The Bestest Music in the Videogame Series That is Called Destiny
I have played over 1200 hours of Destiny 2.
1250, to be precise, a nice whole number that looks like I’ve rounded it up but according to the tracking website I used, no. It’s just that neat.
Destiny 2 is my forever game. Plonk me on a desert island with a not-at-all-suspicious internet connection and decent PC and I could play this game forever. One of the best feeling FPSs ever on release, 7 years of development has made it one the best MMOs ever. Each new content drop carries noticeable improvements in narrative and systems design, which means there’s always something to do, something to learn or something to read.
I love it.
Always accompanying that foundational gunplay has been the music. Pre-release, the game’s score was led by Marty O’Donnell, he of Halo ah-ah-aaaaah fame. After throwing a hissy fit over some stock music, he was fired and began a slow slide into bitter-greased tedium. Thank god then that Michael Salvatori remained. Salvatori took over as composer for the sequel, alongside a suite of other incredible talent, and not only did they better O’Donnell’s score, but took the soundscapes of the game into some entirely unexplored territories.
Here then, is a collection of my favourite bits of that soundtrack, alongside some ambient noodling as to why they are, in fact, fucking ace.
Gunslinger: Forsaken
The Forsaken expansion was just flippin great. And there’s little doubt it saved Destiny.
After the bizarre regressiveness of the release of Destiny 2, and the lacklustre expansions that followed, the game had reached a tipping point. Streamers were fleeing, players were ranting, discussion was moving on.
Then Bungie hit the ball so far out of the park it broke orbit.
It took a ballsy move: killing off a main character, completely reworking how weapons and armour worked, adding not just one but two new areas… but it worked. Not only did Forsaken make the game better, it was where the narrative moved from “barely legible” to “actually pretty good”. A tale of loss and revenge tinged with a deep sense of sadness, Forsaken showed just how engrossing Destiny could be.
The loss centered around Cayde-6, Exo hunter, comic relief and Mal-from-Firefly stand-in. He has his own theme on the soundtrack, but no other piece encapsulates the ne’er-do-well vibe quite like this rip-roaring, Sunday-serial-evoking, wild-west sheriff’s theme of a piece. It is adventure, it is daring-do…it speaks to rescues with impossible odds, unsanctioned missions executed under the table, rebel causes taken and nefarious means employed. It’s the first major track of Forsaken and starts the whole thing off with a corrupted-ether infused bang.
Playing out over a prison raid, it was an exclamation mark that this expansion was a new start for the ailing game. And oh how it was.
Journey: Destiny 2
Listening to each of these tracks from start to end is absolutely not something I expected to do while writing this, but I cannot help but let the entirety of this, possibly the greatest single track of the entire series, wash over me each and every time.
I mean…just listen to it.
Before Forsaken, Destiny 2 was a wet-fart of a story. It bettered the original’s, but so do most episodes of In The Night Garden. It was coherent, but featured one of the game’s worst antagonists, some of the dullest CGI sequences ever put to monitor and a complete waste of a fascinating premise.
Said premise was that the Guardians, the player characters, have lost their power of immortality. A race that had never known weakness suddenly became powerless in a world they had hammered into submission through a cycle of live/die/repeat. The narrative possibility-space that streams from that idea is endless, and was a huge part of the marketing cycle leading up to the game’s release.
Of course, you regain said powers almost immediately because the whole thing was a cool marketing trick someone wrote on a whiteboard, not an actual mechanic.
Listening to this piece though, you can fool yourself into remembering Destiny 2 as a towering achievement of loss and redemption. Concurrently sad and hopeful, Journey originally played over our Guardian trekking through enemy infested territory, vulnerable and alone for the first time in their existence, watching the one bastion of humankind burn to cinders behind them.
It is magnificent.
Cabal Stomp: Destiny 1
The only track from Destiny 1 on my list, this thundering deathmarch of a theme accompanies the arrival of the hulking Cabal, a warlike race of militaristic space rhinos.
The Cabal were always my favourite enemy race in the game. Very little was known of their backstory in Destiny 1; they weren’t a cosmic plague unleashed by the Darkness like the Hive, they weren’t the universe attempting to micromanage itself into balance like the Vex. They weren’t even the once-great nation state of the Fallen. They were just a massive, unstoppable empire whose only trait was excess. I loved their simplicity.
Destiny 2 ruined that of course, centring the race around the world’s most cliched Maximus Decimus Meridius stand-in, Ghaul. The recent introduction of Calus, disgraced Cabal Emperor and Guardian sugar-daddy, alongside his fantastically humourless daughter Caitl, has knocked them back up the rankings but the old Cabal, that mysterious race who would rather destroy a moon than go around, are long gone.
This theme though. Fucking slaps.
Look Within — Beyond Light
Raids are the pinnacle of the Destiny 2 experience: six man puzzle-solving, enemy killing, team coordinating dungeons that can last anywhere from one to five hours depending on your group. They are the main course to the single player’s entree, and often contain the most impressive encounters in the game.
Deep Stone Crypt is no exception. Added in Beyond Light, this particular raid was much anticipated due to the history of the setting, one that has swirled around the lore since the early days of the first game. The Crypt is the long-rumoured source of the Exos, one third of the playable races, and finally getting to unravel the mystery of their creation and purpose was one of the big draws of the expansion.
The final encounter is against Taniks, a Fallen pirate who, like the Crypt itself, has haunted the game since all the way back in D1. Only this time he’s used the technology of the crypt to turn himself into a tank. As you do.
The Morning Star space station has plummeted to the surface of Europa, you and this abomination are all that remain. Fittingly, the track is full of pomp and menace, punctuating the start of the encounter with an unforgettable trill of horns and percussion. It’s the perfect theme for the final boss of a videogame. Except for one important detail.
This isn’t the boss’ theme. This is your theme.
This is the theme of a team of immortal warriors freshly imbued with the power of a space magic far beyond the understanding of the laws of our dimension, unleashed on the remnants of a failed looting expedition.
It’s this track that hammers home just how far the story of the game has come. In the beginning, humanity in Destiny was a cowed and fragile race, protected by a sparse group of undying mercenaries. But now the Guardians are arguably the dominant force not just in the Sol system, but the universe.
The game had previously struggled with the dissonance between the honourable Guardian leadership and the untold millions of sentient creatures their troops murder each and every day. In Beyond Light this is not only dealt with head on, but is the focus of the expansion. Guardians are not always noble, not always a force for unmitigated good. Look Within is the perfect title for this track, referring not to the enemies you face but the character you play. It’s a terrifying anthem of domination and devastation that plays over your massacre of a ruined creature that poses no real threat to anyone.
You are not a hero any more. You’re a force of nature.
It was the turning point in the narrative of the game, both the expansion and this final encounter. And when you’re lucky enough to be part of a raid group who knows what they’re doing, you can feel it in your bones.
Deep Stone Lullaby: Beyond Light
“Mics off, boys”
So said our team leader, during my very first run of the Deep Stone Crypt. In a raid, where coordination is not only recommended but required, this is unusual.
But not for the Lullaby.
In terms of singular set pieces, Destiny can be lacking. There is no setting-foot-on-Halo moment, no leaving-the-Imperial-City-Sewers. Destiny is a game of stunning skyboxes and impeccable art design but few are the moments of genuine, authored awe. The one exception accompanies the Lullaby, as your fireteam leaves the confines of the Morning Star station and gasps into open space.
Playing behind this emergence into one of the most impressive environments I’ve ever experienced in a video game is the Lullaby. It comes from nowhere, a deeply evocative ballad that swoops and ascends over you as you make your way across the exterior of the station, suspended above the ice moon Europa and surrounded by hostile megaships.
If one dives into the lore of the game, the significance of the tune makes it all the more affecting.
The Beyond Light expansion dealt primarily with a rogue faction of the Fallen, Destiny’s alien pirate race. But the interesting stuff lay off to the side somewhat, with the story of how one impossibly wealthy and desperately scared little man changed the laws of causality itself to achieve immortality. In the process, he created the Exos, android frames powered by human consciousness. Becoming an Exo involved a deeply traumatic process, stripping the human mind of all memory and liquidating the physical body, before what remains of the person’s mindmap is transferred to their final home, an immortal cybernetic body.
Since the very start of the game the origin of the Exos has been a fundamental mystery. All we had were bizarre code names, hinting at some deep alchemical methodology: The Long Slow Whisper, the Deep Stone Crypt, The Tower. Beyond Light answered these questions, one with the Lullaby itself: it is the musical representation of one’s final moments of humanity, a soothing ballad wooing you into a final sleep before you are destroyed and remade, becoming a living ship of Theseus.
It’s gorgeous.
The experience of the Lullaby space walk is still the greatest single moment in my 1250 hours with the game.
Here it is, in case you were wondering.
Watchtower: Forsaken
I started this list extolling the virtues of the Forsaken expansion, and the perilous edge Destiny clung to before its release. It is no hyperbole to say Destiny would not exist today without that reimagining.
It’s an interesting lens to view the game, as from its very inception the game has felt somewhat ephemeral. Hot off concluding the biggest gaming franchise on the planet, Bungie decided to make a bizarre online/offline hybrid of a project which seemed to want to completely rethink what a game could be. It was a massive risk, and one that almost certainly didn’t pay off as intended.
Destiny has always felt like it was one bad expansion away from ending. That it’s still around is down to the dogged stubbornness of its developers and, now at least, Bungie finally realising what kind of game they want to make.
Destiny 2 has become a TV serial, an ongoing, weekly narrative structure driving near constant content updates and additions. And it’s worked. Bungie is expanding, opening new studio after new studio, expanding the franchise into non-game mediums and pulling in money like never before. For the first time ever Destiny has a roadmap, which includes an end, at least to the saga of the Light and Dark. It is safe.
It’s hard to express how much this game has come to mean to me, and even writing that feels bizarrely alien. I am someone who plays games, but has made efforts to never be consumed by them. Games are not my life entire, I have other hobbies and other interests. It is important these interests never overwhelm us, that we are able to separate ourselves from them and see them as what they are: pleasant distractions.
Still. Whenever I see some new tidbit of Destiny news, or a fellow twitterer refer to an in-game event my ears prick up and my heart race increases. It is my game, like it is countless others’.
So, how then to end? With this, the final theme from Forsaken. Although the encounter it accompanied was disappointing (with the real villain being saved for a magnificent appearance in the raid), with these choral wails playing it genuinely felt like a culmination, not just for the story but for the potential of the game Destiny could, and now has, become.
