YOU HAD TO BE THERE
My first glimpse of the Traveler was back in The Red War campaign. A friend had recommended I try Destiny 2 and it wasn’t long before I was off and trying to outdo him at everything. I was addicted, well and truly. No game had had this effect on me since World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King and boy had Destiny got its grip on me.
If I wasn’t online, I was sleeping ready to play again.
I couldn’t wait to be running around for Zavala, Shaxx, Ikora, Eris… and Cayde-6. My dreams were full of that silly blue face and his witty retorts. I was completely gone.
I didn’t play from the beginning of the original Destiny, but I did go back and play those campaigns because my friend basically told me I had to before I was “allowed” to properly play Destiny 2. By the time I was properly into D2, I felt like a piece of the furniture.
Looking back to the start of my Destiny journey, all I can hear is that stupid “in the beninging” meme, but I was genuinely so full of excitement for everything.
Even patrols.
I’d grown up on PvE in World of Warcraft and was already someone who would happily deep dive into lore for hours, so this new world was huge for me. It wasn’t just one level, it was planets, factions, characters, history, wars and weird little bits of lore everywhere. Every destination had its own story and its own feel.
I wanted to know everything.
Byf became someone I listened to for hours because I wanted to understand as much of the world as I could. Later on, through Destiny, he actually became someone I knew, which still feels a bit mad to say.
Campaign by campaign it felt fresh and new. The Red War, next to The Witch Queen, was my favourite. I went into Destiny with no expectation of being drawn in, I was just trying a game because a friend was playing it. That quickly turned into me following the story, asking questions ten a penny and getting excited whenever new campaigns and content dropped.
It felt like our world.
We were the Guardians protecting it, rescuing it from whatever fresh disaster had happened and being sent into places that would probably kill anyone else.
I took my role very seriously.
It was never just a game to me.
Destiny 2 gave me a reason to get out of bed during long periods of isolation and pain because of my disabilities. It gave me somewhere to go even when I physically wasn’t going very far. It eventually helped me start streaming, be social and build a community around something I loved.
That’s probably why the sunsetting hit me the way it did.
I think “you had to be there” properly entered my vocabulary when Bungie started removing huge parts of the game. Mercury went. Mars went. Titan and Io went. Curse of Osiris and Warmind were basically gone and then so was the campaign that introduced me to Destiny 2 in the first place. Bungie’s own Content Vault records list those destinations alongside The Red War, Curse of Osiris and Warmind among the Year 1 content that was removed.
And I am still annoyed about Osiris and Vance’s Lighthouse.
I’d been working on this questline for ages and had ONE thing left to do. One. It was timegated and the content was being sunset, so I basically watched the door close in front of me before I could finish it.
That pissed me off more than a little.
Games sunset things, it’s not some brand new concept, but this didn’t feel like losing a random map or an old event.
This was the core of the game.
These were campaigns we thought we’d be playing forever.
How was I supposed to recommend Destiny to someone and explain what this world meant when they couldn’t even play the story that had introduced me to it?
How do you explain Ghaul when the whole campaign where he invades the Last City, takes the Traveler and strips Guardians of their Light isn’t there anymore?
How do you explain what it felt like limping through those mountains with no Light?
How do you explain The Farm when they’ve never stood there?
How do you explain Cayde getting stranded on Nessus and deciding his master plan is basically to steal a Vex teleporter, get close enough to Ghaul to shoot him and then maybe eat a sandwich?
How do you explain why Sweeper Bot carrying on sweeping while the Tower was literally being attacked became one of those stupid little things we all remembered?
You can tell someone it happened.
You can send them a lore video.
You can pull up old cutscenes on YouTube.
But it isn’t the same.
There’s a difference between knowing Destiny’s lore and having Destiny memories.
I would carry people through raids and dungeons and end up explaining bits of story that I couldn’t actually show them anymore. There would be lore I wanted to carry forward but no real way of giving them the context for it.
Ghaul did so much to our main characters and yet, for somebody joining later, he basically didn’t exist.
Characters had trauma from things newer players had never seen. Relationships already existed with half their history missing.
How do you properly explain all of that to somebody with no Red War, no Farm, no Mercury, no Warmind and no idea what it actually felt like to live through those campaigns?
After the sunsetting, it became really difficult to recommend the game without basically saying:
“Yeah, it’s brilliant, but loads of the stuff that made me love it isn’t actually there anymore.”
I genuinely didn’t think we would ever get it back.
When that content disappeared, it felt like my memories had been messed with somehow. I still remembered those places, obviously, but I couldn’t go back to them. It felt a bit like losing touch with an old friend, not knowing if you’d ever see them again or how you were meant to reach them.
That’s the thing about Destiny 2.
Through the highs and lows and all the times it has annoyed the absolute hell out of me, it has always been deeply personal.
It helped me get out of bed.
It helped me start streaming.
It helped me find people.
It became somewhere that felt like home.
So when Bungie announced that work had begun on restoring vaulted Destiny 2 campaigns, destinations and raids, I was so pleased. Bungie itself acknowledged that removing those experiences had a lasting effect on player trust and on the memories people had built inside the game.
I say our content because that’s genuinely what it feels like.
I don’t just want old missions back.
I want other people to finally be able to see what we saw, understand why these places mattered and make their own memories there instead of just hearing about ours.
For years the answer was always the same:
You had to be there.
Soon, maybe you won’t.
THE DESTINY NEW GUARDIANS NEVER GOT
I first realised the issue newer players were having when Dominus Ghaul and his storyline were completely erased. Curse of Osiris and Warmind too were leaving newcomers to begin the game without any context on who this dude was, why we were fighting him and what had actually happened before they arrived.
Removing, essentially, the base game meant people were coming into a really disjointed timeline without knowing figures like Ghaul or understanding some pretty essential narrative arcs. They relied on us to explain what was going on but how could we adequately capture what we’d experienced without absolutely bombarding them to the point they didn’t want to play anymore?
I was so very sad that Titan had gone. It wasn’t like anywhere else in Destiny 2, eerie and oceanic and somehow it felt like you’d turned the same corner of the same building about 200 times, but it was beautiful! I’d often go and sit on a building and just look out to sea.
How sad.
Mars was another one. Escalation Protocol were words that, for years, a newer player would have had absolutely no idea about. It was hugely popular but also absolutely mad when people would leave you fighting the hordes on your own the second they’d completed whatever they needed to do!
We even lost little things like Stephen Fry as the Concierge AI on Mars. Bill Nighy’s Speaker was hugely important during the early Red War too. These performances and characters became another part of Destiny we had to explain rather than something people could actually experience.
One of the most difficult things to explain, especially after the removal of the Forsaken campaign, is A: why something called the Forsaken Pack is still sold when you can’t actually play the campaign it’s named after and B: WHO WAS ULDREN SOV?!
The Forsaken Pack is still available and gives players access to things including Forsaken Exotics, Shattered Throne and Last Wish, but not the original campaign itself.
Newer players have no real experience of who Crow once was and the fact that he killed our Cayde-6.
The Mara and Uldren storyline, who they were to one another and the fact they’re both now our pals... it makes parts of The Final Shape feel so much less meaningful if you don’t know Cayde and Crow’s history.
THE cutscene.
Cayde being shot by Uldren and then, years later, that imagery being echoed with Cayde and Crow.
Wow.
If you weren’t there for what came before, you simply don’t get the same punch from it.
Even Zavala had a huge chunk of his story cut.
HE LOST HIS LIGHT TOO!!
He was ready to give up. Zavala started as this incredibly rigid, authoritarian character and changed dramatically into the man we see today, someone who leads with his heart just as much as his duty.
His hatred for the Cabal softened through the alliance with Caiatl and the relationship they eventually built. Then Season of the Haunted dug into Safiyah and Hakim, Zavala’s wife and son and what is probably the deepest trauma this character carries: losing them.
Without that context, moments involving them later just don’t have the same emotional weight because newer players haven’t lived through the history that made them important.
And physically, we lost part of our Commander too.
Lance Reddick.
I would absolutely love to go back through those old campaigns and hear his lines again.
Ikora went through so much as well. After Cayde died she was ready to tear the Reef apart and wage an unauthorised war to avenge him. Strip that context away and someone meeting Ikora today could easily see her as this calm, level and stoic character.
She wasn’t!
She could be volatile, angry and driven towards some absolutely wild solutions when someone she cared about was hurt.
She had her spy network, The Hidden, and her complicated relationship with Osiris was a huge part of her history too. When so much of that disappears, her role as one of the Vanguard’s leaders loses some of the foundations that explain why she is the way she is now.
I guess showing people through new content was like offering them a really good sandwich, but I’d eaten a few of the layers. They could tell it was a good sandwich but half the filling was gone, so they’d never really understand HOW good it was as a whole.
People would often talk about Cayde-6 and Crow, but it felt like YOU HAD TO BE THERE to fully understand why loving them or hating them wasn’t a decision you could make without the whole picture.
People liked Crow but they’d have hated Uldren Sov and what he did to Cayde. Probably even more if they’d actually seen and felt it happen rather than having me relay the story in brief.
People knew of Cayde. He’s probably the most famous character in the game but they didn’t understand how crucial a role he played in the world we see today. He’s much more than just “the guy everyone talks about”.
Following Zavala’s story from the beginning would’ve made The Final Shape hit a whole lot harder, or at least it did for me. Especially the story around his family and being at his ACTUAL HOME. The same goes for Crow and Cayde and why that relationship matters so much to those of us who’ve played from the start.
It was also really embarrassing when people joined to play with me and felt they’d been a bit ripped off because they couldn’t play the whole campaign series. If that were me, I’d feel like I was too late to get into it and I’d feel shortchanged.
It definitely stopped me recommending the game as much, especially for more than just raiding and PvP, which is a shame because the PvE side is the strongest part of Destiny in my opinion.
It really did feel like we’d been turned into unofficial historians for the game without asking to be. I’m so glad Byf exists because I used his work as a reference constantly with New Lights.
I’d LOVE new players to understand why our relationships with these characters, especially Cayde-6 and Uldren/Crow, matter so much.
The sacrifice.
THE CUTSCENE. THE POSE.
The way their roles are reversed later. There’s such an emotional tug of war there and the trust we didn’t have for Crow at the beginning after hating Uldren Sov is a massive part of why his story works.
New players didn’t just miss content, they missed the content that made us care.
DESTINY BECAME PART OF MY REAL LIFE
Destiny became far more than a video game for me, it became my lifeblood. I spent years rotting in bed with various physical and mental disabilities. After starting the game on Xbox I started to stream to show others how much I loved it! I got pretty good at it too which led to opportunities I’d never have dreamt of.
Beginning in isolation and struggling with loneliness, I soon grew to have hundreds of friends around the world to log in and play Destiny with or just hang out with in voice chat.
I’ve even met some of them in real life.
After a chance encounter in the Tower one night because he had a funny name — Keith Scranner of Pies! — I invited him to a raid, soon found out he lived nearby and he’s now my IRL best friend!
I eventually switched to PC to play and stream the game and had an actual community behind me, in the thousands! I began helping with raids and was soon leading them myself, helping so many people through difficult endgame content.
I even ended up feeding back to devs on accessibility and what worked and didn’t work for me.
THE people that MADE the game!
Bungie signed me up for a global creator group around The Final Shape as one of around 40 people. I remember signing the NDA, feeling super important and excited!!! Then going into the voice meeting with people from Bungie and so many other MASSIVE creators from around the world.
It felt like a dream come true and like I’d been “seen”. It felt really, really special.
Through Destiny I got to befriend Aztecross, Byf and so many other people. I felt so small among these colossal heroes of mine but as they say, “eyes up, Guardian!” I guess!
In one of those meetings we were told there was information we could release publicly to our followings afterwards. One of those things was the name of the new dungeon, Warlord’s Ruin.
I was so excited I tweeted it immediately before anyone else.
Then loads of people started messaging me asking how I knew and demanding a source...
So naturally I panicked, deleted the tweet and emailed our Bungie contact apologising in case I’d done something wrong by telling people.
Ha!
Thankfully I hadn’t.
Other creators started tweeting it afterwards but I WAS THE FIRST and I shit my pants.
I apparently wanted to be seen, just not THAT seen!
It’s funny to me now but at the time I could already envisage myself being dropped from Bungie creatorship at the very least. If it hadn’t been allowed I’d have completely flunked my NDA, so that experience has had me triple checking before I tell anyone anything EVER since.
For the record, Warlord’s Ruin launched on December 1, 2023.
I was also asked to sign up for Bungie Game2Give and given a main slot in the streaming directory. I hit the $2,500 fundraising goal needed for the Metagalactic Bloom emblem, which was extremely sought after at the time. Bungie’s own Game2Give material confirms $2,500 as the fundraising tier for that emblem.
It was amazing to feel that the game I’d grown to love and gained so much from could now help other people too.
I was even asked to take part in an official Bungie stream with six European streamers taking on the Pantheon challenge. Playing alongside those creators was amazing and they never made me feel smaller than them for a second, even though I had way under half the following of most of them across different platforms!
Being recognised by Bungie meant the world to me. It felt like I was being recognised for my gaming, my personality and my ability all at once.
I genuinely felt seen by the people who had made this world possible.
Destiny even made its way into my actual home and, apparently, onto my body.
Mara, my French Bulldog, is named after Queen Mara Sov. They both have very blonde hair and Mara in-game is kickass and takes no shit, she’s a pretty cool role model to have, so obviously I named my dog after her!
And then there’s the fact I have Savathûn tattooed on my back.
She’s such a badass baddie, strong, powerful and a bit devious, which is exactly why I love her. Debra Wilson is such an incredible actress and voice actress too, she gave Savathûn so much personality and made me feel like my own little dark side would probably be a bit like hers.
Strong powerful women make great tattoos!
At that point I think you have to admit the game has escaped the Xbox.
I even met Nathan Fillion because I loved Cayde-6 so much!
Funnily enough I met him at Telford Comic Convention A WEEK before he was announced as returning for The Final Shape.
I got my picture, his autograph and the chance to actually tell him what he had meant to me as Cayde-6.
I fell in love with Cayde in the very first cutscene he appeared in and since then he’s been beside me in physical form with my various figures of him. Getting to tell Nathan that a game and a character he helped bring to life had essentially given me my life back and so much more was pretty overwhelming.
He was really humbled by it and I was just happy that he knew.
It helped that he was such a genuinely lovely person to interact with that day because, obviously, that only made me love Cayde even more!
It’s funny to think of the friend who introduced me to Destiny seeing all of this when he only recommended it on the off chance I’d enjoy it.
Like... mate, look what you started.
Somewhere along the way I stopped just playing Destiny and realised it had become part of my ACTUAL LIFE.
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE GUARDIANS
I can’t write this piece without mentioning Lance Reddick properly.
He was much more than just a voice actor, he was a gamer too and actively played Destiny. After his death, Bungie even highlighted a community tribute from someone who copied Lance’s own loadout and finished the mission he had been playing before he died.
He brought life and dimension to Zavala that I think is incredibly hard to replace, though Keith David has done a sterling job carrying on his legacy.
Bungie chose David to continue Zavala’s story following Lance’s death while leaving Lance’s existing recorded lines untouched.
I think a lot of what Lance brought to Zavala and the changes the character went through will become even stronger when players are able to experience more of that journey from the beginning again.
I remember hearing online that Lance had died and feeling absolutely broken by it despite never knowing him personally. I immediately wondered how the game would be affected by such a huge loss and whether it would be better to write Zavala out completely.
I think it was handled sensitively, but being true to Our Commander, I don’t think anyone could ever really replace Lance despite how well Keith David is doing.
Zavala feels very different to me now, almost like a new version of the character in his own right. I think that’s probably part of why I didn’t connect with The Final Shape as much as I could have.
Hearing Lance’s voice again in older content makes it feel like the true Zavala is still alive somewhere and Lance with him.
Replaying that old content feels like getting a little more time with him and I’m so glad that part of him hasn’t disappeared.
Another thing I can’t ignore is all of this celebration happening after so many developers lost their jobs.
In July 2024 Bungie cut 220 roles, around 17% of its workforce. Then in June 2026 Sony announced another major reduction affecting most of the Destiny team as well as some Marathon staff. A Washington state filing later put the Bellevue job losses in that 2026 round at 292.
It’s heartbreaking seeing former employees react to the news that campaigns and features they worked on are returning while they themselves aren’t.
They need to be remembered and celebrated too.
Working as a creator and being in contact with people directly affected by those layoffs made it sting even more. Some of them became friends to me as well as people I worked alongside and I’m genuinely angry on their behalf and for the game itself.
This feels like the start of trying to repair some of what happened, but it will never be exactly the same without the people who helped build it.
They were never faceless names to me.
I think it’s very easy to say “Bungie made Destiny 2” and forget that Bungie is hundreds of individual people. Real people with lives, families, problems and pressures of their own.
I can’t imagine how it must feel to leave the game behind, or remain there after watching so many colleagues go, and then see Destiny move from what felt like an ending into this sudden hope of revival.
I think the best way we can remember those people is to enjoy the game they poured so much into without letting the name Bungie become one big faceless entity.
I actually quit and boycotted the game for a while around the layoffs and it took me a long time to come back. Part of what eventually helped was seeing former developers encouraging people to keep enjoying the things they had made.
Now, with so many of those people no longer at the studio, preserving their work somehow feels even more important.
I’d want both former and current staff to know that their work has genuinely changed almost every aspect of my life and I’ll always be grateful for that.
If we’re celebrating Destiny’s history coming home, we should be celebrating the people who made that history too.
WHY BRINGING IT BACK MATTERS
When I heard that Bungie was essentially sunsetting the sunsetting and beginning work on bringing vaulted campaigns, destinations and raids back, I had hope.
Not blind hope.
But hope.
Only a few months earlier, Bungie had announced that June 9, 2026 would bring Destiny 2’s final planned live-service content update and that active development was coming to an end. It really did feel like the end of an era.
Now Bungie’s new leadership is saying something very different: “we are not done with Destiny”, while admitting that removing those experiences damaged player trust. It has promised more details on the restoration work in the months ahead.
It might be coming too late, but I’m willing to give the game another chance with some very reticent hope.
I’m REALLY looking forward to properly returning to Titan if and when it comes back as part of that restoration.
That sci-fi landscape is where I felt most excited in Destiny 2. It was somewhere I could just sit in those sea-green hues and contemplate most things!
We’ve revisited pieces of old places and ideas over the years but Titan, properly, is somewhere I miss massively.
For new players it’s going to feel completely new.
I hope New Lights, or people who simply missed this content, finally understand a bit more about why we love the game so much. Relationships and plot twists might suddenly make more sense when the missing campaigns are actually there to give them some context.
I think characters like Cayde, Zavala, Ikora and Crow will feel entirely different and much deeper.
I’ve done my fair share of carrying people through campaigns but honestly, I’d really like people to play these by themselves and at their own pace.
Treat them more like lore discovery than something to blast through just to tick it off.
Give it its time.
It definitely makes Destiny easier for me to recommend again, but I don’t want to forget who we’ve lost along the way or what it took to get here.
This should have happened much sooner and it’s hard not to still feel bitter about that.
In some ways it feels like closure for Destiny 2. I’m hoping it can be repair and revival in the same breath, while also showing the people making decisions around this universe just how loved Destiny still is and how much people still want a future for it.
It feels like winning one little battle in a much bigger war that’s nowhere near over.
Almost like letting someone back into your life after they’ve been toxic for a while. You still love them but you’re protective of yourself now because you know how much they can hurt you.
No one is beyond forgiveness, but how many times do you let yourself get hurt before you stop trusting them?
Player trust is deeply damaged and I think that hits even harder for those of us who remember all this content being there in the first place.
Even Bungie now acknowledges that removing those experiences had a lasting impact on player trust and enjoyment.
We KNOW what we lost.
Being offered some of it back now can feel a bit like being handed a tidbit when you remember there was a massive steak sitting there before.
Why did it take all of this for us to get it back?
And what happens next?
Part of me still feels like it’s too little too late but I’m reserving SOME hope.
I want Bungie to listen to its playerbase more and learn from how close this game came to feeling dead. I want the people making the decisions to understand why players fought so hard for something they’d spent years loving.
“You had to be there” might get used a little less now, but I don’t think anything can completely recreate what Destiny was like when it was flying high.
You can re-add the content.
You can’t re-add the memories.
You can’t recreate the adventures with REAL people we played with at the time or bring back every developer who was there when those campaigns first released.
You can’t completely recreate the excitement around a new expansion dropping, everyone exploring it at the same time or the seasonal stories building around it.
That part really was something you had to be there for.
I just hope newer players realise there’s so much more to this community than a game.
For a lot of us these weren’t simply campaigns that got removed.
They were parts of our lives.
Destiny will always feel like home to me, even if that home feels a little threatened and unsafe right now.
I’ve cried real big girl tears of happiness AND sadness throughout my time bobbing about underneath the Traveler and somehow I doubt that’s ending today.
I’m sure I’ll be back teaching more New Lights how to play, except this time I might actually have the context to point them towards instead of sending them into a six-hour Byf deep dive.
Sorry Byf.
We still need you though!
For years the answer was always:
You had to be there.
Soon, maybe you won’t have to.