Bungie and Activision have been extremely tight-lipped when it comes to detailing the Annual Pass for “Destiny 2: Forsaken.” Here we are, a week from “Black Armory,” the first new expansion of this second year of “Destiny 2,” and we’re only just now getting the first substantial details about what it will contain.
One thing we did know was that these new expansions would not work the same way that last year’s “Curse of Osiris” and “Warmind” did. There won’t be a story “campaign” to kick things off like we’re used to seeing. So what we’ve been expecting, then, is storytelling akin to what we’ve seen in the Dreaming City over the past three months.
But since the time loop of the Dreaming City turned “Destiny 2” into much more of a living game than it or the first “Destiny” had ever been before, and thus came as quite a shock to pretty much everyone, we really had no idea how that principle might apply to new parts of the game. Will “Black Armory” supplement the story of the Dreaming City and the Taken and Mara Sovv, or is it something else entirely? And given the mechanics for the Dreaming City is so specific to that location — a recurring time loop that resets every three weeks — how would Bungie approach this sort of “live” storytelling when the plot goes elsewhere?
Unfortunately, a lot of the details remain obscure, but we have some idea of how it will work now that Bungie has actually revealed stuff about “Black Armory.” I spoke with “Destiny” community manager David “Deej” Dague about this very topic, and here’s what he told me.
“The Black Armory is not a campaign. It’s a place. It is a source of new rewards, and new forms of power, and new mods for weapons and new armor. It is a place where you will meet Ada-1, who is a new story agent. She is an Exo, and a relic from a lost Golden Age where there was a culture of the Blacksmiths that was founded by three separate families,” Dague said.
“Our goal is to provide [players] with different things to do week over week in the game. And to change that conversation the way we did with the Dreaming City.
“The Black Armory has its own culture for you to learn and understand. It has its own secrets from the Golden Age for you to recover, and add to your collection. You’re gonna learn about the Gunsmiths from the Golden Age from the Norse, French and Japanese lineage. You’re gonna understand, you know, what is Ada-1’s backstory. And that is going to be the experience that we’re setting players up.”
Now, if you’re wondering how this will play into the ongoing story in “Destiny 2” in the Dreaming City and elsewhere, well, Dague told me that it’s really not that simple.
“We’re looking forward to players going in and having a good conversation about the Black Armory independent of some of the other things they may have experienced in the past,” he said.
“It’s not supposed to be a seamless extension. It doesn’t pick up where the Dreaming City story left off. This is new content. It has a similar strategy [to the Dreaming City story], where we’re not releasing a campaign that comes and goes over the matter of a few days.”
When I pressed him on whether “Black Armory” will be picking up some old story thread from “Destiny” lore, Dague replied simply: “It is a new thread.”
Even after dropping a legitimate amount of marketing materials this morning, in the form of an 8-minute video and a calendar, I’d say we still don’t know much of anything about what kind of story we’re in for. But the rollout of the four forges will come relatively quickly — the first two will be out next week, along with the raid, and the remaining two forges will up up and ready within five weeks of the “Black Armory” launch.
And a new exotic quest, which many fans assume will be for the hand cannon The Last Word, starts Jan. 29. The video teased that quest involving the Drifter, so expect some big story nuggets from that, similar to what we got from the Malfeasance quest.
The story itself will be a completely different beast, if the Dreaming City cycle is any indication, but it would seem that we’ll at least have most of the pieces in place by the end of January.