After watching Joe's review about how the story got chopped up, I did some hunting and found this. Possible spoilers, read at your own risk. [spoiler] The below I posted in a comment to a thread about an alternative story. Now seeing how most NDAs are invalid once the product has released I firmly believe I'm safe in sharing the Destiny story when I was invited to a User Research Case Study done by Bungie in early 2013. Note: Test Group = the people in my testing session. Group = Crow's Group. A run down of how the Destiny story was around early 2013. Crow ends up being introduced earlier on in the story, in the place of the Exo Stranger, which is interesting to note. This story revolved around discovering that there was something wrong with the Speaker, and the Traveler. As a Guardian, you were abducted by this yet to be named group led by Crow. In the second mission on Earth you got to a certain point, and he swooped down knocked you out, and brought you to this secret base on Mars. There you met with some Guardians that abandoned the Traveler, the Speaker, and the Light so to speak. It was led by Crow, a burly old human, the Exo Stranger (Who evidently in this variant of the story was male, but had relatively the same personality), and one or two Guardians who lost their Ghosts. It had this predictable plot where the Traveler was the cause of the collapse of the Golden Age because this group found out through their travels that the Darkness was a spawn of the Traveler rather than it's rival. Essentially when the Traveler was brought to Earth it unleashed the Darkness and took over the majority of the technology that Humanity used, turned it against them and nearly wiped it out. As that happened centuries ago the truth was twisted through the speakers that the Traveler protected Earth in it's darkest moment rather than destroying it. They send you to Venus to lure out a Gatekeeper, and steal it's core which supposedly held an AI that could help bring the truth to light about the Traveler, and the Speaker to the citizens of the City. Around this point I recall going to Mars to retrieve the remains of another powerful AI that the Cabal was repurposing for their own use. Then at the end of that mission the test group was sent about 10 hours further into the game where we assaulted a Hive base on the Moon, after the group discovered from an AI that the Hellmouth (IIRC it was a different name then) was a housing for a super weapon that could revive the Traveler from it's dormant state so it could wreck havoc on Humanity again. That's all I vividly remember from the story from that session. I wanted something different, but it felt like yet another halo game. The planet progression was different too, it was Earth > Venus > Mars > Moon. Also the deactivated Spider Walker near the start of the released game is a reference to the Spider Walker in the internal build I played where the Fallen dropped down a bunch of Shanks, Vandals, Driegs, and a.. spider walker. Luckily around mission 7 after returning from Venus to grab an old Starmap I could finally defeat the thing. [/spoiler]