Destiny 2 Story Looks Headed To Europa As Darkness Gathers

Bungie has been somewhat more tight-lipped about where Destiny 2 is heading at the start of Season 11 and into its upcoming fourth year, but we're starting to get some hints. A new teaser trailer hit Destiny 2's Twitter account, showing Jupiter's moon of Europa and the Drifter making his way there. [Update: We have the full details on the new Destiny 2 expansion, Beyond Light.]

The new teaser doesn't offer too much in the way of information, but it plays off another newly released cinematic. That short video, which was added with the weekly reset on June 2, shows Jupiter, with one of the black pyramid ships briefly appearing from its shadow. It seems the next front of Destiny 2's war with evil forces will take place in the orbit of Jupiter.

The Drifter isn't the only person headed to Europa, it seems. Another teaser video shared on the Destiny 2 Twitter account ahead of the June 9 stream shows Eris Morn venturing to the Jovian moon. It was previously leaked a few days early on the Destiny 2 Instagram account.

Both teasers note a reveal stream that's coming on June 9, which is likely to outline what's happening in Season 11 as well as what we can expect from Destiny 2's fourth year of content, which kicks off in the fall. But all three videos also give a few hints as to where the story might be headed. The fact that both Eris and the Drifter are included in teasers seems like it'll link two story threads going forward, both having to do with the Darkness.

The Darkness, much like the Traveler's Light, is a force we've been hearing about since the very beginning of Destiny, but it has only really started to take shape as an actual power and people recently, with the appearance of pyramid-like black ships. In the Shadowkeep expansion, Destiny 2 revealed one of those pyramids hidden on the moon, which seems to absorb Light and attempts to tempt Guardians toward a darker path. When Guardians investigated the ship, they discovered a strange artifact that allowed communication with the people who created it. We learned those folks were on their way, and that they ominously intend to be neither friend nor enemy, but our "salvation."

We know the folks in the pyramid ships are bad news, but little else. They chase the Traveler around the galaxy in an attempt to destroy it, they were apparently responsible for the cataclysm known as The Collapse in Destiny's lore, and they're apparently worshiped by both the Hive and the Vex of the Black Garden. The Traveler waking up at the end of the Destiny 2 vanilla campaign also awoke the fleet of pyramid ships out beyond the solar system, and it has been on its way back here ever since. In the Season of the Worthy, as players worked to restore Rasputin's interplanetary defense network all season, we saw a chart in his bunkers marking the Darkness's progress. Now it's about to arrive, and Europa will be pretty much the first location it passes.

Eris has been studying the pyramid and its artifact since the end of the Shadowkeep expansion's story, so it makes sense that she would venture to Europa to see what their deal is. But the Drifter joining the fun on the frozen moon is an interesting twist. There's a lot of lore about what the Drifter was up to before he showed up in the Tower to facilitate Gambit matches, and it all suggests the Drifter ran into Darkness creatures before--and his former crew felt their evil influence and wound up killing each other.

We know of other folks who have been affected by the influence of the Darkness as well. There's Dredgen Yor, an infamous Guardian who was slowly corrupted by his gun, Thorn, a dangerous Hive artifact called a Weapon of Sorrow. Yor had a bunch of followers, the Shadows of Yor, who also embraced the power of Darkness. And there was the Kentarch-3, a fireteam that invaded the Black Garden, wound up claiming some kind of dark powers there, and turned on each other before disappearing.

The Drifter himself also makes use of Dark powers in his plans through Gambit, which appears to be the Drifter's way of preparing for the arrival of the pyramid ships. The game mode's whole deal is about players gathering "motes of Darkness" and depositing them in banks for the Drifter. So it seems that "Darkness" is an actual physical source of power, the same way Light is--you can pick up Orbs of Light during activities in Destiny 2, like when a member of your fireteam racks up kills with their Super abilities. Motes of Darkness sound like they're effectively the same thing, and the Drifter has seemingly been working on stockpiling them for the future--or, now, the present.

What we don't know is what either Eris or the Drifter intends to do on Europa. Members of the Vanguard are distrustful of the Drifter in particular because of his willingness to embrace dark powers to survive. Eris is also very cagey about what she knows, and we know she was working with Mara Sov, the Awoken queen, on Mara's agenda related to the Dreaming City. A lot of the details about various characters' plans and motivations are still up in the air, but it looks like we'll be learning a lot more in the seasons to come.

Bungie is providing more information about what's coming down the pike in Destiny 2 on June 9, when its next content season starts. That should give us a better sense of what's going to happen in the future, but in the meantime, we know that a lot of things are likely to change soon in Bungie's MMO shooter--at least in terms of its story.