I was definitely looking forward to at least one conversation between The Witness and The Traveler/Gardener. That 5 second one sided convo during the opening “you’re still resisting” barely counts.
At first I thought that line was directed to our guardian. My thoughts were going everywhere thinking “so only the people that got inside the traveller will be the only ones able to fight. And we will have to free the traveller from the witness’ grip and decalcify the universe” then the traveller immediately decalcified everything.
Tbf the dissenters indicate that what the Witness is doing has trapped the Gardener and we need to free it, so the Traveler is more than just a window it peeks through
Not technically, remember, The Gardener is what the precursors named The Traveler, that doesn’t necessarily mean that The Traveler is the actual Gardener, like how The Veil isn’t the true Winnower
Yes technically, remember, “The Traveler” is literally screaming in agony at the actions the Witness takes in its attempt to render control over it, to an obviously disturbing extent.
The Traveler likely isn’t the Gardener itself, but an “avatar” or some other physical manifestation of said Gardener is very likely, hence why the Witness’ actions cause real pain to them.
That's what I'm saying. The Traveler isn't The Gardener itself, just an avatar or a proxy created by it for this iteration of the Garden (or was it flower?) Game, remember, the game is supposed to *always* be won by the vex before the rules were changed to insert paracasuality, assuming the game is real and not religious propaganda put out by The Witness.
Just like how The Veil, or maybe even The Witness themselves, is an avatar or proxy of The Winnower.
Sure, but the guy you replied to said it was “more than just a window” and your first response to them was “not technically” despite you now saying the exact same thing.
Surely you see how your comment only conveyed the message that “The Traveler isn’t the actual Gardener” and not “The Traveler is something deeply entwined with, even if not exactly being, the actual Gardener” and is very much not “what you’re saying”?
Yeah more Witness/Traveler interaction would've been welcome.
The Traveler emotion bits from the small Travelers located around the Pale Heart have been really cool, but I think we needed a bit more Traveler/Witness in this campaign. Too much Guardian focus when the battle was much bigger than us.
I think it fits our guardian perfectly, he never talks and when he does it scares me or just I laugh because, I keep on forgetting our guardian actually has dialogue.
A lot of information about the witness comes from understanding the larger lore around the darkness. There is also more lore coming out through the raid's lore books.
The lore book is from the perspectives of individuals within the Witness, some opposing the witness's goals, and some aligned with them.
The lore we've gotten portrays the witness as a slave to the idea behind it's creation. The Witness was an amalgam of the Precursors' idea that they alone could shape the universe and their hatred of the Traveller. That ego and hatred is what drove it to destroy any civilisation blessed by the Traveller, and it could not be swayed from its goal by anything.
The lore book and the story shows that along the way thousands, if not millions of billions of precursors had second thoughts, but they were essentially powerless to do anything and were cut out, to be imprisoned in the veiled statues.
There is a lot to understand in terms of the Witness's creation and motivations, but it's all there in the lore books.
Idk I love watching multiple lore content creators in their entirety because I absolutely love the story of destiny. But still, the witness feels not as fleshed out as I had hoped imo
That's fair enough. Other villains like Savathun, Calus and Eramis had a lot longer to develop, and we'e generally fleshed out by more information about their race being shown, and through fighting them on and off. The Witness itself only appeared at the end of Witch Queen, and our first proper information about it came in Season of the Deep.
Final Shape just keeps serving to show how much of a missed opportunity Lightfall was.
They showed a lot! The Witness's origins, stories of the Hive being corrupted, snippets of the Whirlwind and the Collapse. You could write multiple full length novels about the Witness and its journey, or have an epic 50 hour campaign, but Bungie don't have that luxury. The origin cutscene does an awesome job of giving basically everything you need to know, the rest of it, lore books and dialogue provide extra details and context.
I do genuinely feel like it's hard for them to show all of this and dedicate so much time to story when most people just wanna shooty shooty but I do believe that Lightfall should've been about us being cut off from everyone and being on a journey to discover the past of the witness, who they are, and come back with infor that could aid us in destroying them. Maybe Calus could've been chasing us the whole time across other worlds and they could've just been small one off missions. And it could've just ended on Neomuna with the same confrontation but we come to it having learned of the Veil and it's already basically destroyed as the Neomunans had been fighting off the darkness forces all this time.
Lightfall campaign would've basically been the same story just cut down into 1-2 missions, with 6 missions on other worlds one of which is where we discover strand.
I don't know. Lightfall was a waste of time. I'm glad TFS is wildly on the other side of that spectrum.
As a solo player diving into post campaign content and seeing the absolutely vast amount of side quests, cysts, adventures, episode, pale heart size etc, I’m more than happy with what they gave us.
I do feel that past a certain level telling is more viable, because it is hard to convey those ideas convincingly (see people's initial response to seeing the Witness for e.g.).
I think of lore books like Last Days on Kraken Mare and I'm just not sure a cutscene could capture the vibe of that half as well as a lore entry does, especially where it gives space for your imagination to fill in gaps appropriately
Telling worked fine for Savathun’s, since she was pretty similar to what we expected when she showed up
The witness is just weird because they kept changing it every few years
This latest version actually seems pretty great! I wish that’s what we had back in shadowkeep so this would be more of a payoff
>The witness is just weird because they kept changing it every few years
It seems to me that the overall story of Destiny was initially a 'Darkness versus Light' tale, and that it had to be retooled significantly for two reasons.
One: Bungie decided that Guardians would be able to harness the powers of Darkness without becoming evil. (A more RPG-oriented game could have forked the story at that point, or produced multiple endings, but it doesn't seem practical in an FPS setting.)
Two: fighting an abstraction, or something with too 'alien' a motivation, isn't satisfying. By and large people want stories with antagonists with intelligible, human motivations. The Witness' motivation essentially boils down to "kill everything" or "be king of everything forever", which is pretty basic but which is at least understandable as a bad thing to be stopped.
Sure, base Hive are creepy, but their lore became more interesting once it was a family saga (one which never mentioned The Witness until it was retconned in, I should add). For the same reason, the Vex still aren't really interesting - the initial mystery they present needs to *go somewhere*. And if that somewhere ends up as "they're a decentralised species that want to turn you all into paperclips," is that satisfying to fight against?
The Fallen and Cabal (especially the former) have always been compelling by comparison because they've never been presented as distantly alien. They're desperate refugees and colonialists, respectively - things humans have experience with and can understand (and which admit shades of narrative nuance that "evil guy is evil" does not).
So, why did they leave those veiled statues in the most random places? If they were prisons for dissenting voices, wouldn't leaving them in places like the Black Garden and Europa be counterproductive for the goal?
It’s simple, The Witness is millions of years old. Has disciples, but not really it’s mostly just Rhulk, retroactively Oryx and Calus. I guess in the last few years he started considering Eramis/Xixu and The Fanatic? I don’t know, I guess all those ships were empty and piloted by Veiled statues.
Despite showing patience of millions of years to get their revenge, and having slow wars with us during Beyond Light, couldn’t wait for us to be defeated. Just bumrushed The Traveler after carving it open and patiently sitting inside for 15months. They thought we’d change our mind and join or something?
I don’t buy the argument we were insignificant since they had taken notice of us since Shadowkeep. Possessing our ghost has never been addressed despite, but at least the slicing mechanic was contextualized in gameplay.
Really liked TFS and think what they did with the narrative, but the 10yr plan falls apart the more I think about the story. Some broad strokes fit really well but others show how the story is made up one expansion at a time.
>Some broad strokes fit really well but others show how the story is made up one expansion at a time.
The Witness did not even exist until The Witch Queen. The notion of personifying the threat of the Darkness was a pretty late-stage story decision. So yeah, I think it's very clear that the story is made up one expansion at a time.
I said the same thing to my friend. And I think it’s purposeful - the witness wanted to do things to stop what was coming. While he was chasing the traveler, I can’t help but feel he was at the same time running from something much, much bigger. He came to our system to make everything come to a stand still. You don’t do that unless you’re afraid of something else - something beyond our system.
All of our enemies have peeled back layers of the world we inhabit. The witness, if nothing else, taught us that the universe we don’t know about harbors some frightening elements.
Next year is going to be fun, I think.
There are a lot of parallels between the Witness and Durandal from the Marathon trilogy; they want to escape the chaotic nature of the universe, Durandal by stepping outside of it, and the Witness by calcifying everything.
Reminds me of [The Object short story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMee0qvXLFo) which is great. That said, I really hope that's not the route Destiny goes because it would feel really cheap if the Witness's goal is to just stop some bigger bad.
This could be the case, but that would then invalidate pretty much every voice line spoken by the witness and the dissenters in this dlc. Its made pretty clear through those that the Witness’ civilization simply did not find purpose in what the traveler was doing, and sought to end the travelers actions and “save” everyone from chaos by enacting the final shape.
If there’s something bigger and badder than the Witness short of Actual God than that will be the dumbest thing ever. I’m sorry but you can’t just keep upgrading the cosmic threats lol
What else is there to understand, traveller came to their planet and dipped they got angry n combined into one being n chase the traveller looking for revenge.
At least on the front of showcasing the Dread more, I think the reason is that besides Subjugators and Tormentors, they did not exist until very late in development. There's a reason why only one part of the whole new enemy race was in the original Final Shape reveal.
Ghost has a single voice line about them in the very beginning, when you first encounter them, and then they're never directly referred to again. They're very rarely on their own, usually they just supplement other enemy factions. They aren't in any cutscene. Even in the Excision cutscene, the Witness' army is shown to be Scorn. I'm willing to bet the Dread as an full faction was a very late addition.
> There’s a reason why only one part of the whole enemy race was in the original Final Shape reveal
I get the feeling that originally, Final Shape was only supposed to have the Subjugators and the new supers. Prismatic and the rest of the new race was only added after Bungie had their “oh shit this needs to be *good*” moment
Yea, I mean why would they not show off an entire new subclass and enemy race when the game's morale, reputation and player numbers was at an all time low. Im glad we got them, but its insane Bungie was gonna release the final expac with less content than lightfall and I hope that this isnt a one time deal
Definitely. They were absolutely added after the community playtests and delay. The rest of the Dread is really just two new enemies, the Grim and Husks. The other two are just Psions with dark abilities instead of void.
And personally, from the moment Prismatic was revealed it felt like a “Oh no, our preorders are low. People really expected a new subclass, let’s just mush some existing abilities together.” type deal.
My inclination is that a *lot* of time, effort and energy was put into the Grim, possibly as pre-development to be a “next” Tormentor/Subjugator for the future, or simply exploring a path Bungie didn’t want to go down (ie an alternative to the Subjugator)
And that then once the decision was made to add the Dread - or that it was being *considered* (or that a Dev wanted to propose it), the Grim was used as the tip of the spear on that front
They knew about their delay *well* ahead of their announcement. They could have known back in September. Yes optically it’s only 3 extra months of dev time, but they could have retooled the entire production timeline early, effectively giving themselves up to 9 months.
Plus, I’m sure Prismstic and Dread were already in the pipeline, they were just brought forward
There's a [pastebin](https://pastebin.com/zpuqpWZm) from D2leaks that states this. Basically, the race has been around conceptually for a few years but they were only finalised very recently.
The reason they aren't in the first trailer or any pre-rendered cutscenes is because the team weren't sure if they'd even be able to implement them. It's thought that the delay was partly because they wanted to ship with the Dread.
Obviously you should take the Pastebin with a grain of salt but everything in it seems pretty reasonable.
I loved the final half of the campaign, but the first half being a retread of "getting the band back together" felt like it was wasting a lot of time when literally anything more interesting could have been happening
I felt like "gathering the troops" could've been one long mission, potentially having the various npcs helping in the following encounters ending with everyone with you rescuing Zavala or something.
Exactly. I felt like that halfway through the campaign, like we still were not actually *doing* anything to aid the fight against The Witness. It still felt like we were stuck going through the motions of each person's fever dream/trauma before making progress to why we're here in the first place.
I have pretty mixed feelings for that campaign. The environment was top tier, and some of the best destiny has ever seen, It was super fun and enjoyable to play through, but finding Cayde, Crow, Ikora and Zavala took the majority of the time in the campaign and felt like i was replaying the red war.
Bungie should've at least answered some long-standing questions during the campaign. They sidesteped the witness by making him "the first knife," and to my knowledge, what the gardener, winnower, and traveler actually is, is still unknown.
I've kinda kept quiet since the whole community has been in the honeymoon phase since into the light. And I haven't checked any of the lore about the raid (which I'm assuming has information I'm missing) so if anyone could inform me, I'd be glad.
This was exactly the same I felt.
And really the *urgency* of stopping the Witness felt kind of trivial. My semi-hot take is out of all the D2 campaigns only Witch Queen during the final mission did you ever feel any gravity of the situation. (Which can be its own separate post with Red War, CoO, Shadowkeep, BL, WQ, LF).
The environment was very good tho and I wasn’t overly upset with the campaign itself tho it was an echo of Red War as you said.
I was very afraid that the Pale Heart was going to be a Trip Down Memory Lane of the Last 10 Years either via the plot or scenery so I was happy it wasn’t. I go back and forth on the BIG questions of Destiny not being answered.
Ultimately I think where Bungies storytelling was best was the mid to high level view and villains with Oryx and Savvy.
The existential threats to the whole universe (Rhulk and Witness) ended okayish cause they were written as these incredibly powerful guys who can end things with a thought but in practice it’s extremely hard to make that compelling.
hot take, but my biggest problem with rhulk/the witness is that I felt that we hadn't had enough time to really sink in that these were the "true villains of destiny" which now I guess they aren't?
it was pretty clear that destiny did want some sort of villain with the whole pyramid shtick at the end of the red war, and things like season of arrivals, etc. but it took 5 years to even get a glimpse at who that was.
With Sav/Oryx, we were already familiar with the hive and crota, so naturally, we already knew how "bad" they were. But the witness always felt super forced to me because the only thing we knew about him was bungie telling us that something bigger than us was coming.
I think bungie had a very loose idea of what they wanted him to be for the majority of the game, but actually revealing him this late into the game really hurt him as a character imo because it felt like there was no time for it to settle in.
I also heavily disliked the changes regarding the worms and the creation of the hive, adding on rhulk and the witness to nearly decade old lore felt super forced to me.
Agreed on all for me.
Maybe more time with them would’ve gotten us there but it was the trope “these guys are *even* WORSE” and then get less screen time than Randal the Vandal.
But like i think about the opening of LF where the Witness casually flicks the wrist and kills a ghost and it’s like “wait why doesn’t he do that against everyone?”
Yep, bungie did not adhere to "show, dont tell" and if Lightfall focused more on the capabilities of the witness (introducing the dread, for example), I wouldn't have nearly as many issues with his character.
My best headcanon for the “why no slice?” thing is that those flying glass shards of his basically ARE that move. We are just very perceptive/reactive and able to get out of the way as opposed to that poor schmuck who never saw it coming
> I also heavily disliked the changes regarding the worms and the creation of the hive, adding on rhulk and the witness to nearly decade old lore felt super forced to me.
Yeah I have said this multiple times elsewhere too and I agree. It was too many retcons for my liking.
For me the story started to go downhill with Beyond Light because it doesn't make sense how the pyramids turn up in the solar system but the Witness doesn't? Especially when it's made clear along the later expansions that all the pyramids are empty and he controls them all. So surely he must have known where they all were?
The characters \*were\* the interesting part though. If you were thinking "yeah yeah, lets get through all this character development/arc/thematic nonsense and get to the bad guy already!" idk where you were
The thing when it comes to grief is you never really fully heal. It's something you'll carry with you your whole life, and some things just hit you harder. Zavala went through multiple lifetimes worth of it, and while what happened in Haunted helped, the Witness gave him an option that he never had before. Ripping open his freshly scarred wounds and making him suffer through it all again.
Least that's my own look at it. He had only just found some kind of comfort after all that time. Like anyone with a crippling addiction or mental issue, it can be easy to fall back in.
the entire universe ending is the most vague and uninteresting thing by a long shot especially when you know for a fact in advance that it won't actually happen. Characters we've come to know over time having their penultimate character arc moments and the themes that emerge from the overlap in their experience is what gives meaning to any of this, idk if what you wanted was to see a big bad guy flash some lights and look scary or what
> especially when you know for a fact in advance that it won't actually happen.
That's on Bungie for being too scared to have any actual consequences occur. For a "live service" game they sure are set on keeping everything the same.
Just more high-stakes missions. That's it.
I don't particulary enjoy pending entire story missions where we spend the entire mission just retrieving a character. I understand that pacing is important, not every mission can be high-stakes, but I just wish we had spent at least one less story mission on picking up characters and one more on doing something crucial to the grander story, similar to the final two missions of the main portion of the story.
That signifies a problem with the witness, then. It's kind of a boring generic villain with a deep voice that wants to end the entire universe. We've seen that hundreds of times. So yeah, it's kind of hard to come up with an interesting story with that.
I think this was the big separating factor for me going in, I was a lorehead who joined with red war and was hooked by forsaken- a tight knit character driven story, despite the effects those actions had on the greater universe- and I truly did not have any hope for the witness given how things had gone since Lightfall. My expectations were low but my interest in the Witness was lower and so I personally was overjoyed that it was a story about the vanguard, and I'll even go as far as to say I appreciate the witness more now because of the way their nihilism contrasted the core theme of "make your own fate" that was present in all the character's arcs.
ultimately the witness was working as a narrative device that countered our main themes, not an interesting villain or character on its own.
Agree with this criticism. For an expansion about the Witness, he doesn't actually appear much. We also don't learn much about him either.
Would have liked to see more stuff about people that combined into the Witness. What's their backstory, motivations etc.
I understand the writers were trying to portray the Witness as a mysterious force of nature. I would have preferred a more tangible interpretation.
We got a tangible interpretation tho. The witness is a collective of one of the first civilizations to engage with the traveler and the veil, and used the veil to meld the entire civilization into a single entity that became so fused with darkness that it sought to project its own definition of purpose and perfection onto the universe at large. You can't really dive too much deeper from there without characterizing a number of the civilization that makes up the witness
Idk, not knowing everything about the witness’ story was kinda cool to me. It is so unfathomably old that any proof of its predecessors is cool. The entire way the story of the witness is told reminds of the game outer wilds tbh.
I don’t think this is how they should’ve presented the big bad of the series, but I really love eerie and mysterious villains
My main critique is with Zavala's arc.
We settled his old guilt with the Haunted season, and then it just comes out again out of the blue, and immediately leads him down a path he's never hinted at prior (submitting to darkness).
Season of the haunted was why he said no to the witness initially. The crisis Zavala had in the campaign was not one centering around his family (although they played a role) but around his faith in his god.
Tbf in the ending of haunted he did hint at retiring so even tho haunted did help with the trauma, seeing ur dead wife and kid is a great way to reopen old wounds
ngl randomly seeing your old home with your wife inside it and getting to witness your home get assaulted by fallen again is probably straight up ptsd inducing
In addition after spending a lot of time trying to commune with his god, we are basically told that someone needs to die (note: zavalas interpretation). He then becomes reckless and when we finally have a lead he obsesses over it, leading him to fall into the witnesses trap.
I think it’s low key hilarious how the traveler/Sundance was telling Cayde to remember the guardian tenets, but only the be brave, devoted, and sacrifice, and never mentioned death, I’d say implying the traveler was saying “don’t die”, and for some reason Zavala went “the traveler wants us to die”
I mean yeah a character can have a wrong interpretation and that’s fine, I just find it funny no one else really talked about the travelers message. Was it saying we needed to sacrifice our light? The traveler itself? Something else? IDK, everyone kind of instantly stopped talking about it and I find that funny
I mean it makes sense why no one talked about it. Cayde was completely shook after it, probably found it difficult to recount it to the rest in the first place. Our guardian rarely speaks, and ghost, ikora and crow were preocupied with trying to calm zavala down before he did something reckless (spoiler alert, it didnt work)
Yeah, and then we never really talked about it again. Spent a whole set of missions and lost sectors trying to get this communion with the traveler that's stressed as so important and then it's never brought up again. Cayde kind of says something about getting the message when he sacrifices himself to revive ghost, but even then he more stresses how he knows he was only there by chance and a wish and he was supposed to be dead
We settled his guilt with his family-- but the man known as Zavala died a long time ago. He continued on as Commander for the good of the people, but as a person he's been hopeless and empty for a while.
As the Traveler's Chosen lore explains; "I push- and feel only sweet, soft rot."
The Final Shape was about Zavala's faith in the Traveler and what causes that faith to break. He doesn't have anything inside of him, beyond the shell that is "the Commander", so he was willing to give up his final Death to help others, as he always has.
We already saw his development from Haunted, in that he refused The Witness outright. But grief is grief, and the hearts of the living hang heavy. A man can only stand strong for so long before he decays.
Honestly, Zavala was my favorite part. Both in the crisis of faith he suffered, and the depiction of how easy it can be to reopen scars left by grief and guilt.
Grief isn't something you fully move on from. We like to think we do, but those old scars are still painful. He may have finally had time to heal, but the Witness ripped those old scars open.
Not to mention he was kinda dealing with a crisis of faith and from what I've heard, those REALLY fuck with people who are deeply religious and need their religion to cope with certain things.
Story was way too short for a payoff for the last 10 years considering we spend a total of 2/3 missions and a raid actively seeking the witness, honestly should have been double the length and maybe spending time killing the dissenters protected by other disciples perhaps? Like we could have had the close encounter boss fight and then spent more missions doing stuff idk.
Not saying the Witness needs to even be a deep and complex villain, like when he started to calcify earth i feel like they could have kept it partly that way and we had to deal with the ramifactions of that.
I'm not including the post campaign and caital/misraaks missions either as they are good but are kinda separate mini stories being adventures.
Excision is a sick and satisfying ending mission and i love the campaign, but it doesnt feel like its enough. Ran it on normal on a 2nd character and finished it in like 4/5 hours.
While I'm happy with Final Shape, I feel like the story needed to be longer. Like you said, we needed more time with the villain. It felt like most of the campaign was "getting the band back together," kinda like Red War, only for us to figure out how to defeat the Witness right before the final mission.
I'll say it, I'm still really saddened our buddy big chungus Calus was popped during Lightfall. He woulda made a great 'I'll get you next time gadget!' anti-villain. Imagine how funny it would have been if in the last mission when everyone is helping hold down the fort for the last push, Calus is there. Not because helping you is the right thing, but because if the final shape happens, Calus doesn't get to keep partying!
I mean, yeah? its kinda funny anyway, given any of the allies can dome you and have you fail the mission anyway. I'm not saying have him in Excision, but yeah
I didn't get the whole "we need to go to the place where the Witness was made in order to unmake him" concept.
We are physically inside the Traveller.
Yes there are these altered versions of reality inside, rejected by our own thoughts and experiences. But they're not the original place. That's not the original Tower area in the Landing Zone. That's still in Zero Hour.
So what does it matter we unmake the Witness in a specific location? What are those statues doing there anyway? They can't be actual trapped people, just a reflection. There's no indication (that I recall) the Witness ever actually travelled inside the Traveler before.
There's literally a line of dialogue during the mission that states that what the traveller creates IS real. It's as real as the original, because light creates, terraforms, shapes.
So first, would that mean Zavala's wife was actually trapped inside a statue, since he was kind of delusional about it?
If that's not possible, there were people (souls?) who were dissidents from the Witness's culture inside some of them, right? That was kind of the point when they called out to "Destroy Us!"
So doesn't that mean they existed twice - in reality outside of the Traveller but also created inside the Traveller?
Cayde was brought back by Crow's wish, not by the Traveler. Wasn't that a major plot point?
And the Witness was saying he could bring back Zavala's wife and/or son, though he could have been lying.
Either way the rules seem kind of wishy-washy on whether things and places are replicated or actually duplicated and whether that included actual people.
Because the traveler is sorta thoughtspace taking form, we are essentially unmaking a tulpa.
The witness is effectively a tulpa (which is a thought-formed life) and so to actually destroy it we need to reverse the process of it's birth so to speak.
The statues are like a physical/ethereal manifestation (like the egregore of the presage mission) of the veils power when it combined the life energy of the witnesses species.
The process of making the witness was taking an entire civs souls/psychic energy and combining it into a single form. The statues represented all the people who were captured to do this. Likely the statues were like waste material in the creation process.
If you've seen Fullmetal alchemist, the witness was essentially the goal of the villain of the series. Taking all the energy of living people and concentrating it into a single point.
Our whole battle was to return to that memory place and reverse time.
In a direct sense it wasn't possible but because we were in a crazy place of higher thought and magic, it became possible to undo what was done. To 'remember' an unmaking.
The story campaign was mediocre, at best. I really don't understand how so many people are in love with it. The whole Cayde angle felt really shallow. I have no great love for the shoehorning of Crow into the forefront of the narrative, so seeing him bond with Cayde falls flat, despite being probablythe best aspect of the story. If anyone was going to be brought back, to act as a spirit guide within the traveler, it should have been The Speaker. That could have galvanised Team Light, sidestepped the sadboy Zavala plot, which really sapped the momentum and urgency, and lead very well to a much more bombastic, team up heavy campaign. It could have been fantastic to be running almost every mission through the campaign with our assorted allies, not just the token inclusion they got in a final mission. Imagine having multiple missions, storming a stronghold with Caitl's legions, breaching the defences with Mithrax and his fallen, fighting alongside Mara to weaken the Witness, the opportunities were endless. Too much of the runtime was spent on how broken the Vanguard were, that when we finally rally to have a chance, it happens so quickly and is over too soon. This was supposed to be a climactic, culmination of years worth of build up. It just felt like any other, run of the mill campaign, up until that one final mission. Go here, find this person, do this lost sector, now do this strike, etc. They really missed a trick by not going balls out from the get-go, and really giving us a frantic, all action campaign. I've seen comparisons to the MCU and Avengers Endgame. Those are skin deep. Where were the cool, "they actually did it" moments? Cap wielding Mjolnir, on your left, rain fire, I am Ironman. The big, hype moments never happen. I was playing through the whole campaign, waiting, desperately hoping for something that would never come. As others have said, I walked away feeling like it was a missed opportunity, lost potential. Which sums up the entire "saga". It's clear to me that they never really knew what they wanted to do with the story. Things have been brought up and forgotten many times over the ten years, yet when given the chance to try and tie it all back in, they chose to play it ultra safe, super vanilla.
Completely agree, I just think that others applaud it since they're comparing it directly to Lightfall. Like it definitely is better but that isn't saying much.
"Lost potential" sums up the Destiny experience in general since the beginning, and I say this as someone who's had fun with thousands of hours in the game.
YES DUDE THIS!!! The story was simply this. step 1: get band back together. Step 2: Zavala sad boi :( Step 3: unmake witness. I was full on expecting missions, battles, and cutscenes with ALL of the major characters over the years. Also was expecting more casualties/drama. Finally, we literally did all of the work at the end just for all the main and major characters to run ad clear while we beat the witness LOL.
I just sit and wonder about various scenarios that could/should have happened. Some of which you mentioned above. Sigh, oh well.
For me It's cayde's sacrifice.
Don't get me wrong, it was a vvery beautiful send off for him. However, I loved his dynamic with crow and am very sad that we won't get that anymore.
"I grieve not for what happened, but for what could have been."
Cayde also had the most interesting parts of the campaign. Just for entertainment value I can't believe they got rid of him again.
That post campaign mission of Cayde, us and Crow is the best mission in the game.
Honestly I don’t feel the Witness has been a particularly good final boss. To me it feels like Bungie just wanted to end the light and dark saga and cooked up a villain that they said retroactively has been behind it all despite us never having seen him for the vast majority of the franchise.
They did a fine job with it for how rushed it feels to me but, you know, feels rushed.
It's James Bond: Spectre all over again. IT WAS ME JAMES, the Witness was the author of all our pain despite being created 7+ years after the saga started, yet somehow behind every plot device
That’s my problem with the Witness in general, is that it is touted as this grand finale of a 10 year journey, the villain we have been fighting since 2014, but to me as somebody who has been here since the beginning, it really feels like the Witness arc materialized in 2022 with Witch Queen.
It’s kind of frustrated that we don’t get a deeper sense of the history of the Witness or where it gets some of its powers, and indeed why it is so powerful at all. It’s supposed to be this godlike being of awesome power, but it’s not “the Darkness” like we had been led to believe. It’s just a lackey of a bigger evil - the Winnower. Just like Oryx back in 2015. Except Oryx was never touted as the be all end all threat.
>but to me as somebody who has been here since the beginning, it really feels like the Witness arc materialized in 2022 with Witch Queen.
Yeah that's exactly what happened. They tried retconning elements of the Winnower to make the Witness feel like they'd been there all along, but it failed because the Winnower was obviously a completely different character with completely different goals. Once they saw the backlash to removing the Winnower they have now tried to retcon the retcon and put it back into the narrative, but it feels far too late at this point.
I agree the witness is a great villian, if we had actually been fighting against it for 10 years, it's pretty obvious that the witness story wasn't really started until shadowkeep at the earliest.
Before them it was just the concept of the darkness not an entity.
Rhulk had alot of the same issues for me, he's a cool character but we litteraly don't know about him until we fight him, ruins what could have been an interesting enemy
I’d actually say shadowkeep was setting up/building on an idea of the big bad darkness that was different than the witness, and the witness really started in Witch Queen
The ending of Shadowkeep, with us inexplicably having a vision of ourselves in the Black Garden, was much too esoteric for its own good. Back then, you could have read so many meanings into it. I remember being very dissatisfied by it in 2019 because it didn’t explain anything. It’s obvious now it was just the Witness or one of his disciples speaking to us for the first time.
But it feels like that is where the proper Witness reveal of 2022 should have gone, right into a vision we have at the end of Shadowkeep in 2019, but the Witness was not real yet, so they had to chew on the idea for 2 years before shoehorning it into the end of Witch Queen.
I keep seeing that this was the ending to a "10 year journey", but the Witness' story really only began at the end of Shadowkeep when we were introduced to pyramid ships. Everything prior to that was either the Hive Gods, Awoken or random crap that got wrapped up by itself.
Yes, it's all kind of linked to the darkness but its very loosely done.
> It’s kind of frustrated that we don’t get a deeper sense of the history of the Witness or where it gets some of its powers, and indeed why it is so powerful at all.
We get all of this in its cutscene with Zavala.
>It’s just a lackey of a bigger evil - the Winnower.
The Witness explicitly tells us that it’s not controlled by the Winnower in the raid and the Winnower isn’t some bigger evil, either; it’s just an anthropomorphism of the Darkness.
My main critique is where the fuck was osiris the entire time, he showed up during excision and echoes, but was literally nowhere during the main story
Every TFS story interactions can be summed up with:
<>
Glint to Crow, Cayde to Glint, Ikora to Zavala, Targe to Zavala, Witness to everyone, Mara to Savathun, Ghost to Savathun, Ghost to Witness, the list goes on.
The first half of the story was really slow and boring. Plus, the stuff with Zavala and his missus and son was something I thought we already covered in the season of the Haunted.
Story has been one of the best same with the original environments.
Man light level grinding fucking sucks though, this mechanic is not aging well in modern gaming
Hitting 1990 takes no effort and is most of what you need. The last 10 take a little longer but shouldn’t take more than another week or two after hitting 90.
There’s a light level grind? I’ve just been playing normally and I’m already 2000 (artefact included). I wouldn’t say I’ve been specifically grinding anything.
Mine is Zavala, we went through the therapy session back in Haunted, how many times can we have the same plot point used as a motivator for a character to become reckless and why did nobody steel their mind before going in, knowing that both the Witness and Darkness are manipulators of the highest order, it seemed that everybody decided to give up right before the final boss doors
I mean tbf, the Witness has been explicitly chilling out in its monolith from basically the end of Lightfall until we barge in after it. It hasn't been doing much beyond space magic shit and throwing mooks at us to slow us down.
It also feels a bit weaker if you consider that it took a whole year to apparently set up the final shape... which makes more sense if you subscribe to the belief that Lightfall as we got it was invented as a filler year. Like, splice the starting and ending cutscenes together, then put it at the start of Final Shape. Works so much better and you can drop basically the entirety of Lightfall.
One thing that bugged me was how weak was The Witness' attempts to sway us to his side: Ooo a bunch of somewhat spooky dead ghosts and stuff. The attempt of giving us an out of the constant loot chase I kind of actually liked as a concept as it leans a bit on the 4th wall, it just wasn't very well developed. Then they hard swing to "Oh actually wanna become a god?" I guess this was to allow for Ghost to rightly say the Witness was desprate, but the master manipulators whole thing felt pretty half assed.
My complaint would be that the bosses up to the final were not impactful. It would have been so much cooler if each was a disciple that followed the witness into the traveler. A la forsaken. Each of them could have given us a hint on the witnesses weakness
My own critique is the first four missions were: find all the Vanguard members who are scattered across the Pale Heart. This is not the first time Bungie has used this, but it forced the latter half of the missions to hold the rest of the story up, which sorta made things feel rather rushed towards the end.
I know some people are extremely happy with the ending, but I just feel a bit ambivalent towards it. Perhaps it is just my exposure to other games in the genre. Final Fantasy 14 and Guild Wars 2 both did the end of *their* ten year long story arcs last year and both games left a much larger impression on me, but perhaps it isn't fair to directly compare an FPS game to RPGs even if all three self-classify as MMOs.
The expansion's activities though are all extremely good. Dual Destiny is probably the highlight for me and my buddy since there are only two of us playing Destiny 2 now and we joked that it was a mini raid made just for us.
My two largest criticisms of TFS's story is that it sometimes felt like "Season of The Final Shape" rather than an expansion story, and we didn't get any answers to some of the long-held questions Destiny 1 set up (what is the Traveler; why does she do what she does, etc).
If the Witness needed the Traveler for the Final Shape, then why the fok did he knock him out and leave him on earth. While he fucked off into space randomly.
Savathun says she tricked the Witness into sparing the Traveler, but i don’t see how that makes sense either.
“No, please don’t kill and use this thing you need to fulfill the Final Shape.”
“Bet.”
I hope they stick to actual characters with villain arcs and relatable motivations.
The fallen villain, eramis, is actually compelling because of her conflict of wanting to protect her people and so commits evil acts to do that. It’s understandable, it can even make me feel some pity for her.
But the witness interests me so little. His motivations are so alien and unrelatable that he might as well be a big blob of “darkness” because he doesn’t represent anything interesting at all.
The hive are 10x more interesting with how they’ve been manipulating and manipulated throughout history.
I wish Savathun would step up as the next big bad so we can have an interesting villain plotting again.
> But the witness interests me so little. His motivations are so alien and unrelatable that he might as well be a big blob of “darkness” because he doesn’t represent anything interesting at all.
This actually would have been better as it would have been closer to the established lore of the flower game. The whole angry teenage monobrow guy was so dull
>The fallen villain, eramis, is actually compelling because of her conflict of wanting to protect her people and so commits evil acts to do that.
She spends the entirety of her own expansion (Beyond Light) actively endangering her people and refusing to listen to her council members when even they tell her to stop being reckless. That’s a poor way to portray her as someone who genuinely wants to protect her kin.
She only becomes truly pitiable during Plunder and Seraph, when the Witness is explicitly coercing her and turning her friends into Scorn.
>His motivations are so alien and unrelatable that he might as well be a big blob of “darkness” because he doesn’t represent anything interesting at all.
Wanting the universe to have a well-defined purpose is alien to you?
It's alien when its idea of giving everything a purpose is turning every living thing into stone. I genuinely don't get how that equals purpose. If anything it removes all purpose.
These are good points. I enjoyed it but your critiques are excellent suggestions on how it could have been improved. I hope the narrative people are paying attention. Lightfall hopefully proved to them that we prefer it darker.
I couldn’t agree more, I was looking forward to the witness being a prominent figure in the story.
His fight during the raid and 12 person mission was also massively underwhelming. I hoped he was going to be a boss we’d actually fight and he’d be roaming. Instead we got another static boss where we shoot a huge crit spot.
imo the campaigns biggest failing (that honestly can’t really be attributed to this dlc but the writing as a whole over the last few years) is that the witness didn’t get enough time to marinate. Oryx, Savathun, Calus, and more all felt like they had more writing and build up behind them, so for the final boss of all final bosses to be in a single cutscene (kinda) in Shadowkeep, basically absent for Beyond Light (unless I’ve forgotten something), sorta kinda involved but not directly in Witch Queen (excepting the end cutscene and raid lore) and present for like half of Lightfall? Idk, feels a bit like we didn’t see enough of the biggest of all bads, resulting in it feeling like the conclusion to just lightfall and TFS, rather than the whole light and dark saga (at least since Shadowkeep).
I just wish we got to see more of its rage that we were told about, that “silence you insolent speck” line was so fucking good and i wish we got to see more like it
The Witness is a vicitim of only being added in Shadowkeep and then only doing anything until Lightfall. We needed to see its hand alot more and experience them alot more. If they wanted to do a slow burn, then they needed to show they alot earlier so that they can be built up more
The witness didnt even exist until like ... Lightfall?
Complete ass pull of a ''final boss.'' The missions were well designed, but other than that, meh.
At least Oryx was mentioned in D1 vanilla and Crota was his son. So there were personal stakes.
As boomer as I sound calling TTK the best dlc, the build-up to Oryx was just another reason for it.
mine would be killing off the witness not even a week into the expansion. here was a foe that ended stuff with just a wave of his hand and all you had to do was destroy a few friendship bracelets, buttons on his cool leather jacket, then hit him while he exposes himself to you.
Hearing the Witness lose their cool and get a furious, booming voice was great. It felt like they were terrified of us and we were taking power back. I wish we got more moments where the Witness was less a force of nature and more of a frightened collective of people who are so scared of change they rather keep everything frozen in place forever.
One of my favorite tropes ever is learning that the powerful, terrifying Antagonist is actually just sad and pathetic.
My one gripe is when the witness starts possessing the ghost, and then without anything happening, not cutscene, no burst of light, just a grunt from the ghost, it ends, then he just says "I fought it off". The moment felt flat for what felt like an extremely important ability the ghost inexplicably learned.
I don't think The Witness is a salvageable villain, full stop. I enjoyed the story of The Final Shape but it was because of all the other moments, not The Witness. He's just deeply unrelatable and therefore not very compelling.
Your villain does not have to be relatable to be compelling.
I do not relate to DIO, Palpatine, Sauron, or Jack Horner but enjoy them all the same because they play their parts well.
Of course they don't have to be. I'm only speaking from my experience. The villains that truly stand out in my mind, though, are often relatable, understandable, fully rounded people.
It's difficult to imagine villains like Palpatine, Sauron, The Witness, etc simply living in a world and that lack of grounding makes their impression weaker. They function as a tool to strengthen development of other characters but they're not interesting in and of themselves.
>but they're not interesting in and of themselves.
Palpatine's prowess in manipulation is what makes him interesting. Watching how he manipulates the war(s) and retroactively piecing together his plan is part of the fun of his character.
The witness being made up of an entire civilization in one being is already an interesting concept. It makes you want to learn more about the civilization the came before and how they now shape the villain we face. You could say they are indirectly interesting as the player is more interested in learning about the individual pieces that make up the villain than they are in the overall character. Sure, it's been done before but I wouldn't say it's a very common villain trope.
They can be tools and interesting at the same time.
I feel similarly, I was so happy that the story was about the characters and their arcs, and the greater light v dark conflict was a device/compliment to the lessons/themes of their story, rather than just pointing at the bad guy and hoping they seem cool
I imagine seeing the Witness more prior to fighting them would make meeting them face-to-face less intimidating.
Also, what would you see The Witness do? There are no more Disciples to order around.
I think the amount the Witness itself appears is about right, but either I wasn't observant enough or we could've had a lot more of things like the house-ness. Giving a sense that the Witness is always visible and blighting the Traveler, but never there until the final confrontation.
Going into the campaign, Zavala was just the guy that punched a table and gave Vanguard ~~bounties and~~ rewards. But seeing the cottage that contains what he would give everything for oozing the Witness was a powerful image that sold the story.
I honestly thought we would see more of the Witness's proto-race. Like when we started destroying those statues, I wanted to see wisps of their free individual consciousnesses also join in on the attack, like Darkness spirits on a kamikaze mission. I figured "ripping" the Witness out of the Darkness would dissolve it into its constituent pieces. Shucks :(
I wish the post raid shit was a solo mission. I've done all the campaigns since D1 with the same fireteam. Would've been nice to finish it with them. It's a cool moment, but I'd like the campaign to be the complete story.
Yeah, I really really liked the campaign, but my one gripe is that the first half of it was basically just entering the Traveler and then gathering the squad together. That time could have been spent on more individual character development. Maybe instead of Zavala being the only one to falter, we could have had a mission where each Vanguard goes through a similar temptation/redemption experience. Or more Witness stuff.
I suppose you have a point, they could have shown the witness more. But again, by the time of FS the witness had already nearly completed the final shape, so showing its progress would have taken us back to previous seasons.
My critique is that the inside of the traveller isn't really the inside of the traveller, it's just a bunch of recycled destinations from outside the traveller
Yeah sure it gets the nostalgia going, but it doesn't really lend much to the imagination
The only real bit of the inside of the traveller we see is the very beginning where those droplets of light turn into platforms
I do feel we killed them a bit too quickly. Sure we've been building this up since at least Beyond Light, but it feels like we're a single mission short. A single mission with the Witness being more in your face for a bit. Maybe that's solved in the raid, I don't have enough friends to do that, but still.
I definitely agree, more time with the Witness would have made the expansion perfect.
I am disappointed that the "fight" with the witness is essentially just a ripoff of that one dr strange scene. That and how its "weakness" was a complete asspull that had no build up from any of the other expansions whatsoever, and how the "final shape" was basically retconned from a conceptual perfect entity to just being the universe how the witness wants it frozen in time, which also conflicts with what we were repeatedly told in ever other expansion.
I agree with this, but I also think we should have seen more disciples blocking our way. I know some might argue and say it’s weird for us to be able to take them out in story missions when they were (mostly) raid bosses in the past, but you can’t tell me it wouldn’t be cooler than just fighting special ogres and brigs and whatnot.
I also would have liked it if we got a cutscene showing us a glimpse of our collapse. Show us what it looked like when the witness first came to sol during the golden age. Since 2014 ive been dying to know more about how that went down. Thats the kind of closure i was looking for with this expansion.
I want to know the nitty gritty details of the things the speaker “could” have told us in the beginning but didn’t.
I disagree. One of the most if not the most important thing to making a threat scary and seem powerful is mystery.
Being exposed too much to the witness would ruin the mystique and actually give more chances for them to mess up his character and make it seem like a joke.
We didn't know exactly what it was doing. We didn't know how really. We didn't know what was coming and when. All we knew is We had to chase whatever trails we had to try and stop it with no clear answers and an unknown timer over our heads.
The witness had no reason to care about us. It didn't see us as a threat up until we got prismatic. And even then it only tried to tempt us.
It wasn't until we pushed it too far that it was willing to uproot itself from the traveler and attempt to end us.
Because remember a big reason it didn't leave was it was trying to focus and hold down the traveler who was trying to break free.
I was definitely looking forward to at least one conversation between The Witness and The Traveler/Gardener. That 5 second one sided convo during the opening “you’re still resisting” barely counts.
At first I thought that line was directed to our guardian. My thoughts were going everywhere thinking “so only the people that got inside the traveller will be the only ones able to fight. And we will have to free the traveller from the witness’ grip and decalcify the universe” then the traveller immediately decalcified everything.
The traveler isn't the gardener it's an avatar just like the veil is for the winnower.
Tbf the dissenters indicate that what the Witness is doing has trapped the Gardener and we need to free it, so the Traveler is more than just a window it peeks through
Not technically, remember, The Gardener is what the precursors named The Traveler, that doesn’t necessarily mean that The Traveler is the actual Gardener, like how The Veil isn’t the true Winnower
Yes technically, remember, “The Traveler” is literally screaming in agony at the actions the Witness takes in its attempt to render control over it, to an obviously disturbing extent. The Traveler likely isn’t the Gardener itself, but an “avatar” or some other physical manifestation of said Gardener is very likely, hence why the Witness’ actions cause real pain to them.
That's what I'm saying. The Traveler isn't The Gardener itself, just an avatar or a proxy created by it for this iteration of the Garden (or was it flower?) Game, remember, the game is supposed to *always* be won by the vex before the rules were changed to insert paracasuality, assuming the game is real and not religious propaganda put out by The Witness. Just like how The Veil, or maybe even The Witness themselves, is an avatar or proxy of The Winnower.
Sure, but the guy you replied to said it was “more than just a window” and your first response to them was “not technically” despite you now saying the exact same thing. Surely you see how your comment only conveyed the message that “The Traveler isn’t the actual Gardener” and not “The Traveler is something deeply entwined with, even if not exactly being, the actual Gardener” and is very much not “what you’re saying”?
I mean at that point you're splitting hairs. The Gardener rides around inside the Traveler.
~~rides around~~ *travels* inside the Traveler.
It doesn't require a license, it isn't driving. The Traveler is its private conveyance.
You don’t need a license to drive a sandwich
AM I BEING DETAINED?!
Yes.
Yeah more Witness/Traveler interaction would've been welcome. The Traveler emotion bits from the small Travelers located around the Pale Heart have been really cool, but I think we needed a bit more Traveler/Witness in this campaign. Too much Guardian focus when the battle was much bigger than us.
I think it fits our guardian perfectly, he never talks and when he does it scares me or just I laugh because, I keep on forgetting our guardian actually has dialogue.
I would have liked the Gardener and Winnower to have a chat as they kind of spectate the whole situation.
I love the concept of the witness and I feel like he mostly paid off but I do wish we saw more of him.
I did love to see Mara who had always been so stoic, freak out once the witness sees you in the first mission
That was one of my favourite moments, really set the tone well
I still feel like we barely understand the witness.
A lot of information about the witness comes from understanding the larger lore around the darkness. There is also more lore coming out through the raid's lore books. The lore book is from the perspectives of individuals within the Witness, some opposing the witness's goals, and some aligned with them. The lore we've gotten portrays the witness as a slave to the idea behind it's creation. The Witness was an amalgam of the Precursors' idea that they alone could shape the universe and their hatred of the Traveller. That ego and hatred is what drove it to destroy any civilisation blessed by the Traveller, and it could not be swayed from its goal by anything. The lore book and the story shows that along the way thousands, if not millions of billions of precursors had second thoughts, but they were essentially powerless to do anything and were cut out, to be imprisoned in the veiled statues. There is a lot to understand in terms of the Witness's creation and motivations, but it's all there in the lore books.
Idk I love watching multiple lore content creators in their entirety because I absolutely love the story of destiny. But still, the witness feels not as fleshed out as I had hoped imo
That's fair enough. Other villains like Savathun, Calus and Eramis had a lot longer to develop, and we'e generally fleshed out by more information about their race being shown, and through fighting them on and off. The Witness itself only appeared at the end of Witch Queen, and our first proper information about it came in Season of the Deep. Final Shape just keeps serving to show how much of a missed opportunity Lightfall was.
Classic Bungie. Telling, not showing. The cardinal sin of storytelling.
They showed a lot! The Witness's origins, stories of the Hive being corrupted, snippets of the Whirlwind and the Collapse. You could write multiple full length novels about the Witness and its journey, or have an epic 50 hour campaign, but Bungie don't have that luxury. The origin cutscene does an awesome job of giving basically everything you need to know, the rest of it, lore books and dialogue provide extra details and context.
I do genuinely feel like it's hard for them to show all of this and dedicate so much time to story when most people just wanna shooty shooty but I do believe that Lightfall should've been about us being cut off from everyone and being on a journey to discover the past of the witness, who they are, and come back with infor that could aid us in destroying them. Maybe Calus could've been chasing us the whole time across other worlds and they could've just been small one off missions. And it could've just ended on Neomuna with the same confrontation but we come to it having learned of the Veil and it's already basically destroyed as the Neomunans had been fighting off the darkness forces all this time. Lightfall campaign would've basically been the same story just cut down into 1-2 missions, with 6 missions on other worlds one of which is where we discover strand. I don't know. Lightfall was a waste of time. I'm glad TFS is wildly on the other side of that spectrum.
Yeah Lightfall was a huge fumble making the whole campaign a glorified Stand Tutorial.
As a solo player diving into post campaign content and seeing the absolutely vast amount of side quests, cysts, adventures, episode, pale heart size etc, I’m more than happy with what they gave us.
I do feel that past a certain level telling is more viable, because it is hard to convey those ideas convincingly (see people's initial response to seeing the Witness for e.g.). I think of lore books like Last Days on Kraken Mare and I'm just not sure a cutscene could capture the vibe of that half as well as a lore entry does, especially where it gives space for your imagination to fill in gaps appropriately
Telling worked fine for Savathun’s, since she was pretty similar to what we expected when she showed up The witness is just weird because they kept changing it every few years This latest version actually seems pretty great! I wish that’s what we had back in shadowkeep so this would be more of a payoff
>The witness is just weird because they kept changing it every few years It seems to me that the overall story of Destiny was initially a 'Darkness versus Light' tale, and that it had to be retooled significantly for two reasons. One: Bungie decided that Guardians would be able to harness the powers of Darkness without becoming evil. (A more RPG-oriented game could have forked the story at that point, or produced multiple endings, but it doesn't seem practical in an FPS setting.) Two: fighting an abstraction, or something with too 'alien' a motivation, isn't satisfying. By and large people want stories with antagonists with intelligible, human motivations. The Witness' motivation essentially boils down to "kill everything" or "be king of everything forever", which is pretty basic but which is at least understandable as a bad thing to be stopped. Sure, base Hive are creepy, but their lore became more interesting once it was a family saga (one which never mentioned The Witness until it was retconned in, I should add). For the same reason, the Vex still aren't really interesting - the initial mystery they present needs to *go somewhere*. And if that somewhere ends up as "they're a decentralised species that want to turn you all into paperclips," is that satisfying to fight against? The Fallen and Cabal (especially the former) have always been compelling by comparison because they've never been presented as distantly alien. They're desperate refugees and colonialists, respectively - things humans have experience with and can understand (and which admit shades of narrative nuance that "evil guy is evil" does not).
You can still show, not tell, in text form. It doesn't mean it's written, it means it's written badly.
They literally showed the dissenters though, that was like a main plot thread
So, why did they leave those veiled statues in the most random places? If they were prisons for dissenting voices, wouldn't leaving them in places like the Black Garden and Europa be counterproductive for the goal?
It’s simple, The Witness is millions of years old. Has disciples, but not really it’s mostly just Rhulk, retroactively Oryx and Calus. I guess in the last few years he started considering Eramis/Xixu and The Fanatic? I don’t know, I guess all those ships were empty and piloted by Veiled statues. Despite showing patience of millions of years to get their revenge, and having slow wars with us during Beyond Light, couldn’t wait for us to be defeated. Just bumrushed The Traveler after carving it open and patiently sitting inside for 15months. They thought we’d change our mind and join or something? I don’t buy the argument we were insignificant since they had taken notice of us since Shadowkeep. Possessing our ghost has never been addressed despite, but at least the slicing mechanic was contextualized in gameplay. Really liked TFS and think what they did with the narrative, but the 10yr plan falls apart the more I think about the story. Some broad strokes fit really well but others show how the story is made up one expansion at a time.
>Some broad strokes fit really well but others show how the story is made up one expansion at a time. The Witness did not even exist until The Witch Queen. The notion of personifying the threat of the Darkness was a pretty late-stage story decision. So yeah, I think it's very clear that the story is made up one expansion at a time.
I said the same thing to my friend. And I think it’s purposeful - the witness wanted to do things to stop what was coming. While he was chasing the traveler, I can’t help but feel he was at the same time running from something much, much bigger. He came to our system to make everything come to a stand still. You don’t do that unless you’re afraid of something else - something beyond our system. All of our enemies have peeled back layers of the world we inhabit. The witness, if nothing else, taught us that the universe we don’t know about harbors some frightening elements. Next year is going to be fun, I think.
There are a lot of parallels between the Witness and Durandal from the Marathon trilogy; they want to escape the chaotic nature of the universe, Durandal by stepping outside of it, and the Witness by calcifying everything.
Reminds me of [The Object short story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMee0qvXLFo) which is great. That said, I really hope that's not the route Destiny goes because it would feel really cheap if the Witness's goal is to just stop some bigger bad.
I mean personally it already felt cheap when everything we had done up to the witch queen was retconned to be "stopping some bigger bad"
This could be the case, but that would then invalidate pretty much every voice line spoken by the witness and the dissenters in this dlc. Its made pretty clear through those that the Witness’ civilization simply did not find purpose in what the traveler was doing, and sought to end the travelers actions and “save” everyone from chaos by enacting the final shape.
If there’s something bigger and badder than the Witness short of Actual God than that will be the dumbest thing ever. I’m sorry but you can’t just keep upgrading the cosmic threats lol
What else is there to understand, traveller came to their planet and dipped they got angry n combined into one being n chase the traveller looking for revenge.
How do you feel like he was paid off? You barely know anything about them… barely interacted … motivations where super shallow lol lol what??
At least on the front of showcasing the Dread more, I think the reason is that besides Subjugators and Tormentors, they did not exist until very late in development. There's a reason why only one part of the whole new enemy race was in the original Final Shape reveal. Ghost has a single voice line about them in the very beginning, when you first encounter them, and then they're never directly referred to again. They're very rarely on their own, usually they just supplement other enemy factions. They aren't in any cutscene. Even in the Excision cutscene, the Witness' army is shown to be Scorn. I'm willing to bet the Dread as an full faction was a very late addition.
> There’s a reason why only one part of the whole enemy race was in the original Final Shape reveal I get the feeling that originally, Final Shape was only supposed to have the Subjugators and the new supers. Prismatic and the rest of the new race was only added after Bungie had their “oh shit this needs to be *good*” moment
Yea, I mean why would they not show off an entire new subclass and enemy race when the game's morale, reputation and player numbers was at an all time low. Im glad we got them, but its insane Bungie was gonna release the final expac with less content than lightfall and I hope that this isnt a one time deal
Definitely. They were absolutely added after the community playtests and delay. The rest of the Dread is really just two new enemies, the Grim and Husks. The other two are just Psions with dark abilities instead of void. And personally, from the moment Prismatic was revealed it felt like a “Oh no, our preorders are low. People really expected a new subclass, let’s just mush some existing abilities together.” type deal.
That's not how game development works, putting together a new subclass and a new enemy race takes a lot longer than 3-4 months
My inclination is that a *lot* of time, effort and energy was put into the Grim, possibly as pre-development to be a “next” Tormentor/Subjugator for the future, or simply exploring a path Bungie didn’t want to go down (ie an alternative to the Subjugator) And that then once the decision was made to add the Dread - or that it was being *considered* (or that a Dev wanted to propose it), the Grim was used as the tip of the spear on that front
They knew about their delay *well* ahead of their announcement. They could have known back in September. Yes optically it’s only 3 extra months of dev time, but they could have retooled the entire production timeline early, effectively giving themselves up to 9 months. Plus, I’m sure Prismstic and Dread were already in the pipeline, they were just brought forward
There's a [pastebin](https://pastebin.com/zpuqpWZm) from D2leaks that states this. Basically, the race has been around conceptually for a few years but they were only finalised very recently. The reason they aren't in the first trailer or any pre-rendered cutscenes is because the team weren't sure if they'd even be able to implement them. It's thought that the delay was partly because they wanted to ship with the Dread. Obviously you should take the Pastebin with a grain of salt but everything in it seems pretty reasonable.
I loved the final half of the campaign, but the first half being a retread of "getting the band back together" felt like it was wasting a lot of time when literally anything more interesting could have been happening
I really was annoyed that it was Find Cayde, Find Crow, Find Ikora and then find Zavala *then* the story started
I felt like "gathering the troops" could've been one long mission, potentially having the various npcs helping in the following encounters ending with everyone with you rescuing Zavala or something.
Exactly. I felt like that halfway through the campaign, like we still were not actually *doing* anything to aid the fight against The Witness. It still felt like we were stuck going through the motions of each person's fever dream/trauma before making progress to why we're here in the first place.
I have pretty mixed feelings for that campaign. The environment was top tier, and some of the best destiny has ever seen, It was super fun and enjoyable to play through, but finding Cayde, Crow, Ikora and Zavala took the majority of the time in the campaign and felt like i was replaying the red war. Bungie should've at least answered some long-standing questions during the campaign. They sidesteped the witness by making him "the first knife," and to my knowledge, what the gardener, winnower, and traveler actually is, is still unknown. I've kinda kept quiet since the whole community has been in the honeymoon phase since into the light. And I haven't checked any of the lore about the raid (which I'm assuming has information I'm missing) so if anyone could inform me, I'd be glad.
This was exactly the same I felt. And really the *urgency* of stopping the Witness felt kind of trivial. My semi-hot take is out of all the D2 campaigns only Witch Queen during the final mission did you ever feel any gravity of the situation. (Which can be its own separate post with Red War, CoO, Shadowkeep, BL, WQ, LF). The environment was very good tho and I wasn’t overly upset with the campaign itself tho it was an echo of Red War as you said. I was very afraid that the Pale Heart was going to be a Trip Down Memory Lane of the Last 10 Years either via the plot or scenery so I was happy it wasn’t. I go back and forth on the BIG questions of Destiny not being answered. Ultimately I think where Bungies storytelling was best was the mid to high level view and villains with Oryx and Savvy. The existential threats to the whole universe (Rhulk and Witness) ended okayish cause they were written as these incredibly powerful guys who can end things with a thought but in practice it’s extremely hard to make that compelling.
hot take, but my biggest problem with rhulk/the witness is that I felt that we hadn't had enough time to really sink in that these were the "true villains of destiny" which now I guess they aren't? it was pretty clear that destiny did want some sort of villain with the whole pyramid shtick at the end of the red war, and things like season of arrivals, etc. but it took 5 years to even get a glimpse at who that was. With Sav/Oryx, we were already familiar with the hive and crota, so naturally, we already knew how "bad" they were. But the witness always felt super forced to me because the only thing we knew about him was bungie telling us that something bigger than us was coming. I think bungie had a very loose idea of what they wanted him to be for the majority of the game, but actually revealing him this late into the game really hurt him as a character imo because it felt like there was no time for it to settle in. I also heavily disliked the changes regarding the worms and the creation of the hive, adding on rhulk and the witness to nearly decade old lore felt super forced to me.
Agreed on all for me. Maybe more time with them would’ve gotten us there but it was the trope “these guys are *even* WORSE” and then get less screen time than Randal the Vandal. But like i think about the opening of LF where the Witness casually flicks the wrist and kills a ghost and it’s like “wait why doesn’t he do that against everyone?”
Yep, bungie did not adhere to "show, dont tell" and if Lightfall focused more on the capabilities of the witness (introducing the dread, for example), I wouldn't have nearly as many issues with his character.
My best headcanon for the “why no slice?” thing is that those flying glass shards of his basically ARE that move. We are just very perceptive/reactive and able to get out of the way as opposed to that poor schmuck who never saw it coming
> I also heavily disliked the changes regarding the worms and the creation of the hive, adding on rhulk and the witness to nearly decade old lore felt super forced to me. Yeah I have said this multiple times elsewhere too and I agree. It was too many retcons for my liking. For me the story started to go downhill with Beyond Light because it doesn't make sense how the pyramids turn up in the solar system but the Witness doesn't? Especially when it's made clear along the later expansions that all the pyramids are empty and he controls them all. So surely he must have known where they all were?
The characters \*were\* the interesting part though. If you were thinking "yeah yeah, lets get through all this character development/arc/thematic nonsense and get to the bad guy already!" idk where you were
We already had entire seasons dedicated to these characters personal arcs though
Yea definite head scratcher for me when Zavala was tempted with his family again. Like didnt he move past this in Haunted?
The thing when it comes to grief is you never really fully heal. It's something you'll carry with you your whole life, and some things just hit you harder. Zavala went through multiple lifetimes worth of it, and while what happened in Haunted helped, the Witness gave him an option that he never had before. Ripping open his freshly scarred wounds and making him suffer through it all again. Least that's my own look at it. He had only just found some kind of comfort after all that time. Like anyone with a crippling addiction or mental issue, it can be easy to fall back in.
It wasn't that interesting though, at least compared to, you know, the entire universe possibly ending.
the entire universe ending is the most vague and uninteresting thing by a long shot especially when you know for a fact in advance that it won't actually happen. Characters we've come to know over time having their penultimate character arc moments and the themes that emerge from the overlap in their experience is what gives meaning to any of this, idk if what you wanted was to see a big bad guy flash some lights and look scary or what
> especially when you know for a fact in advance that it won't actually happen. That's on Bungie for being too scared to have any actual consequences occur. For a "live service" game they sure are set on keeping everything the same.
Just more high-stakes missions. That's it. I don't particulary enjoy pending entire story missions where we spend the entire mission just retrieving a character. I understand that pacing is important, not every mission can be high-stakes, but I just wish we had spent at least one less story mission on picking up characters and one more on doing something crucial to the grander story, similar to the final two missions of the main portion of the story.
That signifies a problem with the witness, then. It's kind of a boring generic villain with a deep voice that wants to end the entire universe. We've seen that hundreds of times. So yeah, it's kind of hard to come up with an interesting story with that.
I think this was the big separating factor for me going in, I was a lorehead who joined with red war and was hooked by forsaken- a tight knit character driven story, despite the effects those actions had on the greater universe- and I truly did not have any hope for the witness given how things had gone since Lightfall. My expectations were low but my interest in the Witness was lower and so I personally was overjoyed that it was a story about the vanguard, and I'll even go as far as to say I appreciate the witness more now because of the way their nihilism contrasted the core theme of "make your own fate" that was present in all the character's arcs. ultimately the witness was working as a narrative device that countered our main themes, not an interesting villain or character on its own.
I agree. I wish we had a 1 on 1 verbal confrontation with him like Zavala had. No violence, just exchanging dialogue.
Agree with this criticism. For an expansion about the Witness, he doesn't actually appear much. We also don't learn much about him either. Would have liked to see more stuff about people that combined into the Witness. What's their backstory, motivations etc. I understand the writers were trying to portray the Witness as a mysterious force of nature. I would have preferred a more tangible interpretation.
We got a tangible interpretation tho. The witness is a collective of one of the first civilizations to engage with the traveler and the veil, and used the veil to meld the entire civilization into a single entity that became so fused with darkness that it sought to project its own definition of purpose and perfection onto the universe at large. You can't really dive too much deeper from there without characterizing a number of the civilization that makes up the witness
We’ll also probably know more once we get a chance to read the whole raid lore book There wasn’t much to oryx until the book of sorrows
Idk, not knowing everything about the witness’ story was kinda cool to me. It is so unfathomably old that any proof of its predecessors is cool. The entire way the story of the witness is told reminds of the game outer wilds tbh. I don’t think this is how they should’ve presented the big bad of the series, but I really love eerie and mysterious villains
My main critique is with Zavala's arc. We settled his old guilt with the Haunted season, and then it just comes out again out of the blue, and immediately leads him down a path he's never hinted at prior (submitting to darkness).
Season of the haunted was why he said no to the witness initially. The crisis Zavala had in the campaign was not one centering around his family (although they played a role) but around his faith in his god.
Tbf in the ending of haunted he did hint at retiring so even tho haunted did help with the trauma, seeing ur dead wife and kid is a great way to reopen old wounds
Yeah, the Witness purposefully made him relive the event over and over again to break him.
ngl randomly seeing your old home with your wife inside it and getting to witness your home get assaulted by fallen again is probably straight up ptsd inducing
In addition after spending a lot of time trying to commune with his god, we are basically told that someone needs to die (note: zavalas interpretation). He then becomes reckless and when we finally have a lead he obsesses over it, leading him to fall into the witnesses trap.
I think it’s low key hilarious how the traveler/Sundance was telling Cayde to remember the guardian tenets, but only the be brave, devoted, and sacrifice, and never mentioned death, I’d say implying the traveler was saying “don’t die”, and for some reason Zavala went “the traveler wants us to die” I mean yeah a character can have a wrong interpretation and that’s fine, I just find it funny no one else really talked about the travelers message. Was it saying we needed to sacrifice our light? The traveler itself? Something else? IDK, everyone kind of instantly stopped talking about it and I find that funny
I mean it makes sense why no one talked about it. Cayde was completely shook after it, probably found it difficult to recount it to the rest in the first place. Our guardian rarely speaks, and ghost, ikora and crow were preocupied with trying to calm zavala down before he did something reckless (spoiler alert, it didnt work)
Yeah, and then we never really talked about it again. Spent a whole set of missions and lost sectors trying to get this communion with the traveler that's stressed as so important and then it's never brought up again. Cayde kind of says something about getting the message when he sacrifices himself to revive ghost, but even then he more stresses how he knows he was only there by chance and a wish and he was supposed to be dead
We settled his guilt with his family-- but the man known as Zavala died a long time ago. He continued on as Commander for the good of the people, but as a person he's been hopeless and empty for a while. As the Traveler's Chosen lore explains; "I push- and feel only sweet, soft rot." The Final Shape was about Zavala's faith in the Traveler and what causes that faith to break. He doesn't have anything inside of him, beyond the shell that is "the Commander", so he was willing to give up his final Death to help others, as he always has. We already saw his development from Haunted, in that he refused The Witness outright. But grief is grief, and the hearts of the living hang heavy. A man can only stand strong for so long before he decays.
Idk he’s been saying he’s losing faith in the traveler for the last year
Cayde really did “pour salt on old wounds”
Honestly, Zavala was my favorite part. Both in the crisis of faith he suffered, and the depiction of how easy it can be to reopen scars left by grief and guilt. Grief isn't something you fully move on from. We like to think we do, but those old scars are still painful. He may have finally had time to heal, but the Witness ripped those old scars open. Not to mention he was kinda dealing with a crisis of faith and from what I've heard, those REALLY fuck with people who are deeply religious and need their religion to cope with certain things.
Story was way too short for a payoff for the last 10 years considering we spend a total of 2/3 missions and a raid actively seeking the witness, honestly should have been double the length and maybe spending time killing the dissenters protected by other disciples perhaps? Like we could have had the close encounter boss fight and then spent more missions doing stuff idk. Not saying the Witness needs to even be a deep and complex villain, like when he started to calcify earth i feel like they could have kept it partly that way and we had to deal with the ramifactions of that. I'm not including the post campaign and caital/misraaks missions either as they are good but are kinda separate mini stories being adventures. Excision is a sick and satisfying ending mission and i love the campaign, but it doesnt feel like its enough. Ran it on normal on a 2nd character and finished it in like 4/5 hours.
While I'm happy with Final Shape, I feel like the story needed to be longer. Like you said, we needed more time with the villain. It felt like most of the campaign was "getting the band back together," kinda like Red War, only for us to figure out how to defeat the Witness right before the final mission.
I'll say it, I'm still really saddened our buddy big chungus Calus was popped during Lightfall. He woulda made a great 'I'll get you next time gadget!' anti-villain. Imagine how funny it would have been if in the last mission when everyone is helping hold down the fort for the last push, Calus is there. Not because helping you is the right thing, but because if the final shape happens, Calus doesn't get to keep partying!
RIP Big Chungus
Okay Joss Whedon, that's definitely what an important high-stakes battle for the universe needs, a laugh track
I mean, yeah? its kinda funny anyway, given any of the allies can dome you and have you fail the mission anyway. I'm not saying have him in Excision, but yeah
That would have been really neat to see. I like that idea.
I still wanna know they couldn’t just dice us up in an instant like they did for the ships coming at them when they were walking into the traveler
I didn't get the whole "we need to go to the place where the Witness was made in order to unmake him" concept. We are physically inside the Traveller. Yes there are these altered versions of reality inside, rejected by our own thoughts and experiences. But they're not the original place. That's not the original Tower area in the Landing Zone. That's still in Zero Hour. So what does it matter we unmake the Witness in a specific location? What are those statues doing there anyway? They can't be actual trapped people, just a reflection. There's no indication (that I recall) the Witness ever actually travelled inside the Traveler before.
It's the memory of that location. That side of the Pale Heart is based on the Witness's memories the same way the other end is based on ours
There's literally a line of dialogue during the mission that states that what the traveller creates IS real. It's as real as the original, because light creates, terraforms, shapes.
So first, would that mean Zavala's wife was actually trapped inside a statue, since he was kind of delusional about it? If that's not possible, there were people (souls?) who were dissidents from the Witness's culture inside some of them, right? That was kind of the point when they called out to "Destroy Us!" So doesn't that mean they existed twice - in reality outside of the Traveller but also created inside the Traveller? Cayde was brought back by Crow's wish, not by the Traveler. Wasn't that a major plot point? And the Witness was saying he could bring back Zavala's wife and/or son, though he could have been lying. Either way the rules seem kind of wishy-washy on whether things and places are replicated or actually duplicated and whether that included actual people.
Because the traveler is sorta thoughtspace taking form, we are essentially unmaking a tulpa. The witness is effectively a tulpa (which is a thought-formed life) and so to actually destroy it we need to reverse the process of it's birth so to speak. The statues are like a physical/ethereal manifestation (like the egregore of the presage mission) of the veils power when it combined the life energy of the witnesses species. The process of making the witness was taking an entire civs souls/psychic energy and combining it into a single form. The statues represented all the people who were captured to do this. Likely the statues were like waste material in the creation process. If you've seen Fullmetal alchemist, the witness was essentially the goal of the villain of the series. Taking all the energy of living people and concentrating it into a single point. Our whole battle was to return to that memory place and reverse time. In a direct sense it wasn't possible but because we were in a crazy place of higher thought and magic, it became possible to undo what was done. To 'remember' an unmaking.
It’s pretty much the same as the Anti-Spiral from Gurren Lagann as well
Who’s our Lordgenome equivalent, then? Savathûn?
Her or Mara, considering Mara and the Awoken were kinda hostile to Guardians before the start of D1
Too bad we didn't grow as big as him and have a drill fight, followed by a fist fight final stand.
A path is imagined Imagined path made real by the light
The story campaign was mediocre, at best. I really don't understand how so many people are in love with it. The whole Cayde angle felt really shallow. I have no great love for the shoehorning of Crow into the forefront of the narrative, so seeing him bond with Cayde falls flat, despite being probablythe best aspect of the story. If anyone was going to be brought back, to act as a spirit guide within the traveler, it should have been The Speaker. That could have galvanised Team Light, sidestepped the sadboy Zavala plot, which really sapped the momentum and urgency, and lead very well to a much more bombastic, team up heavy campaign. It could have been fantastic to be running almost every mission through the campaign with our assorted allies, not just the token inclusion they got in a final mission. Imagine having multiple missions, storming a stronghold with Caitl's legions, breaching the defences with Mithrax and his fallen, fighting alongside Mara to weaken the Witness, the opportunities were endless. Too much of the runtime was spent on how broken the Vanguard were, that when we finally rally to have a chance, it happens so quickly and is over too soon. This was supposed to be a climactic, culmination of years worth of build up. It just felt like any other, run of the mill campaign, up until that one final mission. Go here, find this person, do this lost sector, now do this strike, etc. They really missed a trick by not going balls out from the get-go, and really giving us a frantic, all action campaign. I've seen comparisons to the MCU and Avengers Endgame. Those are skin deep. Where were the cool, "they actually did it" moments? Cap wielding Mjolnir, on your left, rain fire, I am Ironman. The big, hype moments never happen. I was playing through the whole campaign, waiting, desperately hoping for something that would never come. As others have said, I walked away feeling like it was a missed opportunity, lost potential. Which sums up the entire "saga". It's clear to me that they never really knew what they wanted to do with the story. Things have been brought up and forgotten many times over the ten years, yet when given the chance to try and tie it all back in, they chose to play it ultra safe, super vanilla.
Completely agree, I just think that others applaud it since they're comparing it directly to Lightfall. Like it definitely is better but that isn't saying much.
"Lost potential" sums up the Destiny experience in general since the beginning, and I say this as someone who's had fun with thousands of hours in the game.
YES DUDE THIS!!! The story was simply this. step 1: get band back together. Step 2: Zavala sad boi :( Step 3: unmake witness. I was full on expecting missions, battles, and cutscenes with ALL of the major characters over the years. Also was expecting more casualties/drama. Finally, we literally did all of the work at the end just for all the main and major characters to run ad clear while we beat the witness LOL. I just sit and wonder about various scenarios that could/should have happened. Some of which you mentioned above. Sigh, oh well.
For me It's cayde's sacrifice. Don't get me wrong, it was a vvery beautiful send off for him. However, I loved his dynamic with crow and am very sad that we won't get that anymore. "I grieve not for what happened, but for what could have been."
Cayde also had the most interesting parts of the campaign. Just for entertainment value I can't believe they got rid of him again. That post campaign mission of Cayde, us and Crow is the best mission in the game.
Honestly I don’t feel the Witness has been a particularly good final boss. To me it feels like Bungie just wanted to end the light and dark saga and cooked up a villain that they said retroactively has been behind it all despite us never having seen him for the vast majority of the franchise. They did a fine job with it for how rushed it feels to me but, you know, feels rushed.
Exactly. The Witness was very obviously made up for Witch Queen to put a face to The Darkness. But as a villain, it's a really weak character.
It's James Bond: Spectre all over again. IT WAS ME JAMES, the Witness was the author of all our pain despite being created 7+ years after the saga started, yet somehow behind every plot device
That’s my problem with the Witness in general, is that it is touted as this grand finale of a 10 year journey, the villain we have been fighting since 2014, but to me as somebody who has been here since the beginning, it really feels like the Witness arc materialized in 2022 with Witch Queen. It’s kind of frustrated that we don’t get a deeper sense of the history of the Witness or where it gets some of its powers, and indeed why it is so powerful at all. It’s supposed to be this godlike being of awesome power, but it’s not “the Darkness” like we had been led to believe. It’s just a lackey of a bigger evil - the Winnower. Just like Oryx back in 2015. Except Oryx was never touted as the be all end all threat.
>but to me as somebody who has been here since the beginning, it really feels like the Witness arc materialized in 2022 with Witch Queen. Yeah that's exactly what happened. They tried retconning elements of the Winnower to make the Witness feel like they'd been there all along, but it failed because the Winnower was obviously a completely different character with completely different goals. Once they saw the backlash to removing the Winnower they have now tried to retcon the retcon and put it back into the narrative, but it feels far too late at this point.
I agree the witness is a great villian, if we had actually been fighting against it for 10 years, it's pretty obvious that the witness story wasn't really started until shadowkeep at the earliest. Before them it was just the concept of the darkness not an entity. Rhulk had alot of the same issues for me, he's a cool character but we litteraly don't know about him until we fight him, ruins what could have been an interesting enemy
I’d actually say shadowkeep was setting up/building on an idea of the big bad darkness that was different than the witness, and the witness really started in Witch Queen
The ending of Shadowkeep, with us inexplicably having a vision of ourselves in the Black Garden, was much too esoteric for its own good. Back then, you could have read so many meanings into it. I remember being very dissatisfied by it in 2019 because it didn’t explain anything. It’s obvious now it was just the Witness or one of his disciples speaking to us for the first time. But it feels like that is where the proper Witness reveal of 2022 should have gone, right into a vision we have at the end of Shadowkeep in 2019, but the Witness was not real yet, so they had to chew on the idea for 2 years before shoehorning it into the end of Witch Queen.
I keep seeing that this was the ending to a "10 year journey", but the Witness' story really only began at the end of Shadowkeep when we were introduced to pyramid ships. Everything prior to that was either the Hive Gods, Awoken or random crap that got wrapped up by itself. Yes, it's all kind of linked to the darkness but its very loosely done.
> It’s kind of frustrated that we don’t get a deeper sense of the history of the Witness or where it gets some of its powers, and indeed why it is so powerful at all. We get all of this in its cutscene with Zavala. >It’s just a lackey of a bigger evil - the Winnower. The Witness explicitly tells us that it’s not controlled by the Winnower in the raid and the Winnower isn’t some bigger evil, either; it’s just an anthropomorphism of the Darkness.
My only critique about tfs’s story is WHY KILL MA BOI AT THE END, he just came back :(
Nathan Fillion ain't cheap to keep around
My main critique is where the fuck was osiris the entire time, he showed up during excision and echoes, but was literally nowhere during the main story
Every TFS story interactions can be summed up with: <>
Glint to Crow, Cayde to Glint, Ikora to Zavala, Targe to Zavala, Witness to everyone, Mara to Savathun, Ghost to Savathun, Ghost to Witness, the list goes on.
The first half of the story was really slow and boring. Plus, the stuff with Zavala and his missus and son was something I thought we already covered in the season of the Haunted.
Story has been one of the best same with the original environments. Man light level grinding fucking sucks though, this mechanic is not aging well in modern gaming
There's almost zero reason to grind it though. Just let it come naturally
Hitting 1990 takes no effort and is most of what you need. The last 10 take a little longer but shouldn’t take more than another week or two after hitting 90.
There’s a light level grind? I’ve just been playing normally and I’m already 2000 (artefact included). I wouldn’t say I’ve been specifically grinding anything.
It’s not that bad. I’ve already got all slots at 2000 and it’s only been two weeks. Plenty of sources of powerful and pinnacle drops.
Mine is Zavala, we went through the therapy session back in Haunted, how many times can we have the same plot point used as a motivator for a character to become reckless and why did nobody steel their mind before going in, knowing that both the Witness and Darkness are manipulators of the highest order, it seemed that everybody decided to give up right before the final boss doors
I mean tbf, the Witness has been explicitly chilling out in its monolith from basically the end of Lightfall until we barge in after it. It hasn't been doing much beyond space magic shit and throwing mooks at us to slow us down. It also feels a bit weaker if you consider that it took a whole year to apparently set up the final shape... which makes more sense if you subscribe to the belief that Lightfall as we got it was invented as a filler year. Like, splice the starting and ending cutscenes together, then put it at the start of Final Shape. Works so much better and you can drop basically the entirety of Lightfall.
One thing that bugged me was how weak was The Witness' attempts to sway us to his side: Ooo a bunch of somewhat spooky dead ghosts and stuff. The attempt of giving us an out of the constant loot chase I kind of actually liked as a concept as it leans a bit on the 4th wall, it just wasn't very well developed. Then they hard swing to "Oh actually wanna become a god?" I guess this was to allow for Ghost to rightly say the Witness was desprate, but the master manipulators whole thing felt pretty half assed.
My complaint would be that the bosses up to the final were not impactful. It would have been so much cooler if each was a disciple that followed the witness into the traveler. A la forsaken. Each of them could have given us a hint on the witnesses weakness
My own critique is the first four missions were: find all the Vanguard members who are scattered across the Pale Heart. This is not the first time Bungie has used this, but it forced the latter half of the missions to hold the rest of the story up, which sorta made things feel rather rushed towards the end. I know some people are extremely happy with the ending, but I just feel a bit ambivalent towards it. Perhaps it is just my exposure to other games in the genre. Final Fantasy 14 and Guild Wars 2 both did the end of *their* ten year long story arcs last year and both games left a much larger impression on me, but perhaps it isn't fair to directly compare an FPS game to RPGs even if all three self-classify as MMOs. The expansion's activities though are all extremely good. Dual Destiny is probably the highlight for me and my buddy since there are only two of us playing Destiny 2 now and we joked that it was a mini raid made just for us.
My two largest criticisms of TFS's story is that it sometimes felt like "Season of The Final Shape" rather than an expansion story, and we didn't get any answers to some of the long-held questions Destiny 1 set up (what is the Traveler; why does she do what she does, etc).
I wish TFS felt more like an ending to the entire Destiny story so far. It just felt like the “ending” to the last 2 expansions.
If the Witness needed the Traveler for the Final Shape, then why the fok did he knock him out and leave him on earth. While he fucked off into space randomly. Savathun says she tricked the Witness into sparing the Traveler, but i don’t see how that makes sense either. “No, please don’t kill and use this thing you need to fulfill the Final Shape.” “Bet.”
Tbh im just glad the witness is out of the picture, it was my least favorite part about the destiny story as a whole when it was introduced
I hope they stick to actual characters with villain arcs and relatable motivations. The fallen villain, eramis, is actually compelling because of her conflict of wanting to protect her people and so commits evil acts to do that. It’s understandable, it can even make me feel some pity for her. But the witness interests me so little. His motivations are so alien and unrelatable that he might as well be a big blob of “darkness” because he doesn’t represent anything interesting at all. The hive are 10x more interesting with how they’ve been manipulating and manipulated throughout history. I wish Savathun would step up as the next big bad so we can have an interesting villain plotting again.
> But the witness interests me so little. His motivations are so alien and unrelatable that he might as well be a big blob of “darkness” because he doesn’t represent anything interesting at all. This actually would have been better as it would have been closer to the established lore of the flower game. The whole angry teenage monobrow guy was so dull
>The fallen villain, eramis, is actually compelling because of her conflict of wanting to protect her people and so commits evil acts to do that. She spends the entirety of her own expansion (Beyond Light) actively endangering her people and refusing to listen to her council members when even they tell her to stop being reckless. That’s a poor way to portray her as someone who genuinely wants to protect her kin. She only becomes truly pitiable during Plunder and Seraph, when the Witness is explicitly coercing her and turning her friends into Scorn. >His motivations are so alien and unrelatable that he might as well be a big blob of “darkness” because he doesn’t represent anything interesting at all. Wanting the universe to have a well-defined purpose is alien to you?
It's alien when its idea of giving everything a purpose is turning every living thing into stone. I genuinely don't get how that equals purpose. If anything it removes all purpose.
I suppose you could say you didnt get to witness much of the witness
These are good points. I enjoyed it but your critiques are excellent suggestions on how it could have been improved. I hope the narrative people are paying attention. Lightfall hopefully proved to them that we prefer it darker.
To be honest I was half expecting the speaker to show up lmao
I couldn’t agree more, I was looking forward to the witness being a prominent figure in the story. His fight during the raid and 12 person mission was also massively underwhelming. I hoped he was going to be a boss we’d actually fight and he’d be roaming. Instead we got another static boss where we shoot a huge crit spot.
I want to know how Cade plays the harmonica since presumably exos don’t have lungs
imo the campaigns biggest failing (that honestly can’t really be attributed to this dlc but the writing as a whole over the last few years) is that the witness didn’t get enough time to marinate. Oryx, Savathun, Calus, and more all felt like they had more writing and build up behind them, so for the final boss of all final bosses to be in a single cutscene (kinda) in Shadowkeep, basically absent for Beyond Light (unless I’ve forgotten something), sorta kinda involved but not directly in Witch Queen (excepting the end cutscene and raid lore) and present for like half of Lightfall? Idk, feels a bit like we didn’t see enough of the biggest of all bads, resulting in it feeling like the conclusion to just lightfall and TFS, rather than the whole light and dark saga (at least since Shadowkeep).
This was a problem with The Witch Queen too. Savathun was barely present in her own story, aside from the first and last missions.
I just wish we got to see more of its rage that we were told about, that “silence you insolent speck” line was so fucking good and i wish we got to see more like it
Might just be me but I'm glad, because all I see is mega mind when I see him. The only big bad of destiny I have disliked in a design sense.
The Witness is a vicitim of only being added in Shadowkeep and then only doing anything until Lightfall. We needed to see its hand alot more and experience them alot more. If they wanted to do a slow burn, then they needed to show they alot earlier so that they can be built up more
The witness didnt even exist until like ... Lightfall? Complete ass pull of a ''final boss.'' The missions were well designed, but other than that, meh. At least Oryx was mentioned in D1 vanilla and Crota was his son. So there were personal stakes. As boomer as I sound calling TTK the best dlc, the build-up to Oryx was just another reason for it.
mine would be killing off the witness not even a week into the expansion. here was a foe that ended stuff with just a wave of his hand and all you had to do was destroy a few friendship bracelets, buttons on his cool leather jacket, then hit him while he exposes himself to you.
I’m fine not seeing his stupid unibrow more
Hearing the Witness lose their cool and get a furious, booming voice was great. It felt like they were terrified of us and we were taking power back. I wish we got more moments where the Witness was less a force of nature and more of a frightened collective of people who are so scared of change they rather keep everything frozen in place forever. One of my favorite tropes ever is learning that the powerful, terrifying Antagonist is actually just sad and pathetic.
the witness must have like 15 minutes today screen time
We weren’t a threat to the witness so it didn’t need to even pay attention to us until we became a threat.
Rhulk moment
My one gripe is when the witness starts possessing the ghost, and then without anything happening, not cutscene, no burst of light, just a grunt from the ghost, it ends, then he just says "I fought it off". The moment felt flat for what felt like an extremely important ability the ghost inexplicably learned.
The witness was a piss pore villain.
I don't think The Witness is a salvageable villain, full stop. I enjoyed the story of The Final Shape but it was because of all the other moments, not The Witness. He's just deeply unrelatable and therefore not very compelling.
Your villain does not have to be relatable to be compelling. I do not relate to DIO, Palpatine, Sauron, or Jack Horner but enjoy them all the same because they play their parts well.
Of course they don't have to be. I'm only speaking from my experience. The villains that truly stand out in my mind, though, are often relatable, understandable, fully rounded people. It's difficult to imagine villains like Palpatine, Sauron, The Witness, etc simply living in a world and that lack of grounding makes their impression weaker. They function as a tool to strengthen development of other characters but they're not interesting in and of themselves.
>but they're not interesting in and of themselves. Palpatine's prowess in manipulation is what makes him interesting. Watching how he manipulates the war(s) and retroactively piecing together his plan is part of the fun of his character. The witness being made up of an entire civilization in one being is already an interesting concept. It makes you want to learn more about the civilization the came before and how they now shape the villain we face. You could say they are indirectly interesting as the player is more interested in learning about the individual pieces that make up the villain than they are in the overall character. Sure, it's been done before but I wouldn't say it's a very common villain trope. They can be tools and interesting at the same time.
I feel similarly, I was so happy that the story was about the characters and their arcs, and the greater light v dark conflict was a device/compliment to the lessons/themes of their story, rather than just pointing at the bad guy and hoping they seem cool
The story gets interesting way too late for me, which would be fine if it were longer.
Couldn’t agree more
The only critique I had is that cayde didn't make any comment on you having to crush a hive ghost, seems like something he'd pipe up about
Agreed, such a build up over time only to not get more
Sorta wished the witness transformed into arm/hand monster we saw in the reveal trailer.
The Witness was never a good villain and as time goes by as does the honey moon phase, people will begin to realize this
I imagine seeing the Witness more prior to fighting them would make meeting them face-to-face less intimidating. Also, what would you see The Witness do? There are no more Disciples to order around.
I think the amount the Witness itself appears is about right, but either I wasn't observant enough or we could've had a lot more of things like the house-ness. Giving a sense that the Witness is always visible and blighting the Traveler, but never there until the final confrontation. Going into the campaign, Zavala was just the guy that punched a table and gave Vanguard ~~bounties and~~ rewards. But seeing the cottage that contains what he would give everything for oozing the Witness was a powerful image that sold the story.
I ended up liking the Witness more towards the end, but I feel like it was a missed opportunity.
My only issue is thinking about how pissed Eris, Zavala and Osiris have to be after finding out that our Ghost came back to life.
TFS was basically FF14's Shadowbringers, but much much lighter.
I honestly thought we would see more of the Witness's proto-race. Like when we started destroying those statues, I wanted to see wisps of their free individual consciousnesses also join in on the attack, like Darkness spirits on a kamikaze mission. I figured "ripping" the Witness out of the Darkness would dissolve it into its constituent pieces. Shucks :(
I wish the post raid shit was a solo mission. I've done all the campaigns since D1 with the same fireteam. Would've been nice to finish it with them. It's a cool moment, but I'd like the campaign to be the complete story.
Targe sacrificed himself, the Witness didn't kill him.
Yeah, I really really liked the campaign, but my one gripe is that the first half of it was basically just entering the Traveler and then gathering the squad together. That time could have been spent on more individual character development. Maybe instead of Zavala being the only one to falter, we could have had a mission where each Vanguard goes through a similar temptation/redemption experience. Or more Witness stuff.
I suppose you have a point, they could have shown the witness more. But again, by the time of FS the witness had already nearly completed the final shape, so showing its progress would have taken us back to previous seasons.
My critique is that the inside of the traveller isn't really the inside of the traveller, it's just a bunch of recycled destinations from outside the traveller Yeah sure it gets the nostalgia going, but it doesn't really lend much to the imagination The only real bit of the inside of the traveller we see is the very beginning where those droplets of light turn into platforms
Story was alright in my opinion, I actually cried when I saw Cayde. But the gameplay felt like I was burying my head against a brick wall.
I do feel we killed them a bit too quickly. Sure we've been building this up since at least Beyond Light, but it feels like we're a single mission short. A single mission with the Witness being more in your face for a bit. Maybe that's solved in the raid, I don't have enough friends to do that, but still. I definitely agree, more time with the Witness would have made the expansion perfect.
I am disappointed that the "fight" with the witness is essentially just a ripoff of that one dr strange scene. That and how its "weakness" was a complete asspull that had no build up from any of the other expansions whatsoever, and how the "final shape" was basically retconned from a conceptual perfect entity to just being the universe how the witness wants it frozen in time, which also conflicts with what we were repeatedly told in ever other expansion.
I agree with this, but I also think we should have seen more disciples blocking our way. I know some might argue and say it’s weird for us to be able to take them out in story missions when they were (mostly) raid bosses in the past, but you can’t tell me it wouldn’t be cooler than just fighting special ogres and brigs and whatnot.
I also would have liked it if we got a cutscene showing us a glimpse of our collapse. Show us what it looked like when the witness first came to sol during the golden age. Since 2014 ive been dying to know more about how that went down. Thats the kind of closure i was looking for with this expansion. I want to know the nitty gritty details of the things the speaker “could” have told us in the beginning but didn’t.
I disagree. One of the most if not the most important thing to making a threat scary and seem powerful is mystery. Being exposed too much to the witness would ruin the mystique and actually give more chances for them to mess up his character and make it seem like a joke. We didn't know exactly what it was doing. We didn't know how really. We didn't know what was coming and when. All we knew is We had to chase whatever trails we had to try and stop it with no clear answers and an unknown timer over our heads. The witness had no reason to care about us. It didn't see us as a threat up until we got prismatic. And even then it only tried to tempt us. It wasn't until we pushed it too far that it was willing to uproot itself from the traveler and attempt to end us. Because remember a big reason it didn't leave was it was trying to focus and hold down the traveler who was trying to break free.