You Should Watch Destiny 2’s Amazing New Cutscene, Even If You’ve Left

Destiny 2 never fails to perplex me in terms of its storytelling decisions, like dropping what was probably the more important lore reveal in game history in an inkblot cutscene halfway through Season of the Deep, or revealing Savathun survived her cutscene-shown death in a radio message. Now? Here in Act 2 of Episode 3, Heresy, Bungie has released one of its best cutscenes ever.

Perhaps not best from a story perspective, but best in terms of its overall production quality in a game that mostly has to do story beats through in-game dialogue or more non-cinematic cutscenes like the inkblot ones. Not like this.

It’s hard to find a fully “clean” copy of this, but this one has it, and it starts at 2:05 in the video. It does, obviously, contain some spoilers up to present day.

The cutscene slashes through the past and present of the Hive God pantheon, which has a dead Oryx quasi-returned and now interested in us, his killers. Savathun is trying to ditch Hive history of worm-infestation as she now has the Light. Xivu Arath we finally see in full as she tries to grab all remaining power for herself in the post-witness era. Eris, as of this episode, was killed by the Dread, but still lives due to her own Throne World, where now she’s more powerful than she’s ever been. Well, except for that one time she became a literal Hive God for a while.

Bungie was in fact right when they said the longer Episodic format would allow them to do things like more cutscenes, and here we are, with one of its best-ever plopped down right in the middle of an Episode. Can they keep this up? Well, the problem is that since this cutscene was likely made, Bungie has seen more layoffs, departures or transitions to Sony. In addition to that, Axios Studios has shut down, a key partner for many studios, but especially Destiny 2’s cinematics. So it’s unclear if we’ll see things this “peak” again.

Perhaps we will get a crazy finale cutscene as this is the dawn of the new Frontiers era as Heresy ends. Or maybe one to start it, I don’t know. But even with its ups and downs, it’s pretty clear that sometimes, Destiny’s still got it.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.