How Destiny 2 Unexpectedly Became A Game About Dealing With Trauma
When Destiny 2's Season of the Haunted first kicked off, it seemed angled to set players against Calus, a villain who'd been kicking around the game since its 2017 release, wielding a new and frightening power--in other words, another relatively typical bad guy waiting for players to come shoot them. What the characters of Destiny 2 have actually wound up fighting, however, are their own personal demons.
The stalwart superheroes of Bungie's MMO shooter are the «Haunted» the season's title is referring to, and the story that has unfolded each week has been a surprisingly emotional and honest one about coming to terms with personal trauma. As merritt k noted at Fanbyte, somehow, a shooter about killing giant aliens is taking on conversations about mental and emotional health--and doing an admirable job dealing with those difficult subjects.
The premise of Season of the Haunted is actually an outgrowth of the Shadowkeep expansion, where players confronted ghost-like enemies called Nightmares. While Nightmares look like red, spectral ghosts, they're actually the manifestations of memories and regrets. In Season of the Haunted, Nightmares are being weaponized against the game's characters, forcing them to face those regrets head-on. Once Bungie solidified the direction of the season, according to senior narrative director Robert Brookes, approaching the topics with sensitivity became an important part of the process of building its narrative.
«We didn't start the season with the goal of approaching mental health as a topic,» Brookes said during a group interview that included several Bungie developers who worked on Season of the Haunted. «But once we realized what we wanted to do--like, 'Okay, every character of our main cast
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