spoiler
- The Witness was once an entire species
- They discovered the Traveler buried on their home planet.
- The Traveler uplifted their civilization and basically they got bored and needed purpose.
- This led them to seek out The Veil. They built the pyramid ships to search for the Veil.
- The Veil is the Darkness equivalent of the Traveler. Not the pyramid ships.
- The Witness saw the light as a chaotic force to be tamed and tried to use the darkness/Veil to tame it and create the final shape.
- Traveler said nope and began running.
- The Witness’ race mass suicided and used the Darkness to combine their consciousness into what we know as The Witness.
- All the crumbling statues around the pyramids are the remains of its species.
Some pretty dark stuff with the origins of the Witness. I don’t think it’s quite clear what the final shape is yet.
Absolutely wild realizing what all those chopped-up-ppl statues in the pyramids are, and what the pyramids are.
Can you enlighten me quickly? I guess I forgot already …
Spoiler tag doesn’t seem to work in the preview. Whoops!
Sorry for responding late, finally got a chance to play this week. Love the cutscene, the whole dynamic of the Witness being this unified obsession. A collection of thoughts that are hell bent to force their ideas onto the physical plane of the universe. All cause they are certain that all existence will end up suffering like them in the end… Great story ☺️
More lore than the entirety of Lightfall lol
Yeah. I question their decision to tell the story over the entire year instead of giving it to us in Lightfall. This cutscene feels more planned out than the Strand aspect quest though, which felt more like cut campaign content that was slapped together.
I think they’re looking at seasonal storytelling the wrong way. The Beyond Light seasons are peak destiny imo because they tell a coherent and exciting story across all the seasons about Savathun possessing Osiris and infiltrating the tower and manipulating everyone. None of that is really related to the Beyond Light campaign. It’s entirely separate.
That’s what they need to do. Lightfall needed to tell a story that mostly resolved by the end of the campaign and explained the big things. The seasons could then tell a cohesive story of how we fight back against the shadow legion on earth and on Neomuna, and on learning more about portal on the traveler.
I can totally get behind telling a story over the entire year. The problem is they didn’t bother with a story that would do well doled out in parts. Instead they went “Let’s just return to D1 poorly explained mcguffins and then we can explain it later!” which backfired horribly.
MyNameIsByf put out a vid on it today with I think valid criticism. His main points:
- The content of the story and the actual story are not bad. (I agree, otherwise I wouldn’t have posted it)
- The delivery of the story beats is bad.
- The conscious decision to exclude this from Lightfall was a bad decision. (Season 21 was all but finished before Lightfall shipped)
- This cutscene should have been in Lightfall and probably would have saved the narrative.
Great video for sure. Yeah the actual story revealed is fine. I don’t care that the Veil is still largely mysterious because we’ve given it the context where that mystery doesn’t matter as much – it’s the darkness analogue to the traveller. It seems to be singular, gives out(?) darkness powers. There’s still plenty of mystery (wtf are the traveller and the veil? are they sentient in any way? we’ve seen some signs of it from the traveller but nothing I’d call definitive yet, as examples), but we understand where the veil sits in the story and why we needed to prevent the Witness from geting in there (OOPS!)
This season has been huge with the lore drops. First Xivu Arath shows up in the very first mission, and the continues playing a huge role throughout. And now this. Absolutely mesmerizing lore and I can’t wait to hear what all the lore scholars talk about in the coming days and weeks! I’m also excited to see what happens next week as it seems like we’ll learn how to enter the portal.
