On May 21, Bungie announced that it will be making a final update to Destiny 2. Contrary to prior plans, this coming Tuesday, June 9, will mark the end of the franchise’s 12-year run. The servers will remain online until further notice, just as they have for Destiny, but the game therein—the world, the characters and the dangling threads of their stories, the gear, the systems, the very motion of the stars and the planets arrayed beneath them—all of that will be rendered unto stasis. A clockwork universe wound up one last time and left to loop.

When I read this, my day came to a stop. I don’t remember what I was in the middle of doing, but I had to pause and sit with this news. In some regard, I have been sitting with it for the past 2 weeks.

I have for some time now been threatening to write a retrospective on my time playing Destiny, and the truth is it’s already been more than a year since I last played. If there is any time to write my Guardian’s epitaph, it is now.

Only… I still don’t know what to say. I don’t have an elegant, articulate synopsis of what 10 years of playing Destiny meant to me. 

After all this time, all I have are memories. 

Continue reading “The end of forever” →