Lakshmi-2
I can only scream into the void so many times that Destiny 2 players desperately need to be listening to the game’s weekly Veil Containment messages, and that Bungie needs to do something, anything, to make them more accessible and let people know they exist.
This week, in yet another big story reveal, Neomuna co-founder Chioma Esi, beleaguered and depressed from the death of Maya and the frightening powers of The Veil, talks about Rasputin the AI Warmind who ended up finding the hidden Neomuna colony and calling it “Nefele Stronghold” in its records.
Esi dispatches the Cloudstrider Stargazer to leave Neptune and go erase those records. We knew that before, but Esi reveals that she wasn’t doing this to hide Neomuna from conflict, as this is why we always thought we’d never known about them, that they were trying to avoid things like the Collapse and the ensuing wars, but because Esi believed that no one else should be exposed to The Veil, that it was too dangerous for anyone else to access. Neomuna wasn’t hiding, it needed to be quarantined.
This obviously has implications for the fact that there is now an entire city built around Neomuna and it is doing things like projecting the consciousness of the population into little holograms as they sleep to avoid the Vex invasion. And it’s biggest protectors, the current Cloudstriders like Nimbus, do not seem to know about any of this history at all. Also, we have been uh, roughly 50 feet away from the apex of the Veil when we fought Calus and now when we hear these messages, the thing so dangerous they had to hide an entire planet colony so no one would go near it. Not great!
Destiny 2
The other reveal, again, in about 90 seconds of dialogue, is that when Stargazer left he brough along Lakshmi, the exo half-formed from the now-dead Maya Sundaresh. As we know, Lakshmi (well, Lakshmi-2, as she had been wiped once, it seems) would go on to start the Future War Cult before going off the deep end and nearly letting the Vex take over The Last City before dying. It’s unclear what Maya memories of Neomuna and The Veil might have survived, consciously or unconsciously within her, perhaps driving her to some of these actions.
Last week, Bungie ran a TWAB segment all about Veil Containment, an interview with the narrative team explaining its significance. I found myself mildly annoyed they merely mentioned how hidden it was in passing, when this is legitimately some of the best work I’ve seen them script. They have to have the data on how many people are actually hearing this stuff, and it’s close to no one. To even get to where we are right now, you have to:
1) Beat the entire Neomuna campaign
2) Beat the follow-up Deterministic Chaos exotic mission
3) Beat the first Veil Containment mission which didn’t launch until this season
4) Realize that there is a new message every week in a node that doesn’t flash hidden off the corner of the Neptune map
5) Listen to almost three months’ worth of lore entries to reach the one we got today
Given that I read that the number of people even getting past step 3 is between 1-4% of active players, it’s a truly astonishing percentage of the playerbase who will never hear this stuff, which contains some of the biggest story reveals of the last year at least, and certainly more important than quite literally anything we learned in the Lightfall campaign itself. This is driving me crazy.
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