I'm kind of disappointed with the direction of Destiny 2's story.

I really like the Destiny's history and prehistory, for lack of a better term. All that lore about the golden age, warminds, the Darkness and downfall of mankind. I thought these were the interesting questions of the Destiny universe.

With Destiny 2, it feels like they keep writing characters and then throw them away. Every expansion there's a new adventure with a character I don't care about. I feel like they don't spend enough time on how the world of destiny got to where it is.

You can say that the grimoire cards were a dumb way to deliver lore, but I liked the content and can recall them much more better than anything a single character has said.

Destiny would have been vastly more interesting if it had been treated as a single player shooter-RPG instead of a MMO lite loot shooter.

As it stands, almost nothing in Destiny is interesting. There's a lot of cool ideas but little room for substance in between shooting things with friends.

This is what I had hoped the Leviathan would ameliorate- while we moved from monster of the week to monster of the week, I thought Calus could drip-feed us a continuous story about the darkness. As we fought the big bads from season to season, he would imply something bigger each time until we finally clashed with Savathûn or whatever our Destiny 2 story arc is supposed to be, if there is one.

Don’t read into what Destiny’s story was going to be before everyone became a shop owner with a few lines of dialog...

I played Destiny 1 for the first time last year and got constant "grimoire unlocked" messages which meant nothing because they took all that stuff down, leaving no official way to even learn that lore. Not saying that's the reason they backed off from all that lore, but they sure don't seem to care much about it.

I'm sensing some oblique aspersions being cast at Petra Venj here, and I won't stand for it.

I actually completely disagree. I'm not the biggest fan of some of the gameplay loop stuff from the Annual Pass, but the story beats and lore hints within Black Armory and Joker's Wild have been nothing short of fantastic, and extremely interesting. See below. Beware of Spoilers if you aren't caught up...

There is some real interesting stuff going on that heavily hints about our adopting Dark Abilities in the next Destiny sequel to fight off the "Darkness".

Yeah, hard disagree from me as well, at least with regards to Year 2. I think your criticisms are totally valid in terms of the Curse of Osiris and Warmind expansions, but the Forsaken Mara/Dreaming City/Riven storyline I think is the best storytelling Destiny has ever had and it indulges in the cerebral space-fantasy lore that I love about the series.

The stuff that Bungie has been slowly laying the groundwork of since then about whether or not your Guardian is really all about the 'light' or whether they will slip into some kind of morally ambiguous territory has been interesting as well (see: this week's allegiance quest). The character of the Drifter seems like a counter-argument to your one-off character criticism, as he was introduced with only some fanfare in Forsaken but has only grown in importance since then.

Part of this is tied to (finally!) including a whole wealth of in-game lore text. If you're not willing to dive into it then you're missing out on a lot of this, but personally I've been digging it a lot. As someone who also enjoyed Destiny 1 grimoire and lore a lot, the new in-game lore system seems like an improved version of that. (I read a lore entry the other day that was something along the lines of our universe being some kind of bubble universe in another universe, and our whole history has been just been a few hours from the perspective of that other universe? That's the kind of sci-fi nonsense I can get behind).

edit: Also, I think the Calus storyline was the one bright spot of the Year 1 Destiny 2 story. The set-up of the Leviathan raid is that you're taking down this big bad Cabal guy, but at the end of the raid it's revealed it was all just an elaborate test that you passed that he tricked you into taking. In Eater of Worlds your interests and Calus' are mutually aligned so you team up for that, and then you actually come to his aid in Spire of Stars. At the end of Spire when you defeat the Red Legion fleet attacking the Leviathan he officially deems you to be his ally. As Leviathan is still in the Nessus orbit, I think we'll be hearing more from Calus again.

i agree

It has a story?

I think the story seems to be maturing in regards to overall world building with all the side stories/characters starting to intertwine into a "bigger picture" story arc involving the darkness again. I think this is what the series really needs, to focus on the light and dark, traveler and the darkness. They've done a good job building up Mara and the drifter, finally getting into the Nine and so on. Really excited to see where its all comes to a head. Hopefully "D3" or whatever the next installment is, starts focusing on the darkness and hopefully giving the guardians a true side to choose from. Much like the alliance and horde factions from WoW.

I'm seeing a lot of Byf videos here which are great but I've come to really appreciate the way Myelin goes about explaining Destiny lore in a concise way. He was after all brought onto Bungie for a while to help organize and filter through their lore to create the actual Grimoire vol. 1 book that you can buy. If anything, I believe that Destiny's gameplay and Story content is the best it has ever been and can only imagine where things will go with their new freedom over the franchise. Hope it gets wild

I completed Destiny 2 and didnt play any of the add-ons/expansions but everything i've read here is reminding me of Kingdom Hearts. (or at least what I think Kingdom Hearts is...) If I eventually end up playing Destiny 3 will I have any idea what's going on?

@boozak: Some people may disagree with me here but I think one of the nice parts of the Destiny story is that you can kind of engage it with as much as you want without it impacting the gameplay (which I'm assuming is quite different from KH). The game will clearly identify some bad guys for you take out, and if you want to just engage with it on that level and see some pretty environments/cut-scenes along the way you can just do that and have a good time.

On the other hand, if you find yourself intrigued by the world-building in the games, you can dive into literal reams of lore that fleshes out a lot of different aspects of the universe in (IMO) quite interesting ways. Doing so will help explain some of the more esoteric parts of the in-game story (what exactly is Riven? why is the Dreaming City stuck in a 3-week cycle? etc.) but is far from necessary to actually play and enjoy the game. And YouTubers, as people here have been posting, have been making good summaries of all this stuff if reading a bunch of text is not your thing.

Like TSD said, I also really enjoy the engage at your own pace way Destiny tells it's story for the most part. It tells you the stuff you need to know, and hints pretty heavily at the other stuff, but the lore is how people really know pretty crazy stuff about the Destiny universe, and I'm not the biggest person into all that. But I love listening to Myelin Games or My Name Is Byf break all that down for me at times for the important stuff. I honestly have a bigger preference for Byf, though I do often feel like he talks over my head, explaining the more complicated parts of the lore. His hour long talks explaining the universe from top to bottom are some of the best tools to teach the story of Destiny in a relatively short period of time (if you can sit and listen to over an hour of lore talk) in the whole community though, considering how much of a deep dive all of that stuff really is.

Looks like they're bringing back Cayde. New figure description says "Freed from his Tower duty, Gunslinger Cayde-6 now walks his own path, back out in his beloved frontier."