Any theorists available, we have an important new theory coming through, something is not as it seems. Stand by for coded dispatch. (radio crackle) Great, better at least get a purple for this one! (Game Theory Intro Theme) Hello Internet! Welcome to Game Theory! Where, as much of a fan as I am of Peter Dinklage, come on, Tyrion! Here we go. Let's fight our way into their war base. The sword is close; I can feel its power. (snoring) Put a modocome of effort into it! Bungie, I know for Taken King you got Nolan North, but let it be known that I am always available to take on the mantle of a ghost. The campaign begins TODAY #GhostPat I mean seriously ... A know-it-all robot?! It's the part that I was BORN to play! Anyway, I've been wanting to tackle a Destiny Episode for a while now, and with Taken King hitting your update queues the time just seemed right to make a video you can watch while waiting for your Friday raid, but when it was first released, not everything was excited loot drop reaction clips. AWWWW! AWWWW! YESSS! YESSSSS! (banging noises in the background) Oh no ... (laughs) ... When it first hit store shelves it scored much worse than expected across the board, and what it really came down to most of the time, when people weren't flat out cursing Raul the crypt-arch for his positively nefarious end-grim RNG, was the game's story, or more accurately it's lack of one. There was only a handful of cut-scenes and character interactions spread across the 10 to 15 hours it took to get through the campaign and if for whatever reason you wanted more story, you had to actually download a mobile app or login to the Bungie website to access the grimoire database entries you unlock throughout the game. Granted, these kinda reminded me of the type of thing you'd find on a Magic the Gathering card, but that's not even close to replacement for a proper in game story, now is it? You know, I'm not even gonna leave that as a hypothetical question. No. No it is not. But what if I told you that Destiny's story was better than we all give it credit for? That hidden deep within the game lies a twist so huge it turns everything you thought you knew about Destiny right on it's head? Well hold on to your Gjallarhorns, since you're not gonna want to drop that. (screams) YESSSSS!!!! And get ready for a twist that will forever change how you look at this game. But before we begin, let's make sure we are all on the same page since you know, you had to go to a fricking website to get the story. Yea, I'm still a little bit salty about that ok? According to the game, Destiny takes place in our solar system almost 700 years in the future, following an event known as The Collapse. The Collapse heralded the end of a period known as the Golden Age. An era in time brought about when humanity first met the mysterious Traveler on Mars. Even if you know nothing else about Destiny, you've probably seen the Traveler. It's that big white sphere that's definitely not a moon, but kinda looks like a moon. It's on all the marketing and was actually hinted at way back in Halo: ODST, which in and of itself is a total mind blow. Anyway, as we understand it, the Traveler helped humanity along it's way to greatness. Tera-forming planets and moons and showing them all sorts of new technology and borderline magic that helped them expand into space and finally we became the awesome sci-fi space lords we always knew we'd be someday. Self-actualization for the win. Suck on that Maslow and everyone lived happily ever after, for a while ... DUM DUM DUM! (dramatic percussion) Remember that Collapse I mentioned before? See the Traveler emits and channels light with a capital L because it's magical light, I guess (questioningly) to do all the magical stuff that it does but because there can't be Light without there also being Darkness with another magical capital D. After a few hundred years that's exactly who showed up a knocking, the Darkness. "I believe in a thing called love
Just listen to the rhythm of my heart .." and boy was it ever upset. It blew through the whole solar system, crushing everything in it's path, and turned humanity's Golden Age into something that looked a heck of a lot more like Fallout 4. In a last ditch gamble to save mankind, the Traveler posted up over Earth, and humanity built their last city right underneath it, protected by it's light. The Traveler then became dormant, but with it's dying breath created those cute little Tyrion Lannister bots known as Ghosts to revive long dead warriors with the ability to wield Light as a weapon. These characters are your characters, and they're called Guardians, and as you go through the game killing Fallen, Vex, Hive, Kabal and whatever other evil aliens you run into. You're also fighting back against the Darkness as heralds of the Traveler. In other words, you're the hero ... or are you? DUM DUM DUM! (dramatic percussion) Last October on the official Destiny Reddit page a user known as neocitron posted something he called his crackpot theory. Based on the fact that while he was sneaking around doing some patrol missions on the moon, he ran into a Fallen Dreg, who just like the Covenant Grunts from Halo, yell stuff when they get startled, and in this case, what that Fallen Dreg yelled caught him off guard. Here's the clip: (garbled alien audio) It sounded to him that the enemy is running away and shouting The Darkness ... The Darkness (garbled alien audio) Now, admittedly, I don't buy it since the Fallen generally don't speak English, but who knows maybe Darkness is one of those words that sounds alike regardless of the language. Those words, fun fact, are called cognates. Linguistics lessons for the win. Who says video games don't teach you anything? Anyway, it was enough to get me interested. Could Destiny's Guardians actually be a force of Darkness? Well that just wouldn't make sense right? I mean, our character comes from the Traveler, and we know we channel Light because it's all over our menu screens. I mean in Destiny 2.0, it's light alone that determines whether you level up, so saying that we're the Darkness might not make sense, but then again it begs the question, who's to say that Light with a capital L is actually good? I mean we've been conditioned to think Light = good and Dark = evil, but that might not always be the case. Think about it! The Traveler, and by proxy his speaker, aren't required to tell us the truth. All we really know is that an orb appeared in space, helped us out a bit, and as a result we just assumed it was good, but one thing we never stopped to ask is what the Traveler got out of helping us. (gasps) What we're humans and we just deserve to be helped by an all powerful interstellar being with no expectation of anything in return? Sorry! I don't' think so. The Traveler is like the waitress flirting with you at Hooters. Sorry Brosef. She's not laughing at your story cause it's funny. She's just being nice because she wants something from you. In this case a bigger tip. (laughs) Hey, don't be crass ok? This is a family friendly show and if Mars Attacks has taught us anything, it's to not trust unexplained things from space. So in order to solve the mystery we have to figure out what is the Darkness and what is the Traveler? Problem is, outside of you know, the story existing on an entirely separate website, is that it's also super vague. With all the lore bits written in this cryptic poetry, and even then they rarely settle on an answer. For instance, on the grimoire card the Darkness, several different theories about what exactly the Darkness is are listed. Evil personified, a tangible alien invasion force, a necessary symmetry, a post singularity intelligence, an unknowable enemy? Yea. Great. Thanks for really narrowing it down Bungie. But of all these theories, it's the last one that leaves me the most intrigued. "Certain positions, often labeled heretical, imply that the Traveler itself triggered the Collapse, or that it knew the Darkness was coming for it and it hoped to use the solar system as a sacrifice or a proxy army." HMMMMM ... what an oddly specific detail to include. Maybe this crackpot theory isn't so cracked as neocitron thought ... so I kept digging. Before I move on to the next paragraph, quick spoiler alert for Destiny's main campaign, Destiny 1.0. Not like there's much there anyway. Take a look at this. (cat screech) This is the Black Garden, the final destination for Destiny's original campaign, A location that exists in a pocket dimension outside of time. It's the birthplace of the Vex. A race of super advanced time-traveling robots that can simulate the entire universe, including themselves, and all possible outcomes within their own minds, and people said Destiny's lore was complicated. Digging through more grimoire cards revealed Legend: The Black Garden, and a weird little story from a Guardian named Pujari: "I walked beneath the blossoms at the end of the path grew a flower in the shape of a Ghost. I reached out to pluck it and it cut me with a thorn. I bled and the blood was Light. The ghost said to me. You are a dead thing, made by a dead power, in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life. The Traveler is life, I said. You are a creature of darkness. You seek to deceive me, but I looked behind me down the long slope where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine and I felt doubt. When my Ghost raised me from the sea there was a thorn cut in my left hand and it has not healed since." What we can take away from Pujari's story is his doubt. As a Guardian, he's a warrior of the Light of the Traveler who represents life, but when he says this to the Ghost in his vision, he's suddenly struck with doubt, and at this point it's probably worth reiterating, Guardians, the characters you play as in Destiny, are reanimated corpses brought back to life by the Traveler's Light carried in Ghosts. Yea that's not sinister at all, right? Like the vision says, Pujari and other Guardians are dead things made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. As a result, we're led to believe that we can trust what the Ghost in the vision says, that the Black Garden, home of the enemy, is a place of life, and that Guardians are only meant to kill. It's an interesting juxtaposition. The Traveler and his Guardians of the Dead Versus the Black Garden which represents true life, growth, a garden of blossoms and trees, but that's not the only time we see Guardians cast in a fairly negative light. One of the fragments labeled Legends is from the persepctive of a Guardian. In it, there's this quote, "The people we work with and the people we see in the street, and the people we tell about our dreams. We kill them all. I think because we were made to kill, and this is the part of us that thinks about nothing else. Often I kill people I don't know, but like most of us I think I knew them once, in the time before one reset or another when my mind was younger and less terribly scarred." Guardians here are portrayed as mindless killing machines, destroying indiscriminately. Light or no, good guys usually have some greater purpose you know? But the Guardians kill mindlessly to protect the Traveler. I mean look at the lead up to the final battle with the Vex at the end of Destiny's first campaign. You fight your way through the Black Garden, only to confront a room of Vex, peacefully praying, and what you're told by Dinklebot Carrier of the Traveler's Light is that you're about to kill their god. (robotic voice) Think you can kill a god? (female voice answers) Don't think I have a choice. Ok, so let's pause right there. Let me ask you Destiny players, why are you about to do this? After the battle we are told that Light flows back to the Traveler, but again who is he? What does he stand for? You don't know! You just killed a race's god for a reason you can't comprehend. That my friend, is not hero behavior right there, and in case you still have doubt, here's another quote, this time from the lore fragment labeled "Fate of Skolas." "While the other houses fought for their future on Earth throwing themselves at the Great Machine, Skolas wasted his people in games of betrayal and ambition. Everything wants to kill his people, the machines and the militants and the green eyed Hive The dead soldiers that hoard the Great Machine and come out crusading to wipe all hope away ..." Guardians are the dead soldiers, and again we hear about them killing indiscriminately in the hope of wiping out races, but what's most important to note here is that the Great Machine is another name for the Traveler. That is a huge revelation. Why? Well prepare to have your mind blown because the Great Machine is referenced only one other time in the lore, in the grimoire card Variks the Loyal. Now, Variks is a Fallen, one of the primary enemy alien races in the game. Here is the quote, "First, the Great Machine. Then sky fell away. Whirlwind ripped away the past. All honor lost. All hope ... Now at war. Fight for system." Let me spell this out for you. The enemy race in the game, the one now fighting against the Traveler at one time had the Traveler on their side. Oh and that whirlwind mentioned in the card is a moment in the Fallen's history where all their past was wiped away. No one can remember what exactly came before, and afterward they were forced into a nomadic lifestyle. Huh, sound familiar? Like say maybe the Collapse of humanity? Which once again came after the Traveler visited the planet. Now of course we don't get specifics, but for the Traveler to visit a planet only to have that planet fall to ruin shortly afterward and then have the survivors seek revenge against it, and then to have the whole scenario seem to repeat again with humanity. Yea. Definitely not what you would think about when it comes to a good force, but enough digging through arcane lore veiled in poetry. The true proof comes from the people who worked on the game. On Reddit, an anonymous contributor who participated in a Destiny Beta test from early 2013 broke their NDA and revealed exactly what we've suspected, and if there's any doubt to the validity of this, it was actually removed once because of legal issues and was re-posted again because you know it's the internet. According to his report, a character was originally meant to reveal to you the the Traveler and it's Speaker were not to be trusted. That the Traveler was responsible for the Collapse of the Golden Age, and that the Darkness is actually a by product of the Traveler who turned humanity's technology against itself, destroying us. Your character was meant to get recruited to prevent the Traveler from being resurrected, and there you have it. There's your Traveler, the one you're fighting for, your guiding Light in humanity's darkest hour, nothing but a giant planet sized liar and traitor to the entire human race. Admittedly the game changed drastically after that Beta, losing one of it's main writers and design directors, but from the lore bits and pieces we've seen today the truth is still hidden in there, waiting to be revealed. Maybe we'll never actually see the Traveler betray us or maybe Bungie's saving their big reveal for another meaty piece of DLC down the road. Still, whatever the case may be, I'll bet you'll be looking at that big solemn sphere in the sky just a little bit differently from now on. (dramatic music) But HEY! That's just a theory ... a GAME THEORY! Thanks for watching! Welcome back to the SUPER AMAZING END CARD TOURNAMENT! Where today I just want to know, was I able to convince you? Do you think the Traveler is still the good guy, or are you suspicious about his motivations? Could the Traveler truly be a force of evil and if you do think that he's evil do you think this is a plot line that they're still gonna go through with, or is this just gonna be buried under all the writing changes? Click on one to choose to cast your vote, or if you're on mobile or tablet click on the links in the description to cast your vote, and all of you get taken back to the channel page where if you haven't subscribed yet, I highly encourage you to do so. We have a lot of awesome theories coming out between now and the end of the year. It is busy. Theories on Assassin's Creed, Halo, FNAF, Zelda, Fallout and a whole lot more, so get excited! I am staying busy so that way you guys are over analyzing all of your favorite games all the time between now and the end of the year, and while you're out there catch up on all the Game Theories you may have missed! Or the other shows, or Film Theory, or GTLIVE. There is so much stuff happening right now it is crazy! I hope you're enjoying it. I'm enjoying making it for you guys. It's a lot of work, but it's awesome cause you guys are responding so enthusiastically, so as long as you guys are enjoying it, I'm gonna keep producing it for you, so thank you all as always for your support and in the meantime remember one more time ... It's just a Theory ... a GAME THEORY! Thank you guys for watching!
Sorry if I'm nitpicking, but I got a huge hard on for destiny lore.
They can only simulate two hundred and twenty seven different realities. They also can't simulate something like the powers of the hive, the light, and warmind Rasputin. As it is impossible for them to react and simulate. However they can simulate everything else as far as we know. They are also not robot, more like cyborgs. They are closer to time traveling space plankton (yes...plankton. Hell, the hive are magic undead space krill) then just robots.
The tragity of Skolas is very sad. We attacked him and his race from his plans to protect his race from oryx, the light snuffer when he peered through the vex gate that left his mind to the consistency of scrabbled eggs. With the past, he grieves for the love of the traveler. They wish for it to accept them. As you can hear from Varkis the loyal/betrayer if you stand near him. So while it is true the traveller leaves to create a barrier for the darkness, the fallen do not see it like this. They do not want revenge, they want forgiveness or acceptance. Very big detail missed.
If you read the new cards, it's clear the traveler makes races become more advanced only to protect himself. He's been doing it for literally millions of years. You can know that if you read to chapter 5; verse 0 in the Book Of Sorrow and year one cards. Specifically 4;9 As a example. This doesn't mean it's evil. It's mostly perspective. The only reason it didn't leave earth was not because the local warmind Rasputin crippled it before it got the chance to leave. It still likely saved human kind if it DIDN'T come. Who knows. The cabal might of bulldozed earth. The vex might take it over without needing to fire a single shot. Lord knows what the hive might of done. And the fallen, eh. They'll do what they already do. So it's a choice of having your knees blown out or your head. Not that there was a choice.
Personally to me, it's one of his worse theory's. Not to be negative. It's just that it's common sense if you are even remotely interested in the lore or bothered to read/listen to ingame messages. I knew this since day one of TTK and even had some sneaking suspicions before that. You don't even need to get to book of sorrow, Verse 5;0 to already know this. I was really expecting more then now old Year 1 Destiny memes and mostly old card texts. There is so much there and all we got were what /r/DestinyLore and /r/Thecryptarchs would literally call child's play when it comes to Destiny lore. There's just so much small and big detail being wrong or just obvious in his video. Even though it's wrong, that one FNaF video was better then this.
Sorry mat pat, love you buddy, but I'm going to have to give this a low score. I know you focus on so many games, so you need to know lore about all of them, but unless you really, almost religiously, focus on the lore of destiny, then don't bother. Although true. This theory is flawed, rattled with large, minor errors, has been around since almost day one, and as of TTK. Is canon.
If anybody is confused or interested at my wall of text that looks like a crazy ramblings of a mad man or just general destiny questions. I'm happy to answer.
Possably the most poorly reasearched theory put out. Most of this stuff is explained in the Taken King campain or Book of Sorrows, niether of which are mentioned.
All hail the traveler our one true savior and heir to the throne!
So good theory there Matt but some of the information is a tad off. First Id like to suggest some reading material for you. The Book of Sorrow. This selection of lore from The Taken King DLC out lines the rise to power of the Hive, Their Taken King Oryx, his son, as well as where the Traveler came from before reaching us or the Fallen as well as where the Vex actually come from (not the Black Garden). Currently due to this book as well as other bits of lore it all points towards the Hive either being the Darkness or at least working directly for them with "them" being the Worm Gods. Now looking toward what you said about the Fallen you were mostly correct. The Traveler was helping their civilization before us, and the whirlwind was in deed their collapse, however, the Traveler has no real offensive powers that are currently known to us so when the Have (Darkness) showed up to destroy all life in their universe he (she?) left to avoid death and somehow ended up in our universe. Now once the Hive showed up in our galaxy to start the cycle all over again he tried to leave like he did with the Fallen, But lucky for us (kind of) a pre-collapse AI known as a Warmind named Rasputin used some unknown weapon to damage the Traveler to prevent it from leaving (the cause of all the damage you can see towards the bottom of the traveler when you are in the Tower) then coming to terms with being stuck on Earth he used some unknown (ya that word comes up a lot) attack halting the Hives advance, and he released the Ghosts to find the Guardians to protect him. Then much later the City was built under him as it was the only real safe place left on earth. Now what you said about the Guardians is true we are the Army of the Dead but the ultimate goal is not to wipe out all life everywhere (we have the Hive for that) In fact according to Commander Zavala we have tried to make contact with the Cabal in an attempt to make an alliance but that ended badly. Attempts have also been made with the Vex to no success. There is so much more to the lore (still sadly mostly outlined in the Gimoire) then what I'm mentioning here that it barley scratches the surface.
Book of Sorrow http://db.destinytracker.com/grimoire/enemies/books-of-sorrow
Rasputin (and his attack of the Traveler) http://www.destinypedia.com/rasputin
Vex http://www.destinypedia.com/Vex
I apologize in advance for any spelling or grammar errors as i have typed all this out from my cell and well big thumbs and a tiny phone don't really play well
Pls no Spoiler, only answer...It is a real Theory/Plot explanation or it is a hidden Destiny commercial?
MatPat. DO ONE ON PRAEDYTH PLSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
So I heard Alex was on the writing team. Bet he had fun with this one! :D
I can't believe you let such an easy pun fall out of your closing statement!: ...sphere in the sky under a new light.
So the Traveler is Kyubey?