The past two Episodes of Destiny 2’s post-Final Shape story content have not been amazing, but that has changed with the arrival of Heresy, the final episode before Destiny switches to its new, untested Frontiers model.
Why is it great so far? Well, spoilers follow for that. Big ones, in fact.
It is rare that Destiny 2 is able to pull off a truly shocking surprise in a storyline these days. Sometimes things like character deaths are spoiled by marketing (Cayde in Forsaken) or executed extremely poorly (Amanda Holliday). Not so with the opening mission of Heresy, which sees a new Dread enemy kill Eris Morn outright, a key character in Destiny lore for the last ten years. This results in her quasi-boyfriend Drifter losing his mind as he attempts to save and resurrect her to no avail (though she may be in some Throne World somewhere, which is teased).
Now, this week, we have seen the return of an “Echo” of Oryx, now catching up on the events of the last ten years which features the very first onscreen reunion of all the Hive god siblings, which includes Xivu Arath and Savathun. It was a pretty stunning moment this week except…
Xivu Arath didn’t talk. While Oryx and Savathun conversed, every time Xivu’s caps lock lines were there, there was complete silence. And in the rest of the Episode, the same is true for Sloane, as with Drifter mourning and now ghosting us, she is our lead NPC this season. Unfortunately, 80% of her lines are not voiced, which makes you either have to read subtitles only as you fight, or we get these weird half-conversations with Drifter, where he’s voiced and she’s not.
This is not Bungie’s fault, it’s just very, very bad timing. This is the result of a video game voice actor strike which began in July of 2024. The result of that was that some lines were able to be recorded for this Episodes (Drifter, Oryx, Savathun) and some were not (Sloane, Xivu Arath). Bungie opted not to use either placeholder voices or some sort of AI recreation tech, which I think most would agree was the right call, despite the end result here.
It’s just a bummer, as this is turning out to be the best story content since The Final Shape, and I would argue that we’ve just seen the most stunning death in the game’s history, no offense to Cayde, namely because no one saw it coming. I’m not sure if this issue will carry forward into Frontiers content, but hopefully not.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
