Any theorists available, we have an important new theory coming through, something is not as it seems.
Stand by for coded dispatch. (radio crackle)
Great, better at least get a purple for this one!
(Game Theory Intro Theme)
Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory!
Where, as much of a fan as I am of Peter Dinklage, come on, Tyrion!
Here we go. Let's fight our way into their war base.
The sword is close; I can feel its power. (snoring)
Put a modocome of effort into it!
Bungie, I know for Taken King you got Nolan North, but let it be known that I am always available to take on the mantle of a ghost.
The campaign begins TODAY
#GhostPat
I mean seriously ...
A know-it-all robot?!
It's the part that I was BORN to play!
Anyway, I've been wanting to tackle a Destiny Episode for a while now,
and with Taken King hitting your update queues
the time just seemed right to make a video you can watch while waiting for your Friday raid,
but when it was first released,
not everything was excited loot drop reaction clips.
AWWWW! AWWWW! YESSS! YESSSSS! (banging noises in the background)
Oh no ... (laughs) ... When it first hit store shelves it scored much worse than expected across the board,
and what it really came down to most of the time,
when people weren't flat out cursing Raul the crypt-arch
for his positively nefarious end-grim RNG,
was the game's story, or more accurately it's lack of one.
There was only a handful of cut-scenes and character interactions
spread across the 10 to 15 hours it took to get through the campaign
and if for whatever reason you wanted more story,
you had to actually download a mobile app
or login to the Bungie website to access the grimoire
database entries you unlock throughout the game.
Granted, these kinda reminded me of the type of thing you'd find on a Magic the Gathering card,
but that's not even close to replacement for a proper in game story, now is it?
You know, I'm not even gonna leave that as a hypothetical question.
No. No it is not.
But what if I told you that Destiny's story was better than we all give it credit for?
That hidden deep within the game lies a twist so huge
it turns everything you thought you knew about Destiny right on it's head?
Well hold on to your Gjallarhorns, since you're not gonna want to drop that.
(screams) YESSSSS!!!!
And get ready for a twist that will forever change how you look at this game.
But before we begin,
let's make sure we are all on the same page
since you know, you had to go to a fricking website
to get the story.
Yea, I'm still a little bit salty about that ok?
According to the game, Destiny takes place in our solar system
almost 700 years in the future,
following an event known as The Collapse.
The Collapse heralded the end of a period known as the Golden Age.
An era in time brought about when humanity first met
the mysterious Traveler on Mars.
Even if you know nothing else about Destiny,
you've probably seen the Traveler.
It's that big white sphere that's definitely not a moon,
but kinda looks like a moon.
It's on all the marketing and was actually hinted at way back in Halo: ODST,
which in and of itself is a total mind blow.
Anyway, as we understand it, the Traveler helped humanity along it's way to greatness.
Tera-forming planets and moons and showing them all sorts of new technology
and borderline magic that helped them expand into space
and finally we became the awesome sci-fi space lords
we always knew we'd be someday.
Self-actualization for the win. Suck on that Maslow
and everyone lived happily ever after,
for a while ... DUM DUM DUM! (dramatic percussion)
Remember that Collapse I mentioned before?
See the Traveler emits and channels light
with a capital L because it's magical light, I guess (questioningly)
to do all the magical stuff that it does
but because there can't be Light without there also being Darkness
with another magical capital D.
After a few hundred years that's exactly who showed up a knocking, the Darkness.
"I believe in a thing called love Just listen to the rhythm of my heart .."
and boy was it ever upset.
It blew through the whole solar system,
crushing everything in it's path,
and turned humanity's Golden Age into something that looked a heck of a lot more like Fallout 4.
In a last ditch gamble to save mankind, the Traveler
posted up over Earth, and humanity built their last city right underneath it,
protected by it's light.
The Traveler then became dormant,
but with it's dying breath created those cute little Tyrion Lannister bots known as Ghosts
to revive long dead warriors with the ability to wield Light as a weapon.
These characters are your characters,
and they're called Guardians,
and as you go through the game killing Fallen, Vex, Hive, Kabal
and whatever other evil aliens you run into.
You're also fighting back against the Darkness
as heralds of the Traveler.
In other words, you're the hero ... or are you?
DUM DUM DUM! (dramatic percussion)
Last October on the official Destiny Reddit page
a user known as neocitron posted something he called his crackpot theory.
Based on the fact that while he was sneaking around
doing some patrol missions on the moon,
he ran into a Fallen Dreg,
who just like the Covenant Grunts from Halo,
yell stuff when they get startled,
and in this case, what that Fallen Dreg yelled
caught him off guard.
Here's the clip:
(garbled alien audio)
It sounded to him that the enemy is running away
and shouting The Darkness ... The Darkness
(garbled alien audio)
Now, admittedly, I don't buy it
since the Fallen generally don't speak English,
but who knows maybe Darkness is one of those words that sounds alike regardless of the language.
Those words, fun fact, are called cognates.
Linguistics lessons for the win.
Who says video games don't teach you anything?
Anyway, it was enough to get me interested.
Could Destiny's Guardians actually be a force of Darkness?
Well that just wouldn't make sense right?
I mean, our character comes from the Traveler,
and we know we channel Light because it's all over our menu screens.
I mean in Destiny 2.0, it's light alone that determines whether you level up,
so saying that we're the Darkness might not make sense,
but then again it begs the question,
who's to say that Light with a capital L
is actually good?
I mean we've been conditioned to think Light = good
and Dark = evil, but that might not always be the case.
Think about it! The Traveler, and by proxy his speaker,
aren't required to tell us the truth.
All we really know is that an orb appeared in space,
helped us out a bit, and as a result
we just assumed it was good,
but one thing we never stopped to ask is
what the Traveler got out of helping us.
(gasps) What we're humans
and we just deserve to be helped by an
all powerful interstellar being with no expectation of anything in return?
Sorry! I don't' think so.
The Traveler is like the waitress flirting with you at Hooters.
Sorry Brosef. She's not laughing at your story cause it's funny.
She's just being nice because she wants something from you.
In this case a bigger tip.
(laughs)
Hey, don't be crass ok? This is a family friendly show
and if Mars Attacks has taught us anything,
it's to not trust unexplained things from space.
So in order to solve the mystery we have to figure out
what is the Darkness and what is the Traveler?
Problem is, outside of you know, the story existing on an entirely separate website,
is that it's also super vague.
With all the lore bits written in this cryptic poetry,
and even then they rarely settle on an answer.
For instance, on the grimoire card the Darkness,
several different theories about what exactly the Darkness is are listed.
Evil personified, a tangible alien invasion force,
a necessary symmetry, a post singularity intelligence,
an unknowable enemy?
Yea. Great. Thanks for really narrowing it down Bungie.
But of all these theories, it's the last one that leaves me the most intrigued.
"Certain positions, often labeled heretical,
imply that the Traveler itself
triggered the Collapse,
or that it knew the Darkness was coming for it
and it hoped to use the solar system as a sacrifice or a proxy army."
HMMMMM ... what an oddly specific detail to include.
Maybe this crackpot theory isn't so cracked as neocitron thought ...
so I kept digging.
Before I move on to the next paragraph, quick spoiler alert for Destiny's main campaign, Destiny 1.0.
Not like there's much there anyway.
Take a look at this. (cat screech)
This is the Black Garden, the final destination for Destiny's original campaign,
A location that exists in a pocket dimension outside of time.
It's the birthplace of the Vex.
A race of super advanced time-traveling robots
that can simulate the entire universe, including themselves,
and all possible outcomes within their own minds,
and people said Destiny's lore was complicated.
Digging through more grimoire cards
revealed Legend: The Black Garden,
and a weird little story from a Guardian named Pujari:
"I walked beneath the blossoms
at the end of the path grew a flower in the shape of a Ghost.
I reached out to pluck it and it cut me with a thorn.
I bled and the blood was Light.
The ghost said to me.
You are a dead thing, made by a dead power, in the shape of the dead.
All you will ever do is kill.
You do not belong here.
This is a place of life.
The Traveler is life, I said.
You are a creature of darkness.
You seek to deceive me,
but I looked behind me down the long slope
where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind
and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine
and I felt doubt.
When my Ghost raised me from the sea there was a thorn cut in my left hand
and it has not healed since."
What we can take away from Pujari's story is his doubt.
As a Guardian, he's a warrior of the Light
of the Traveler who represents life,
but when he says this to the Ghost in his vision,
he's suddenly struck with doubt,
and at this point it's probably worth reiterating,
Guardians, the characters you play as in Destiny,
are reanimated corpses
brought back to life by the Traveler's Light
carried in Ghosts.
Yea that's not sinister at all, right?
Like the vision says, Pujari and other Guardians
are dead things made by a dead power in the shape of the dead.
As a result, we're led to believe that we can trust what
the Ghost in the vision says,
that the Black Garden, home of the enemy,
is a place of life, and that Guardians are only meant to kill.
It's an interesting juxtaposition.
The Traveler and his Guardians of the Dead
Versus the Black Garden
which represents true life, growth, a garden of blossoms and trees,
but that's not the only time we see Guardians cast in a fairly negative light.
One of the fragments labeled Legends is from the persepctive of a Guardian.
In it, there's this quote,
"The people we work with and the people we see in the street,
and the people we tell about our dreams.
We kill them all. I think because we were made to kill,
and this is the part of us that thinks about nothing else.
Often I kill people I don't know,
but like most of us I think I knew them once,
in the time before one reset or another
when my mind was younger and less terribly scarred."
Guardians here are portrayed as mindless killing machines,
destroying indiscriminately.
Light or no, good guys
usually have some greater purpose you know?
But the Guardians kill mindlessly to protect the Traveler.
I mean look at the lead up to the final battle with the Vex
at the end of Destiny's first campaign.
You fight your way through the Black Garden,
only to confront a room of Vex,
peacefully praying, and what you're told by Dinklebot
Carrier of the Traveler's Light is that you're about to kill their god.
(robotic voice) Think you can kill a god?
(female voice answers) Don't think I have a choice.
Ok, so let's pause right there.
Let me ask you Destiny players,
why are you about to do this?
After the battle we are told that Light flows back to the Traveler,
but again who is he? What does he stand for?
You don't know! You just killed a race's god
for a reason you can't comprehend.
That my friend, is not hero behavior right there,
and in case you still have doubt,
here's another quote, this time from the lore fragment labeled "Fate of Skolas."
"While the other houses fought for their future on Earth
throwing themselves at the Great Machine,
Skolas wasted his people in games of betrayal and ambition.
Everything wants to kill his people,
the machines and the militants and the green eyed Hive
The dead soldiers that hoard the Great Machine
and come out crusading to wipe all hope away ..."
Guardians are the dead soldiers,
and again we hear about them killing indiscriminately in the hope of wiping out races,
but what's most important to note here
is that the Great Machine
is another name for the Traveler.
That is a huge revelation.
Why? Well prepare to have your mind blown
because the Great Machine is referenced only one other time in the lore,
in the grimoire card Variks the Loyal.
Now, Variks is a Fallen, one of the primary enemy alien races in the game.
Here is the quote,
"First, the Great Machine.
Then sky fell away. Whirlwind ripped away the past.
All honor lost. All hope ...
Now at war. Fight for system."
Let me spell this out for you.
The enemy race in the game,
the one now fighting against the Traveler
at one time had the Traveler on their side.
Oh and that whirlwind mentioned in the card
is a moment in the Fallen's history where all their past was wiped away.
No one can remember what exactly came before,
and afterward they were forced into a nomadic lifestyle.
Huh, sound familiar?
Like say maybe the Collapse of humanity?
Which once again came after the Traveler visited the planet.
Now of course we don't get specifics,
but for the Traveler to visit a planet
only to have that planet fall to ruin shortly afterward
and then have the survivors seek revenge against it,
and then to have the whole scenario seem to repeat again with humanity.
Yea. Definitely not what you would think about when it comes to a good force,
but enough digging through arcane lore veiled in poetry.
The true proof comes from the people who worked on the game.
On Reddit, an anonymous contributor who participated
in a Destiny Beta test from early 2013
broke their NDA and revealed exactly what we've suspected,
and if there's any doubt to the validity of this,
it was actually removed once because of legal issues
and was re-posted again because you know it's the internet.
According to his report,
a character was originally meant to reveal to you
the the Traveler and it's Speaker were not to be trusted.
That the Traveler was responsible for the Collapse of the Golden Age,
and that the Darkness is actually a by product of the Traveler
who turned humanity's technology against itself,
destroying us.
Your character was meant to get recruited to prevent the Traveler from being resurrected,
and there you have it.
There's your Traveler, the one you're fighting for,
your guiding Light in humanity's darkest hour,
nothing but a giant planet sized liar and traitor to the entire human race.
Admittedly the game changed drastically after that Beta,
losing one of it's main writers and design directors,
but from the lore bits and pieces we've seen today
the truth is still hidden in there,
waiting to be revealed.
Maybe we'll never actually see the Traveler betray us
or maybe Bungie's saving their big reveal for another meaty piece of DLC down the road.
Still, whatever the case may be,
I'll bet you'll be looking at that big
solemn sphere in the sky just a little bit differently from now on.
(dramatic music)
But HEY! That's just a theory ... a GAME THEORY!
Thanks for watching!
Welcome back to the SUPER AMAZING END CARD TOURNAMENT!
Where today I just want to know,
was I able to convince you?
Do you think the Traveler is still the good guy,
or are you suspicious about his motivations?
Could the Traveler truly be a force of evil
and if you do think that he's evil do you think this is a plot line
that they're still gonna go through with,
or is this just gonna be buried under all the writing changes?
Click on one to choose to cast your vote,
or if you're on mobile or tablet
click on the links in the description to cast your vote,
and all of you get taken back to the channel page
where if you haven't subscribed yet,
I highly encourage you to do so.
We have a lot of awesome theories coming out between now and the end of the year.
It is busy. Theories on Assassin's Creed, Halo, FNAF, Zelda, Fallout and a whole lot more,
so get excited! I am staying busy
so that way you guys are over analyzing
all of your favorite games all the time
between now and the end of the year,
and while you're out there catch up on all the Game Theories you may have missed!
Or the other shows, or Film Theory,
or GTLIVE.
There is so much stuff happening right now it is crazy!
I hope you're enjoying it.
I'm enjoying making it for you guys.
It's a lot of work,
but it's awesome cause you guys are responding so enthusiastically,
so as long as you guys are enjoying it,
I'm gonna keep producing it for you,
so thank you all as always for your support
and in the meantime remember one more time ...
It's just a Theory ... a GAME THEORY!
Thank you guys for watching!