Bungie Teases Destiny 2 Time Travel Storyline After Shadowkeep

In advance of Destiny 2's third year of content getting underway, Bungie released a new ViDoc last week that covers much of what we can expect to see in the new Shadowkeep expansion and beyond. It also provided some new, long-term hints about where the Destiny 2 story will go in the months after Shadowkeep and the Season of the Undying, which kicks off a few days after Shadowkeep's October 1 launch. One particular clue suggests Guardians are going to be dealing with time travel in the future, which could relate to ongoing stories with the Vex, the Hive, and the Dreaming City.

In one shot during the ViDoc, director Luke Smith and production director Justin Truman are filling out a grid on a whiteboard that includes information about upcoming Destiny 2 seasons. At the top of the grid is a box that explains the top-level player goal of each season. For the Season of the Undying, which starts soon after the release of Shadowkeep, the goal is to "Dam the Flood." Since we know that Undying focuses on the Vex attacking the moon and other locations around the solar system in response to the Hive actions during Shadowkeep, the flood is likely the wave of incoming Vex.

But the grid also shows Smith and Truman filling in the goal for the season after Undying, the Season of the Dawn. That box says "Fix the Timeline," a phrase that screams time travel.

There's a lot going on with time travel in Destiny right now. First and foremost, the Vex are known as time-traveling robots who use simulations to try to create a future where they successfully take over the solar system, and they're a huge part of the new story content that's about to hit Destiny 2. Bungie says in the Vidoc that we're about to see the beginning of a story that unfolds across the entire third year of Destiny 2, culminating in Season 11 at the end of the year.

There are also lingering time travel threads to deal with. The biggest is the "curse" that infects the Dreaming City, the endgame location from the Forsaken expansion. That place is trapped in a time loop that repeats the same three weeks over and over again. Despite dealing with the Dreaming City for nearly a year, it doesn't seem as though we're any closer to breaking the curse. Destiny 2 has dropped a lot more lore about that situation in the meantime, though, suggesting that a Vex mind, which was taken by Oryx and serves the Hive, has been the cause of the loop. What we don't know yet is how to defeat it, but lore clues suggest that solution might reveal itself with the release of Shadowkeep and the ability to boost players' Power levels up to 999 with the use of seasonal artifacts.

There's also a story thread from all the way back in Destiny 1 that lore has suggested could come up again. That's the story of the Stranger, a character who appears in the original Destiny to send you to stop the Vex's plans, which are spinning out from a strange, out-of-time location called the Black Garden. You destroy the "heart" of the Black Garden in Destiny 1, seemingly putting a big damper on the Vex's goals. But as the Vidoc says, the Vex invasion in the Season of the Undying stems from the Black Garden--and it's also the scene of Shadowkeep's new raid, Garden of Salvation.

Lore also suggests that the Stranger is a time traveler, showing up in Destiny 1 to get you to stop something that has already happened in her timeline. There are also some hints that the Stranger knows or works with Mara Sov, the queen of the Awoken and a major player in the Dreaming City story. Mara has been working off-screen toward some greater goal for most of Destiny 2's second year, but we know little about her goals and agenda.

It might be that, after breaking the Dreaming City out of its curse, you'll then be tasked by Mara and the Stranger with some time-travel shenanigans to undo some of the damage done in Year Two. We know from lore that the curse is related to strengthening Savathun, one of the godlike sisters of the Hive's king, Oryx. Allowing the curse to go on for a year is probably a very bad thing, so maybe the next step to solving that crisis will be to return to the past and prevent it from happening in the first place.

There were a few other interesting clues scattered around the Vidoc, too. It looks like we'll once again be visiting Rasputin, the giant artificially intelligent warmind who has been a central figure for the whole of Destiny. It also looks like the Infinite Forest on Mercury, another major Vex location, could factor in as well. Another look at the Dreaming City popped up in the footage near the end of the Vidoc (as did a lot of other things, like existing Strikes), which could be another clue.

Unfortunately, we're left with a lot of speculation for where Destiny 2 is going in the future. If Forsaken and the last three seasons are any indication, though, we can expect Bungie to continue to pick up and run with plot and lore ideas that have been hanging around in Destiny for years. We might even finally see some definitive conclusions.