Many video games are, bluntly, overly pompous. In part that’s because it’s difficult to write any story in video games, an artistic medium where increasingly the art is not in telling the story but crafting storytelling tools for your audience. Too often, that means piles of lore about the world and very little time dedicated to characters, but Destiny 2 seems to have gotten the memo about just how silly the whole thing is, in its big reveal trailer.
The trailer, up above, offers contrasting inspirational speeches. It opens with a standard one that lays out the plot, with a respected actor serving as the voice, revealing the main hub of the first game got trashed (and which coincidentally means players switching over lose all their weapons). It’s intercut with a much more honest one that admits the fun of the game is running around shooting aliens, taking their stuff, and doing it in as flashy a way as possible.
This is much more of a relief than you might think. Part of our critical issue with Destiny is that Bungie was, at least at first, so convinced they were turning out the video game equivalent of Star Wars they wrote lines like the infamous “That Wizard came from the moon” without realizing how ridiculous it sounded. After all, “Wizard” is an enemy type and the Moon is an area in the game, there’s no way that would sound silly, right? That spilled over to the game itself, as Bungie realized people were going to play the game their way, not Bungie’s way, and thankfully loosened up.
There’s much we don’t know about Destiny’s next chapter. While it’s safe to assume you’ll be running around with guns, putting bullets in aliens, it’s not clear how much of the years of refinements the game’s DLC worked into it will be carried over, or how it’ll play otherwise. But at least Bungie is acknowledging that the first time around, they took it all a little too seriously, and that promises to mean a lot more fun September 8th.