Destiny 2 and The Punch That Killed the Bees

Destiny 2 isn’t really about the punching. It is, at best, a short layover on the long redeye to the general vicinity where the road to Punchalla lies. You get to punch things with your fists in Destiny 2, but only sometimes. It’s really a game about shooting aliens and robot aliens and dead aliens and dead alien bees with parasites? Oh, you can also shoot your fellow human saviors of humanity, the zombie Guardians, though some of them are robots too. I wasn’t even going to write about Destiny 2, but then I got to throw a punch that changed the outcome of the story (at least in my head). So, bear with me as I talk about guns, more guns, our understanding of reality, and eventually a single punch.

Let’s begin with the question: why are there so many games set in the future that are all about guns? Don’t we ever move on from shooting things? And they’re not always ray guns or lasers either, just bullets and machine guns. From Halo to Mass Effect, it seems we are hard-pressed to imagine a future without guns. Is it that we are so obsessed with guns in the present we can’t see any other solution, or is it that guns really are the pinnacle of war? Will the ultimate weapons for personal defense always be those that simply throw metal at long distances?

Distance is a part of it. As someone who usually plays shooting games as a melee punching class, I can tell you from firsthand experience that closing the distance to punch bad guys is usually not easy. Batman does it with ropes and sneaky sneaking, Cyberpunk 2077 does it with implants that let you shrug off bullets. But it’s always something I have to worry about.

You may ask why don’t I just embrace the love of the gun? After all, a bullet is like a very fast small punch with a long reach. There’s just something artless about guns to me. Maybe because they represent soulless industrialization. Maybe because they have no other purpose than to wound and kill. Maybe because they just seem unfair. But it’s mostly that they don’t do cool punches and kicks. It’s usually just bullet after bullet in a straight line. Maybe there’s some game out there in which the guns fire little bullet ninjas that punch and kick your targets. That would be cool, but it still wouldn’t be my character throwing those punches and kicks.

I like to imagine futures in which we don’t use guns. Maybe we’ll always have to fight, but we can do it in so many more imaginative and artful ways. Star Wars and Dune tried to do this, one with monks who basically prophesize the paths of every bullet (blaster bolt) and the other by having shields that make bullets useless. As an aside, they have lasers in the Dune universe but apparently, if you shoot a laser at a shield, it creates an atomic explosion. So people don’t do that. Even though there are sci-fi franchises that have moved past the gun, games that do so are few and far between. I guess the Star Wars games count, but I can rarely punch things in those.

I feel like Destiny 2 almost understands this but is trapped in our gun-centric universe. You get to punch things in Destiny 2 and you get shielding tech to protect yourself. But the shields don’t have that much umph in them and you mostly get one punch which is locked behind a cooldown timer most of the time. There are ways around that timer, but those require building your character through a lot of grinding, and all to execute that one boring punch. Meanwhile, the guns are endless.

I’ll admit I’m tempted by the guns. So many fun shapes that shoot in all sorts of different ways. And Destiny 2, like all shooting games, rewards you for using the guns with the Pavlovian treat of winning engagements. You can sit behind cover waiting for your punch to charge up for a minute or more, or you can shoot things now and win! It’s a hard argument to ignore.

There is some fun punchiness to be had in Destiny 2. I found a pair of boots/pants that stored lighting when I ran and discharged it with my punches. Pretty nice, but they required you to run around, sometimes in circles, and only really worked well against swarms of small enemies. As I said, you can spec your character to maximize your punches, but I haven’t found a “build,” as they say, that makes the punches flow and do enough damage to progress through the game without any guns.

About the closest I came to walking on the road to Punchalla in Destiny 2 was throwing that one punch I wrote this post about. It happened during a mission that was only available for 1 week. There’s a lot of this time-gated nonsense in the Destiny franchise. You can’t see the whole story in the game anymore. It’s only available for a while and then they take it down, ostensibly to make room for more content, but really because they want those sweet sweet FOMO logins and the real-money microtransactions they supposedly bring in. It may be true that logins correlate to microtransactions but I still think whoever came up with this idea ruined a lot of video games for the rest of us.

The other “benefit” of removing story content is that it encourages multimedia engagement or some shit. You have to go to youtube or a wiki to see or read about what happened in the story. Think about how ridiculous this is. Like if I ripped out pages from a book and told you to go read the cliff notes. Or if I deleted scenes from a show and told you could watch them in a grainy youtube video with somebody shouting over them? Of course, now that I wrote this, it’ll probably happen at some point: “Watch the latest season of Stranger Things before it’s gone forever! And we’re removing season two to make headspace for season four.”

Anyway, the presentation of the story sucks in Destiny 2 and people complain about it all the time, but most people are there to shoot things so Destiny doesn’t really care. They added a story timeline in the game with about as much effort and detail as I would put into a PowerPoint about the history of my t-shirts. (Spoiler alert: most of my t-shirts are black or white, with no logos or anything.) The point of the timeline is to tell you that Things Happened in Destiny 2, but look over here: a newish-looking alien to shoot, and here’s this new gun! But if you want it to look really cool, just use some space bucks (bought with $$$) to buy a skin for your gun! (It’s not pay-to-win unless you’re playing the true endgame which is pure Fashion for its own sake).

It’s not all bad. I did get to throw that one punch. I was playing this mission to extract a witchy woman from a crystal, or to extract a giant ghostly wormy worm from the witchy woman, or to save the mysterious guy who runs the PVP subgame. I’m not sure, maybe it was all three. Like I said the story is a bit hard to follow when you constantly hide pieces of it. The mission requires six players and includes matchmaking, thank god. Some content in Destiny 2 has no matchmaking so I can never see it as I have no friends in Destiny 2. That’s more of the story I will never know about.  But hey, I can always check the timeline and dream…

So, we’re blasting away, the six of us. I haven’t played the game in months so I don’t really remember which button does what and I keep dying. I realize I’m not even wearing my special boots that let me punch lightning bolts. I equip those but, to my horror, I see that they are not the same color as the rest of my outfit. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but the whole point of this mission is to see some cutscene that closes out the story for the season, and my character will be included in the cutscene in those mismatched pants. I stop again and find the right shade (out of dozens) that really ties my outfit together.

I go back to blasting along with my teammates and we’re shooting things and aliens are dying but there’s always more of them and we’re stuck in one big room so it doesn’t really matter. I might as well be playing Galaga or Space Invaders. I then notice some of the names of the people I’m playing with which breaks the immersion for me even more. It’s hard to imagine the far future in which people name their children Ballsack69 or GameWinnner2022 (not real handles but you get the idea).

I have to remind myself that the player characters in this game, or Guardians, aren’t people from this time. As best as I can figure it out, Guardians are corpses from long ago that are re-animated by the light-based magical technology of some kind of benevolent Death Star. The players are actually zombies of people who died long ago. Maybe they’re even dead gamers who came back to life in this immeasurably-far future or is it the not-so-distant future? I would check that timeline but it doesn’t go back really far. So maybe they adopted their silly gamer names as a way to recall their past lives.

The problem with that is that Guardians are not supposed to have any memories of their past lives. How to headcanon this one? Maybe when these Guardians are first re-animated in the ruins that cover the Earth, they read some old faded graffiti and they base their names on that. Okay, Ballsack69, I honor the respect you pay to the last writings of the lost world, but you do know the implications of the moniker you’ve adopted, right? It’s not exactly the sort of name you would want to be introduced by when meeting Lady Noseupington for tea.

The names are easy headcanon to reconcile. The magical technology is a bit harder. I get what they’re going for. The Arthur C. Clarke quote about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic is the basis for a lot of what goes on in the stories and books I write. I just have a hard time getting my head around what is actually meant to be happening with the magical science technology in Destiny 2.

The game likes to throw the term “paracausal” around a lot as an explanation for magical science happenings and the cool guns. I think it uses it to mean things that happen outside of casualty: Not that we can’t see all the hidden workings that happen behind the scenes, but things that are happening outside cause and effect. The game uses the term paracausality as if it is some new force or power like electromagnetism or necromancy.  

But causality isn’t some force that we can codify and measure like electromagnetism, it is simply the idea that effect follows cause. So, something “para-,“ or outside causality, would be outside the idea that effect follows cause? Or that some effects don’t have causes? Or Magic in one understanding of the word. But, like it or not, even non-science magic is causal in nature. When Harry Potter says “expecto patronum!” that is the cause, what follows is the effect of some flashy reindeer or some such. In this way, we can say magic is casual. True Magic would be something like utter random madness. Effect untethered from cause.

For example, if I fire a “paracausal” gun in Destiny 2, it shoots a bullet. I pull the trigger and things die, and if that isn’t cause and effect, what is it? A “true” magic “paracausal” gun would sometimes turn into a parakeet and sometimes change the color blue to green and sometimes tell you it’s time for tea, and sometimes grant you true love and sometimes win the Superbowl all by itself. Complete utter random madness. No way to tell what will happen next. But that’s not Destiny 2. Destiny 2 is: shoot gun:kill aliens::cause:effect.

I get that what Destiny 2 may be getting at is the idea that we may never understand all of reality, especially what happens at the quantum levels. That there are forces we have yet to harness that may appear like magic to us. Like when a space witch summons her space ghost worms to possess some dead aliens. It defies normal understanding of the laws of the universe as we have come to know them, even in the far future. All that may be para-understanding, but it’s not paracausal. We simply don’t see how the space witch’s spell works. Maybe it’s nanobots, maybe it’s some as-of-yet-undiscovered aspects of quantum levels of reality. Maybe it’s wormholes made by her space ghost worms. 

It could be the case that our real non-game universe works at the behest of tiny demons who live in the quantum world and that stars beseech these demons for great fusion power in exchange for the souls they kill when they go supernova. As crazy as that would be, it would still be a causal relationship. And if we knew exactly how many souls it takes for a star to live a billion years and could understand the underlying processes and measure the exact flow of quantum demon energy, would we still call that magic or simply a kind of demonic science?

But to get back on the point, if I found a gun that somehow did a “magical” thing it wouldn’t be outside of cause and effect, it’s just that cause and effect are shrouded. Maybe some super AI robot figured it out and made my “paracausal” gun to take advantage of some invisible quantum process but then went mad when it realized the true scope and nature of the panfoamic everythingverse and so couldn’t explain what they discovered to anyone else.

I suppose the best I can do with Destiny 2 is to reason that this is a sort of dystopia in which even the most erudite persons have forgotten even this fundamental logic: that there can be cause and effect even to processes that are inscrutable. Or they’ve given up on trying to figure out the actual science of what may be happening.

To us, living in the present heyday of science, potential explanations for “paracausal” happenings are plentiful, from nanobots to quantum tunneling. I can probably come up with some pseudo-sciency theoretical explanation for everything that happens in Destiny 2 and still maintain the idea of cause and effect. Demons who infest their hosts as ghostly worms and grant cosmic powers? How about quantum AIs that manifest their circuits on any sufficiently complex molecule chains and then begin to build nanomachine projectors utilizing everything from dark-matter gravity to micro-fusion. You know what, I feel better when I explain it, at least to myself.

All this said I can’t exclude the possibility that there is True Magic in our reality, not-processable processes that we can never understand: things that just happen. Maybe that’s how the quantum world works. Things just happen not because but sanscause. Maybe there’s a way to harness this power or force to do Magical things that have effects without cause. But how would you control something like that? As soon as I tell this sanscause force to do something, to have an effect, am I not the original cause of that effect? Do I break the universe by creating such a sanscause effect?

But since we can never experience everything without becoming everything, we can’t rule out that somewhere out there, sanscause things happen in the quantum world and even in the macro world, without explanation, without cause and effect. Maybe Bigfoot just IS sometimes and sometimes he just ISN’T. Maybe I’ll wink out of existence as I finish this paragraph, just like Bigfoot.

Phew. Still here, or was I gone for a picosecond? How can I ever be sure what happened in that instant when I pressed the Enter key? 

These are the things I’m thinking about while I’m in that big room shooting aliens on that final mission of the season in Destiny 2. But it’s okay. I have five un-thematically named buddies with me. We’ll be alright, Me, Ballsack69, and the rest. Then I realize that two of them have disappeared and we are just four. Was it some kind of paracausal hiccup or did a couple of them just get tired of this mission? We’ll never know, but hey that’s the paracausal life for you.

We move on to the final stage of the mission which is another big room with lots of aliens who I think are dead aliens brought back to life, or aliens possessed by ghostly space worms, or some kind of ancient race of anthropomorphic bees (they live in a “hive” and have a “queen,” (sometimes a “king”) and sometimes they’re just shadowy ghosts of dead bees?). What the F is going on? I think I understand the whole paracausal thing better than the story.

Anyway, negotiations with the dead demon bees break down pretty quickly and it’s on to the shooting. But there’s a new element to all this: It seems one of our friendly NPC (who is a zombie robot, I think) isn’t going to just stand there but will actually help out for once. Well, he does just stand there but he puts up this healing shield which me, Ballsack69, and the team run into whenever the firefight gets too hot.

And the firefight gets too hot. I think it’s meant for six players and not four so there are a lot of dead demon bees running around. And presumably, because this is a story mission that everyone wants to see from the boring beginning, no new help is coming. Still, I have my guns and a sword that I like to swing sometimes when I find the rare batteries for it. I wish it was a big punching gauntlet but that’s never going to happen. I hold out paracausal hope that one day that rusty sword will magically transform into a futuristic punching glove. I think if that were the case, I might have to make friends in Destiny 2 and try to tackle all the hardest content. What punchy glory that would be.

But in the fight against the dead demon bees, I can’t even use my regular punches. There’s just too much going on. I can’t even get in punching range. Too many bad guys shooting in every single direction and only four targets for them. Then we start dying. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for space warrior zombies powered by paracausal light. Our little flying I-phones revive us after a few seconds: Subscription-based immortality. Except there are parts in this game where if everybody dies at once, you have to start the whole stage or room from the beginning. Sigh. I hate going back to checkpoints in any game. Let me fight more bad guys but don’t take away my progress.

So, we die and then die again. There’s a part where the main dead demon bee dude charges up a Dragonball-level attack and if we don’t all shoot his death sphere before it finishes charging, we all die instantly. I get this pretty quickly but I can’t tell if my teammates get it. Too many bullets flying around. And in this game that is all about pushing people to play together, the text chat is inconsistent at best. I don’t even think it works at all half the time.

I’ve heard we’re all supposed to join some “Discord Server” and set up our “mics” for proper “comms.” I don’t even own a mic and I don’t know if a Discord Server is an Apple store app or if it’s hidden in the murky depths of the Dark Web. It certainly sounds like some kind of demonic entity: The Server of Discord, the Presenter of Bickering, and the Waiter of Ill Feeling. I don’t think I’m ready to make the sacrifices this demon may require just to talk to people.

Now, I’ve grown to like Ballsack69. He’s really trying, he’s jumping and shooting, and even throwing out special attacks. But, here’s the thing: I don’t know if I want to hear him talk. It’s not about what he has to say, though I’ve heard people say some nonsense online. It’s that he exists in our time, in our reality. What he has to say will ruin what little immersion I have left. Maybe he’s an RPGer who only talks in character. Does anyone actually do this in Destiny 2? Would that be better or cringingly worse? I honestly don’t know.

What can I do? I can quit the mission and start all over again from the beginning but that’s like another 45 minutes of blasting the same rooms again and my brain is getting tired. So, I change my equipment again, (making sure it’s color-matched) and this time go with the chest armor that makes my super One-Punch-Man flying punch more special. Then I run out and try to grab as many of the paracausal balls of light that somehow have weight to them to charge up this ultimate thunder punch. I will only be able to use it once before the main dead demon bee dude’s Dragonball charge attack kills us all again.

Do I hit the dude as hard as I can now? Can my super special attack take him out in one blow? That seems unlikely. I wait, and keep shooting, trying to figure out what to do. Then I realize that the dead demon bee dude isn’t the level boss here, it’s charging instant-death death sphere. And then I remember we can shoot it and it takes damage… In my mind, I hear Arnold Schwarzenegger speak to me from the 80s action-horror classic Predator: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

I see the Dragonball death sphere form again and I say to Ballsack69: “I got this.” But he can’t hear me through my monitor. I launch myself fist first. This is the one saving grace of Destiny 2: That I don’t use some stupid light sword or big bullet but fly with my fist in front of me like some goddamned paracausal superhero. And as I’m flying through the air, I wonder if the Champions of Punchalla are watching. Do they take notice of such last-ditch displays of unarmed combat? 

Then to my instant horror, I fly right through the charging death sphere. Did I miss it? Or is it immaterial? But I shot it with bullets. It was bleeding. I have just enough flying umph left to turn around for one more pass. I can’t hit the ball but maybe I can at least punch the ground and look cool doing it. I land in a joyous AOE explosion which, to my surprise, destroys the charging death sphere and kills the main dead demon bee dude. The enemy is defeated and the mission is won.

At least that’s what I think happened. Hard to tell anything in Destiny 2 with all the bullets and explosions and flashing lights. But I think I did… something. I saw some pretty big damage numbers fly when I landed.

Ballsack69 comes over and shoots at me. No friendly fire in PVE (from most guns?) so it doesn’t hurt me. I think it’s the only way he can communicate his excitement at my timely display of martial prowess. Or he’s mad that the mission took so long because I was color-coordinating my outfit, or he’s just a griefer. I guess I’ll never know. The screen fades and the cutscene begins and I realize that I’ll never see him again. Goodbye, Ballsack69, my paracausal zombie friend. I will speak well of you to Lady Noseupington.