Destiny 2’s Revenant finale exposes a problem that must be fixed for Heresy & Frontiers

The final third of Destiny 2’s Episode Revenant touched down on January 7, tying up another dangling narrative thread and exposing one of the game’s biggest flaws in the process.

After almost eight years of service, the cracks in Bungie’s looter shooter aren’t just starting to show, they’ve widened to a degree where ignoring them has become impossible.

Frequent technical issues notwithstanding, another long-suffering component of Destiny 2 is its story or, to be more precise, the method of its delivery.

Lavished with praise for providing a satisfying conclusion to the Light & Darkness saga, The Final Shape‘s subsequent Episodes, Echoes and Revenant, by comparison, have felt like stop-gaps to tide Guardians over until Frontiers arrives in summer 2025.

Arguably, that’s all seasons have ever been; narrative filler underlined with new, temporary playable content to keep idle hands busy between major expansions, but Revenant’s disjointed nature sets a worrying precedent for Destiny 2’s future.

Chronological disorder

Like Echoes, Revenant closes the loop on a handful of legacy Destiny 2 characters, granting a degree of finality to their years-long character arcs but without reflecting those upheavals in-universe.

At Revenant’s climax, Eramis, an enemy-turned-reluctant-ally, is granted free passage to leave Earth and the Sol system for helping to eliminate a threat to humanity. She departs, vowing to rebuild her race’s destroyed homeworld of Riis.

Previous to this, the Vanguard had captured and imprisoned the former Disciple of the Witness for her crimes. Here she remains after Revenant’s final cutscene, speaking the same dialogue as if the events that led to her freedom never happened.

The jarring discontinuity leaks into the Last City elsewhere, too. Mithraax, despite being freed of the curse placed on him by Nezarec, continues to behave as if the affliction remains.

The Last City becomes a time bubble betraying Destiny 2’s live service trappings as a result, a feeling of stagnation only exacerbated by a lack of meaningful interaction elsewhere.

Face to face

Barring a handful of exceptions, dialogue integral to forwarding your momentum in Revenant’s story is confined to radio calls or, worse, interactions with inanimate objects. Even with their physical selves being within walking distance, objectives requiring a chinwag with characters don’t happen in-person, but remotely.

Despite his history with Revenant big-bad Fikrul, for example, the latter’s defeat elicits not an in-person debrief with Hunter Vanguard Crow, but a disembodied sign-off triggered by interacting with a calling card.

The result is the lack of any meaningful closure or urgency. Your Guardian essentially exists in a vacuum, unimportant enough to warrant a sit-down with humanity’s defenders, despite being its savior more times than human hands can count.

If these shortcomings, like many of Destiny 2’s ongoing problems, are a result of Bungie’s reduced workforce, they collectively call into question whether the studio will be able to deliver the same level of quality that saw The Final Shape receive so much praise.

With Heresy scheduled for release on February 4 and privy to the most development time as a result, the third and final Episode before Destiny 2 enters a new, uncertain era, needs to stick the landing, or else the record player lows underpinning Echoes and Revenant could be broken before Bungie even has the chance to start anew with Frontiers.