The excitement over the last season of Star Wars: The Clone Wars could not be higher as the series enters into its last few episodes before it wraps up for good. However, the same can't be said right now for Destiny 2, which has experienced quite a few ups and downs throughout its Year 3 content drops. While The Clone Wars, being an animated series, and Destiny 2, being a live service action-adventure MMO first-person shooter, are completely different beasts with their own formulas to get just right, there's one lesson in particular that Destiny 2 should take from this last season of The Clone Wars.
And that has to do with Destiny 2's narrative, which in many ways has struggled to please fans as it has continued to stretch out events and not completely deliver satisfying payoffs for its setups. But the main focus here is about how Destiny 2 has continued to treat its characters, its lore, and its history.
Destiny 2 FOMO and Universe
To Destiny's credit, the franchise quickly built up a rich and interesting universe with fascinating lore, backstories, legends, and more. In many ways, Destiny as a franchise has quickly launched itself to being a contemporary of Star Wars despite it being nearly 40 years Star Wars' junior. But there is one place, in particular, that could become a pitfall for Destiny 2's narrative if it isn't careful. And that is how Destiny 2 often tries to draw a connection between too many things.
Destiny 2 has a long history of relying on legends of its lore to excite players, and sometimes underwhelmingly. Osiris returned from his exile in Year 1's Curse of Osiris DLC. Ana Bray reappeared on Mars in the subsequent Warmind DLC. Both Nokris and Xol, powerful Hive entities, appeared in the same Warmind DLC. Saint-14 returned last season in Season of Dawn. This season, so many connections are being made between Ana Bray, Zavala, Rasputin, the pyramid ships, the fabled Seven Seraphs, and more.
While many players have complained about how this reliance on the past has allowed Destiny 2 to avoid making forward momentum into the future, it has also caused another problem. It has made Destiny's universe feel suddenly much smaller, as though every major event in the game's universe has been interconnected and involved only a small cluster of characters. And that is where Star Wars: The Clone Wars comes in.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Destiny 2
In the season 7 episode, "Dangerous Debt," there is a character who appears who may have gone unnoticed to many fans unless they are familiar with the Star Wars: Rebels animated series. In "Dangerous Debt", the Mandalorian Bo-Katan is accompanied by fellow Mandalorian Ursa Wren. Ursa Wren is the mother of Sabine Wren from Rebels. While this is a great piece of connection between the two series, supervising director of The Clone Wars Dave Filoni explained the danger of making too many connections in a fictional universe:
"You have to be careful when including characters. It's always a balance between a fun idea and a character we love, and a universe which begins to feel too small."
This is a great piece of wisdom from someone who has done a lot of work in the Star Wars universe, arguably one of the most expansive, successful, and generation-spanning franchises in history. And it illustrates the dangerous path that Destiny 2's narrative has been heading down. In particular, the inclusion of so many characters from Destiny's lore and history, while has been fun and exciting at the time, has impacted the universe in a way that has shrunk it down in scope considerably.
There is less mystery than ever in Destiny. Many of the characters that were fabled legends—Osiris, Saint-14, Dredgen Yor, the Ahamkara—have stepped out of the pages of Destiny's Grimoire and into the gameplay of Destiny 2. Granted, many moments with these characters and narratives surrounding them have been satisfying. But again, each time they have been brought out of the past and into the present, it has taken some of the mystery and intrigue away.
Suddenly, there is less lore to look back on because the lore has become the player's present reality. And with each answer and connection made, the universe has actually started to feel smaller instead of wider and more unknown, begging to be explored. It would be good for Destiny 2 to take the advice from The Clone Wars and to be selective with how many connections it makes lest the depth of the Destiny universe turn mistakenly much more shallow than it could—and should—be.
Destiny 2 is available now for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
Source: Star Wars
