Tonight I finished the Ace of Spades exotic quest which is part of the Forsaken expansion, and I have to say.... well I don't really know how to say it. I have played through both of the Destiny games and all of their expansions, and with the first game I felt a true connection to the vanguard and an understanding of the world that Bungie has sculpted. But in Destiny 2 I experienced a true connection I have never felt in a video game before, the characters were no longer characters for me, they were a part of my life. You know when you're reading a book and on a very suspenseful page you start to feel like its time to put the book down for the night but when you read the last sentence something just pulls you in even further? you just have to know what happens next, whether your favorite character lives or the villain dies. And when that titular event happens you have a raw emotion that comes from the primordial mess in your soul and you feel happiness, sadness, you break down crying or experience an unprecedented rage, and for a split second you're not in the real world anymore, because that story is now your reality. The story and world of Destiny 2 became that for me. While Dominus Ghaul was kind of bland, at the end of the story I ended up hating him and as I reached the top of the ship to fight him I was angry, my judgment became clouded with fury when he became absorbed in light and mocked me, the traveler, everything the guardians have worked for. The base game story, while Generic, was flawlessly executed and gave me a true experience akin to being absorbed into a new world. For a couple hours, everything felt real, and my emotions were real, and I connected.
When Forsaken came out and I played through the story, I only saw how much more adept the storytelling became. Uldren Sov made me seethe every time he appeared and when Cayde-6 gave his final goodbye, my heart went into free fall. A character in a game didn't die a scripted death; that day I lost a friend. Someone who I had experienced my life with, who cheered me up and always kept a smile on his face even in the fiercest battle, was now gone, and that garden of admiration was suddenly replaced with a molten lake of infinite rage.
I didn't want revenge, I needed it.
at the end of Forsaken I felt relieved, like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I was no longer an Atlas, burdened with a tumultuous sadness, but finally happy that my friend's death was not in vain.
Or so I thought.
When the last step of the Quest told me to go to Titan to collect the final ten stashes, I was kind of confused, hadn't I just collected four of them? how many could there be? So I start the quest, and instantly you could tell the difference. This was not any ordinary mission, but the final chapter to heavy, heavy book. This mission, while very simplistic in terms of style and content, was easily my favorite level in the entirety of the series. The music fit so intrinsically to the setting and story, very slow and somber but not to sad, almost fading into the background at times but still maintaining heavy importance with an extremely hefty undertone. the switch up of treasure hunting whilst shooting hive was a very layman approach but it was so fun, I wasn't even remotely bothered by it, and when I opened my first stash, the same feeling i got when I saw Cayde die came back to me, like a haunting nightmare. Now replaying strikes and story missions I would here him all the time, but that to me was more something like time travel or just hearing the past, but this was the Cayde of now, new words and tales I had yet to badger him about. Finding each stash and hearing the declaration of each of the would be killers made me reminisce of my battles, my friends, and my memories of my dearest EXO.
The two audio logs that hit me the Hardest were the ones addressed to Ikora and Myself. listening to Cayde talk to the warlock vanguard was so humanizing to me, it felt like an actual guy who had been through hell and back just wanted to let his friend know just how much she meant to him, and it hit me so hard i'm tearing up just typing this out. this wasn't a game anymore, this was the closing statements of my friend, who had only just recently just performed his final act. When I opened up that last stash, and I heard his voice again for the final time, talking to me, thanking me, commending me, it was like a father telling his son how proud he is of him and how he looked up to him. It hit me like a supernova, and I couldn't help but mourn over losing someone so special to me. He wasn't a couple pixels on a screen, he was a true friend that made everything just a little bit better when he was there.
Bungie hit the nail on the head with this, and I believe this was an absolute masterpiece, a magnum opus maybe, because for the first time in my life, a game like destiny transcended into a piece of art, not just on canvas but much deeper.
Cayde-6 was the best bet I ever lost.
Submitted September 25, 2018 at 10:42AM by BluKomodon https://ift.tt/2Q4xlbw
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