Writing about Destiny 2 is always a touchy thing – do you try to explain things in a way that makes sense to non-players, or do you go straight into the Space Silmarillion? Today we’re going for the latter: a recent datamine hints that we’ll soon revisit the Cosmodrome in Old Russia – the first area from the original Destiny.
Said datamine has unearthed several voice lines recently added to the Destiny 2 client, apparently with the patch that initiated the in-universe Halloween event, Festival of the Lost. GamesRadar+ reports on redditors who have discovered the voice lines for Amanda Holliday, the Tower’s mechanic and now the organiser of the Fesitval.
In one, Holliday says “That’s where your ghost found you, right?” The original Destiny began with your ghost resurrecting you for the first time in the Cosmodrome, so she’s clearly referencing it here. But in the second line she makes it explicit: “This might be the last time you ever set foot in the Cosmodrome.”
I’m sure many of our gentle readers have played and enjoyed the first Destiny, but I’m also sure that many of you are like me and only got into this weird world when the sequel launched on PC. That makes navigating the game’s embedded lore a bit confusing.
Given the time at which the voice lines were added to the game, and their speaker, GamesRadar+ makes the reasonable assumption that our return to the Cosmodrome is linked to the festival. The festival is live now and we’ve yet to return to Old Russia, but the event will have a second stage – for the first time, according to our resident Destiny lore wizard Rich. Bungie has said its final week will see the murder of Master Ives, the Reef’s Cryptarch, and give players a quest to pursue his killer. Rich thinks we could see players head to a small instance of the Cosmodrome as part of that quest – it’s vanishingly unlikely that the whole area would be restored for a mere seasonal event.
Rich the Grey also points out that while Bungie has specified “no new planets” as part of its DLC for the coming year, reintroducing the Cosmodrome isn’t technically adding anything “new” to Destiny. Thus if it doesn’t conclude the Festival of the Lost, it could return as part of that DLC in some form (Bungie mentions ‘bubble’ locations, whatever that means), but that would be a surprise given that a return to Oryx’s Dreadnaught has been much more strongly hinted, and would fit better with the current story.