'Destiny 2' Won't Include 'The Darkness' Because Bungie Doesn't Know What the Hell It Is Either

Destiny 2 is primed to be more than just a great game, Bungie is setting it up to be the fresh start they need to recover from some of the missteps taken in the first game. When Destiny 2 was announced, fans were skeptical - at least until they heard about how quests, the multiplayer structure, collectibles, guns and armor would be tweaked.

With #E3 behind us now, Kotaku's Jason Schreier had a chance to sit down with the game's director, Luke Smith. It was candidly brutal, but it gave fans a great glimpse inside the typically mum developer. Luke was explaining how the development team was in essence rebooting the core narrative of the #Destiny universe.

So does that means Destiny 2 is a reboot?

Not quite, but Luke explained that the reboot started by completely wiping any mention of The Darkness, the unknown force in the background of the first game that players fought against. The reason that Bungie is wiping The Darkness from the story, is because they didn't know what it was supposed to be. Bungie's Luke Smith said:

"So, I think that at a point, just totally candidly? We had no idea what it was. Straight up. We had no clue."

To countless fans of the game, The Darkness felt like a lazy filler for an actual villain, as a reason to fight without really knowing why. Luke explained that The Darkness simply started as a narrative tool, but slowly became a conglomeration of all the races in the game, and The Darkness officially became a thing that really didn't make any sense at all once you actually started thinking it through.

You were a Guardian of The Light, protected by The Traveler to fight against The Darkness.

The only reason that The Darkness worked, is because Bungie worked incredibly hard to flesh out the backstory of the game's villains and created a unique history for the evil alien races that were a part of The Darkness, but through the entire story - there was never a defining moment of, this is what The Darkness truly is.

Destiny 2 will give us a real villain in Dominus Ghaul.

As the leader of the Red Legion, Dominus Ghaul takes the battle to us in the opening moments and shows us the terrifying face of evil, and the power that he controls. The Cabal alien race has sought out The Traveler, believing that the power belongs to them and Dominus will do anything for it.

This rebooting of the narrative was the only choice that Bungie really had if they wanted to incorporate the horde of diehard fans with new players, as it would have made no sense to continue building the series around a villainous entity that seems so convoluted and complex. But Luke made sure to explain that just because Dominus Ghaul has arrived, that doesn't mean that The Darkness is gone for good. The Traveler is still a big mystery, and there must be a reason why so many races want to destroy it.

Whatever the villainous intent of The Darkness, it's good to know that Bungie realized that they needed something else to pit players against, something with a face.