So, I've played through the story a couple times, cuz hey, I actually liked it.
I've typed up this little wrap-up of the races, their apparent motives, and what we do and don't know. Originally, this was a response to one of those halfwit haters who can't understand the concept of progressive storytelling, but I thought I'd just put it here for all to see, not just in a reply to jackass troll #4368752. Here we go...
The Cabal are simply brutish imperialists, endlessly advancing and conquering worlds. The Grimoire says, "You could follow a trail of broken planets back to the Cabal homeworld (sic)". It seems that they don't much care for anything more than conquering for conquering's sake. They're just a warlike race, from what I know.
The Fallen are scavengers. They go where there's loot to be had, from either abandoned warzones and cities, or by preying on what they think are weaker races. They do seem to be fighting the Hive a lot. This might be due to the Hive just being murderous of other species, or the Fallen trying to claim their land/treasures.
The Hive are a more bestial, primal race. They have colonies like insects, and there's a lot of dimorphism. We don't know if they're all one species, or a collective of symbiotic species. This is left as a mystery, since they're the more horrific of the races. This is a common storytelling trope - not revealing too much info on the scary monsters - since people tend to be more afraid of things they don't understand. I'm sure we'll learn a lot more about them in The Dark Below. All we really know about them at this point is that they're closely related to The Darkness, and those wizards are dicks.
The Vex is not really a race, but rather one consciousness spread across space and time. They work toward an end that is likely unfathomable to our characters, since we're just high-tech humans, and mechanical hive-minds probably have different wants or needs (if they even have wants or needs). We do know that they're trying to build a network across the solar system, perhaps even across the universe. The Vex also seem to be an imperial race, in regard to their attempts toward this goal.
The Vex found the Darkness in The Black Garden (or maybe they built the garden around it), and saw it as a way to become more powerful, thus they supported it and protected it, in hopes for some of its power. Perhaps the Vex were even trying to control it. The Traveler is the enemy of The Darkness, which is why The Vex are at odds with it and humanity.
The Darkness wants to extinguish all light and life from the universe. This is obviously bad news for all the races, which gives each race reason to fight against the Vex. That's why you see the Fallen and Cabal fighting them on Earth, Venus, and Mars.
At the end of the story, we destroy the fragment of Darkness that had enveloped the shard of The Traveler, thus pushing back the Darkness (for the time being) and restoring The Traveler. And now the real fight begins. We've won the battle, but not the war. The Traveler is awoken, and The Vex and Hive will be fighting harder than ever to destroy it.
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2 RepliesOk, I can see a lot of the stuff you've got does make sense. I've had a running theory that I've been working on for a while. Starting with Cabal, a lot like you said, an imperialistic group of brutes that conquer or destroy other races, as shown by the Psions being a probable different species than the main Cabal forces. Now, while they have been conquering worlds, they still haven't exactly been left untouched. In the Grimoire, theres a ghost fragment that says the ghost overheard them talking about fleeing something. This could possibly be the Darkness. So they may also have lost their homeworld, and are trying to make up for it by creating a massive empire. Or they may be trying to protect their home by creating a huge buffer zone of planets that they can use to defend themselves and keep their homeworld safe for a while at least. The Fallen are the most interesting race to me. I think that they seem to be a race that was once actually a lot like mankind, and had been found by the Traveler. After they made contact with the Traveler, they reached an enlightened era that was the equivalent of the human golden age, which is why when you shoot them in the head, light spills out of their necks. They are also terrified of the Hive, who seem to be the Darkness' servants, and model their servitors after the Traveler in a sense. However, some sort of social or cultural upheaval happened, and they may have actually obliterated their own planet and destroyed their social structure, reducing them to marauding pirates and scavengers, who then follow in the Traveler's wake in order to try and gain its favor back, but costing them even more of their advancement and driving them further into their marauder lifestyle. The Hive are the servants of the Darkness. They seem to be polytheistic, with their gods "living" among them and guiding their society in between periods of dormancy. However, they have a god above all gods, which is the Darkness. The Darkness controls them and instructs them on what to do, which is why they hunt the Traveler and seek to extinguish light. They also might be able to corrupt other species, leading to the diversity of their forms, a lot like the zerg from StarCraft. But this worship of the darkness is why they have that growth that spreads wisps of darkness and why they worked to corrupt the Traveler using its fragment in one of the missions. The Vex are, and pardon the pun here but it seemed fitting, vexing to me. They seem to be incredible logical and trying to accomplish that great goal of all interstellar hyper intelligent robot races and wipe out all sentient life in the galaxy because of their irrational behavior and damaging effects on their surroundings. However, they also seem to have some other motives that revolve around whatever it is in the Garden. If I remember correctly, somewhere it says that they may have actually created that entity, either intentionally or through some accident. Either way, they didnt understand it, and couldn't comprehend its power, so they came to one logical conclusion: to worship it in order to attain its favor and power. My best guess is that whatever it is, it may be a fragment of the Darkness taking a physical form due to something the Vex did, thus creating a separate entity from the Darkness that the Hive worship. This entity drives them forward, much like the Hive, and pushes them towards galactic conquest and some hidden motive. These are my theories on the races at least.