Destiny 2
I have already made it clear that I do not believe we are getting a fifth (sixth if you count Taken, seventh if you count Scorn) “Darkness” race in Destiny 2 for Beyond Light this fall.
It seems pretty clear to me that the Pyramids, like the Traveler, as essentially giant beings in and of themselves rather than transport ships for some new enemy race. And we have already seen the next big bad of Beyond Light, Eramis, a Fallen Captain.
However, I have some BIG DREAMS for the type of enemy we will fight in Beyond Light, and I wanted to share them with you here today.
Okay, so here’s what we know:
Eramis has taken up the Darkness on their offer to wield their power. So she has stasis, a new “freezing” ability that we Guardians will also get access to.
One focus of this season is going to be the Deep Stone Crypt, the location of the raid this time around, and it’s the place where exos were first born.
Destiny 2
Exos are robotic bodies uploaded with human consciousness, but they can also be resurrected and given light by the Traveler and made into Guardians, as we’ve seen.
Beyond Light looks to be a “major” expansion with a fully new zone (Europa), the return of the Cosmodrome, and possibly something secret (the interior of a Pyramid ship). The most “major” expansions in Destiny history brought us quasi-new races, Taken (The Taken King) and Scorn (Forsaken), though those were modified versions of existing races.
So where is this leading? Two words:
Exo.
Fallen.
Alright, hear me out.
Granted there are still enough Fallen around the system for us to kill these days, but there are far less of them than there used to be with us decimating them for a zillion years now. The events of Destiny 1 and Destiny 2 have all but destroyed them, and what few remain are in fact starting to become allies like Mithrax and House Light or Spider and his Tangeld Shore porcupines.
So what exactly is Eramis’s House Devils going to be made up of?
Here’s my idea for both story and gameplay:
Destiny 2
Eramis discovers the Deep Stone Crypt on Europa and learns the secrets of uploading consciousness to machines. Fallen already worship machines as is, so this is the logical evolution of the species. She begins creating Exo Fallen en masse, and they become the new “modified Fallen” enemies of this expansion, like SIVA Fallen and Scorn before them. I’m not even sure we can rule out that Eramis *herself* isn’t an exo Fallen, possibly having undergone the upload process herself. I mean, take a close look at her compared to the model of a normal Captain. Sure that tubing and plating could just be fancy armor but...maybe not.
See?
These exo Fallen, like Eramis, will be gifted with stasis powers from the Darkness. We don’t know how exactly the Darkness hands out power just yet, but presumably you don’t need to die and come back to life with a “Darkness Ghost.” So maybe Eramis just creates her Exo Fallen army and they get powers right off the bat. Whatever stasis powers the Fallen have will play into how the enemies fight mechanically, even if they are technically just modified models of existing Fallen. Similar to how the Taken got new attacks after their reskin.
To me, this satisfies everything this expansion needs. A new race that is probably not going to be fully new, and can technically be reskin, but be both interesting lore-wise and combat-wise.
At the very least, I am expecting just…stasis Fallen with modified abilities. The exo part would pretty much just be cosmetic anyway, but I think it would be a very, very logical and cool story development. We know borderline nothing about the full history of the exo and the creation process, so it’s essentially a blank slate that could accommodate for a turn like this. If not, it will still be interesting I guess, but exo Fallen is just an idea I cannot shake.
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