Random Access Mutterings: Light In The Abyss

All over game news sites like Gamesradar and Kotaku, there's been an interview making the rounds that director Luke Smith over at Bungie is admitting that the team didn't know what the hell the vaguely named force known as The Darkness was in Destiny.  Smith is quoted thusly:

"So, I think that at a point, just totally candidly? We had no idea what it was. Straight up. We had no clue."

In some respects, it's not hard to accept this particular assertion.  Players who made their way through the first year of Destiny definitely complained about the lack of cohesive story elements.  Even the Grimoire was incredibly vague as to the nature of The Darkness, even going so far as put forth the multiple theories (within the game lore) as to what it might be.  It's perhaps understandable that the hot take here is "Bungie finally admits they didn't know what they were doing!"

But looked at another way, I suspect that there has been some degree of loss in communication.  As weird as it sounds, and it's the sort of scenario that can only happen in game development, the director may well be cut off from (or at least constrained in talking to) the guys doing all the story creation and lore writing.  The first thing which suggests this is that Luke Smith was the guy doing the directing chores on "The Taken King."  And really, there was probably more cohesion of story and lore in that expansion than pretty much anything that came before or since for the first game's entire run.  For those who played through it the second year, you got a very good look up close and personal look at the Hive, and the Books of Sorrow Grimoire cards helped tell an engaging mythopoeic story.  For Luke Smith to be completely ignorant of that work while he was serving as director, while plausible to an extent, strains credulity when you think about it after more than a second or two.

The second thing to keep in mind is that while Luke Smith may have said that they want to be telling a story about the Light, that slippery and ill defined force that seems to exist underneath the fabric of the reality we can physically perceive, he also mentioned that they are not completely giving up or removing the Darkness (or its presence) from the game entirely.  The Kotaku Split Screen podcast where Smith talks about Destiny 2 has Smith saying this:

“Because when we’re going to talk about Darkness next, we need to know what it is and have a plan for it. And we do.”

Admittedly, the more pessimistic and conspiracy minded of us might see echoes of the title cards from Ronald D. Moore's version of Battlestar Galactica, where it was constantly promised that the Cyclons "have a plan."  The timing of Moore's revelation that no, there really wasn't a plan, might cause some gamers to take Smith's words with an unhealthy degree of skepticism.

I think that, ultimately, Destiny 2's first year is going to be the equivalent of a sports team's "rebuilding year."  They know that they have all these story elements laying around from the first game that have generated questions without answers.  They know that there are places from the first game which we'd like to know more about in light of the second game's storyline.  I suspect that, if history is any indicator, players will find themselves confronting that stygian and ill-understood force once more.  And this time, they will be given the chance to truly know their enemy.