Destiny is obsessed with a lot of things.
1970s sci fi.
Guns with really weird names.
Icons. Icons. ICONS.
And Orbs.
Glowing, hovering, and completely inscrutable orbs.
From bubble bobbles to baffling spheres, video games are rolling in orbs.
But Destiny’s infatuation is unique. You’ve got everything from glowing balls of incomprehensible energy,
to a giant God-like sphere that hovers over the last city on Earth
and 99% of Destiny’s marketing material.
Orbs permeate the gameplay, aesthetics, and lore of the series.
But...why?
Humanity’s fascination with inscrutable orbs extends well beyond video games.
Google “mysterious orb” and you’ll find page after page of phantom spheres captured by
low res security cameras.
The orb came and went for hours.
Sure, these can be explained away as glare, or dust on the lens,
or distant car lights or rocket launches or weather balloons
but the point is, there’s something about them that we find alluring.
It’s why a floating sphere is such a tempting object in video games: when we see an orb
we must have it. Or at the very least, understand its arcane nature.
Bungie knows that, and they're exceptionally good at helping us understand what something means...
when they want to.
Even something as simple as the game’s icons.
Ryan Klaverweide was the Visual Design Lead on Destiny 2, so he knows a thing or two about iconography.
Arc looks like this and if anyone uses
this icon, you should know that that means arc something....
I tried to definitely institute graphic design principles that you would use on, like, a corporate branding guide,
and then apply those to a video game.
This branding guide approach allows them to communicate a lot of information with just
a simple set of shapes. For example, there’s a new helmet in the latest expansion that
gives the Hunter class a teleportation ability it hasn’t had since the first Destiny.
By slightly riffing on the original icon, they can explain this new ability without using
any words.
That was always huge. Can I make one set of iconography or one set of ideas that means
a lot to this game and it exists in this world.
The first time you see Destiny’s menu it might as well be written in hieroglyphics.
But thanks to the extremely intentional and holistic symbols, you quickly come to understand
what all those icons mean as you go about your daily chores I mean quests.
And that saves you time because it helps connect all these disparate concepts.
Bungie knows how powerful iconography, which begs the question: what’s the deal with all these orbs?
We are left with no choice but to study each of these perplexing spheres,
from the smallest ball of energy to the iconic Traveler,
in order to discover, what is the real meaning behind them?
That means we’ve got a lot of balls to get through, so first, let’s start with the ones you
can pick up and caress like a sweet babe…
and then slam dunk.
Whether it’s fusion cores, lamp orbs, glowing relics, or void charges, when you pick up
a crackling ball of energy in Destiny there’s pretty much only one thing you’re gonna
do with it:
Slam jam it into the ground so hard it explodes.
Sure, they have different explanations in the lore:
Deactivate this shield barrier!
Disrupt the ritual!
Ignite the lamps!
Charge the generator!
Use your hands to pick up the energy!
But the end result is still gonna be taking a ball and smashing into something.
Or just bouncing it off your head for fun weeeee!
This summer, Bungie added an exotic beam cannon this summer, The Ruinous Effigy, which turns a regular
match of destiny into an explosive slam dunk competition.
You can find hundreds of Ruinous Effigy dunking compilations on YouTube because
IT. NEVER. GETS. OLD.
Now, now, now, it might sound like dunking is an overused mechanic in Destiny, but that’s not the case.
In fact, Bungie might be the only developer out there that understands that
the appropriate amount of slam dunks in a video game
is always MORE.
However, these are actually some of the most scrutable orbs in Destiny.
They’re basically just glowing basketballs.
Though I should point out how jarring it was to find an ACTUAL basketball
in the new Beyond Light expansion, which you ironically can’t dunk with.
That takes care of the orbs you can hold and touch, but what about all those orbs in your inventory?
There was a point in time, I think it was around D2, it was around D2-ish,
where I said to her, I was, like,
"we can't keep making circles." Everything's a circle. Everything's a ball, like everything, every currency, every you
know, quest item, is a ball a glowing ball or metal ball.
Like a bottle of Orbitz, destiny’s inventory will always inexplicably include some orbs.
When Bungie put a bunch of content into cold storage with the latest expansion, a lot of these orbs disappeared,
likely forever. But does that mean they stopped adding spherical items to the inventory?
No, of course not.
The “herealways” is a brand new type of currency that comes from the Fallen. To understand
why this alien race might use a ball as currency, you need to understand their relationship
with the “Traveler”.
Before this big mysterious ball ever hovered over Earth, it graced the Fallen with a technological
golden age. They worshipped it like a God, and eventually began crafting items in its
image – like these hyper intelligent ball machines.
Servitors became an important part of the Fallen’s social hierarchy, even after the Traveler left them for Earth.
Which is to say that,
sometimes a really big Servitor is the boss at the end of a level.
In real life, orbs have a long history of religious symbolism. Ancient Greeks and Romans
depicted their gods holding these abstract and unnatural objects. Later, Christians put
a cross on it, called it a ‘globus cruciger’ and used it to symbolize the divine right
of Christ (and Christian monarchs) over the Earth (which I should remind you, is an orb.)
If humans did it, then it stands to reason that the Fallen might have too,
which seems pretty scrutable to me.
And they might not have been the only ones.
You can find Vex spheres all over semi-machine world Nessus. The Vex are a race of highly
intelligent robots capable of simulating and therefore predicting the future.
So... why are they carving big stone orbs?
The simple answer is, we don’t know! Because this guy is the universes foremost expert on the Vex.
Ah, the Vex gate at the center of the lake!
What lake!?
So I’m just gonna call these Vex orbs middling-scrutable. They might be super important in the lore,
but you can’t interact with them, so who really cares.
A plant unsupported by any data!
So vex orbs are vexing… what about when you take on the Taken?
By the way, love these names Bungie, keep up the great work.
Any time you encounter this interdimensional shadow race, there will probably be some impenetrable
‘blight’ domes alongside them. Sometimes they’re even accompanied by a giant, pulsating
black orb floating in the sky. The blight domes protect any Taken inside of them, forcing
you to enter their inhospitable environs to destroy their glowing orbital core.
Look, I don’t understand how the Taken “work” any better than I understand how gravity "works",
but I do know gravity pulls everything in our universe into spherical shapes,
whether it's stars or planets or globs of water.
I wish I could say that insight is helpful to understanding
why the Taken blight is shaped this way, but for that you’d need a physicist to answer that,
and they still haven’t united the theory of gravity and quantum relativity into a universal
“theory of everything”. Are they even trying!?
Look, I'm just gonna take a page out of their book and say that The taken blight is ‘theoretically’ scrutable.
(Screaming)
The last enemy-related orb I’ll be looking at is the Hive Shrieker. As the name implies,
these things love to scream and I hate them and they are no mystery to me.
They look like a flaming purple eyeball, probably because according to the lore they’re scouts for
powerful Hive wizards. Did I mention this sci fi game has wizards? Anyway, weird eyeballs
have kinda been a thing in Destiny 2 lately.
Earlier this year these strange orbs known as “Savathun’s Eyes” appeared all over
the solar system. We also got a new special dungeon called Prophecy
(which I should note was chock full of inscrutable orbs)
that ended with you meeting this giant blue person whose
eyeballs look exactly the same as “Savathun's Eyes”. The only problem? That ain’t Savathun.
How can I scrute these orbs?
If these matching orbs aren’t just a case of reused art assets, it’s potentially a
huge deal for Destiny’s lore.
It’s like if the Game of Thrones audience discovered
the Night King was actually working for the Iron Bank of Braavos the whole time because
he forgot to take off his employee name tag.
This is the thing that really gets me about Destiny’s orb fixation.
Even if you find some plausible explanation for there being yet another sphere in the game,
it’s still going to be baffling in some other way.
Take the game’s soundtrack. It’s called the Music of the Sphere’s. Hmmm, why is that?
Well they tell us it’s a reference to the ancient cosmological philosophy Musica Universalis,
which posits that the movement of the heavenly bodies is a form of music!
Well that's just super! But then how do you explain THIS
"singing" Some hope for the future, Some wait for the call. "singing"
And look, there it is again! Destiny’s largest, and therefore, most mysterious orb, the Traveler!
Look, if you don’t know what this things all about, let me give you a really quick summary.
This absolute unit arrived in our solar system and did lots of dope godly shit, but then
the Darkness showed up and harshed the vibe. The traveler totally did us a solid and kicked
the darkness out, but then it had to chill on doing god stuff for a while.
But not before it made a bunch of humans into space wizards. Nice!
Now whenever players do cool space wizard stuff in game, they generate little “orbs of light”
that their bros can use to charge up their wizards powers.
It’s why the aftermath of destiny combat often looks like someone busted open the Chuck e Cheese ball pit.
This is what makes the Traveler is integral to Destiny’s lore, and the whole reason humanity has survived so long
in such an inhospitable universe.
But we still don’t why it does these or what it is,
making it the most inscrutable orb in all of Destiny.
But I do think the Traveler’s shape is central to why Destiny is so orb happy.
Like, let's say the traveller was a triangle since the beginning. It probably would mean a lot
of triangles in Destiny, not circles.\
When you start from the traveler and everything kind of extrapolates from there graphically and visually,
you end up with a lot of circles, and radiating orbs, and things like that.
So why isn’t the Traveler a big triangle?
It likely has something to do with shape language.
This is the design concept that certain shapes can inform story, mood, or tone.
You see it all the time in animation – round characters are friendly and approachable, while angular
characters are aggressive or dangerous.
But animation it's usually a little more subtle than it is in Destiny,
where the Traveler AKA the “good God” is a BIG BALL
and the Darkness AKA the “bad God” is a BIG TRIANGLE.
And just like the Traveler has those little Orbs of Light, the Darkness has little triangular Motes of Darkness.
Okay, so that might explain the design reasons behind these shapes, but what about in game?
What’s the narrative purpose?
Well clearly these shapes have meaning. Not just that; they are sacred.
And what ancient concept proscribes symbolic, sacred meaning to certain geometric shapes?
A philosophy that can be traced directly back to Musica Universalis? By none other than
mister I-fucking-love-angles, Pythagoras? And also just so happens to be a
“guiding pillar” of Destiny’s graphic design?
SACRED! GEOMETRY!
It’s all right there, in the menus! These orbs are all part of a grand design.
A design that still leaves us wondering why...
But...what if there isn’t a why? What if there’s just an... “is”?
Let’s take one more step back:
Another big concept in Destiny is “paracausality,”
the ability to make something happen simply by willing it. Or as the Destiny wiki helpfully describes it:
“magic”.
The Traveler’s light is “paracausal”, which means that
all the Guardians in the game are “paracausal” as well. In essence… one of the greatest
powers in the game is the player’s will. In Destiny, guardians literally have the ability to
“make their own fate,”.
So whatever “caused” all these inscrutable orbs is irrelevant. What’s matters is
the effect, which is a beguiling mystery we can’t help but obsess over…
and make YouTube videos about.
When it comes to a question like “what is the Traveler”, giving an
answer would probably do more harm than good.
And this is as a fan, not an employee,
Like, I think as soon as you answer the Traveler question Destiny’s over, like,
what happens after that, you know? I think they wanted to, you know, not do the midichlorians thing and
leave some things like completely open and like, just let you wonder forever what that is.
It’s not that “we’ll never know” what these orbs are all about.
It’s that not knowing is the point.
The Force was more alluring when it wasn’t described as a biological function.
Any description of what the Traveler actually is will never be as satisfying as
what you might imagine.
I can pontificate about perplexing spheres all day long – and you know I would – but
what these orbs actually mean is up to you.
Because in Destiny, you can make your own fate.
And then slam dunk it.