Immaru said something about it but it was vague. My impression of it was him freezing the universe how he imaged it should be. So that it’s perfect and no one suffers, by not dying or living. Just existing. It seemed goofy I’m trying to find if.

[url=https://youtu.be/v9H6Y6iecCY?si=1VBBuqs352PqlvfG]Immaru describes the Final Shape[/url] Words used are flat and static while he describes it as winning by switching the game off.

Flat and static, unchanging like a picture. Turning off a game, freezing a moment in time before it’s natural end. Along his views of what the universe should be, parts changed/removed/shifted. Have you seen the new exotic Tessellation? Different colors cut to fit a shape, a melding of Dark and Light below it. The foundational powers of the cosmos holding up a designed collage. Basically going to make a cosmic snow globe. A perfect scene frozen forever. No life or death, no suffering. How dull. Prefer the Hive ideal.

Well I mean that’s the point. The Witness sees the chaos of life as something that only causes pain in the end, the end result being the only thing that matters in the grand calculus of the universe. The Witness isn’t some eldritch cosmic god, in the end it’s a collection of grief, trauma and nihilism of billions of long dead people sharpened into an all-powerful rage that would burn the universe. I hope they make that clear by the end. After the campaign, raid and potentially matchmade activity to finally defeat the Witness, it should have been torn low. Reduced to a pathetic little thing that can’t do much of anything anymore. Something that should be left to die. The Witness isn’t going to be a satisfying end to this saga, because the saga itself was never particularly well defined or wholly satisfying itself. But it can deliver a satisfying end for the Final Shape.

It saw the intervention of the Traveler as the cause of cosmic chaos. Which is silly cause the intervention saved his species from the Vex. That’s why it isn’t satisfying, it’s lame and doesn’t make sense. The Saga was well defined enough. What we are getting is someone’s reluctant fan fic. I don’t see them doing much. Tbh, they are just going to wave their hands and use word salad.

But that’s precisely the point. The Traveler visited planets and raised civilisations up, offering no guidance or greater purpose. When it eventually moved on, sooner or later that species would be destroyed or die off. The Witness isn’t looking at all that death and calling the Traveler evil for it, that would be hypocritical. The Witness is calling the entire cycle pointless, that allowing a species to prosper beyond their own natural limits and prolonging their existence is causing needless pain. Just look at Humanity for instance, by the time of the Ares 1 mission we were already facing extinction, whether by overpopulation, climate change or the Vex. Without the Traveler’s intervention we would’ve been wiped out, but the Witness sees it as prolonging the inevitable, allowing countless others who would never have been born otherwise to live and die. It’s ironically a very machine like response.

You put the cart in front of the horse. The Witness species turned on the Traveler and caused it to start traveling and seeking others to combat the Witness and the Vex threat. It didn’t leave them and uplift any during the years the Witness people were growing. It stayed with them. We saw the video. It minimized the impact it had on the cosmos until they forced it to go to others. And this was long before the Hive. So we are talking billions of years ago. The Witness caused the chaos and suffering it moaned about it because it grew an ego by whatever it learned from the Veil. The cycle wasn’t pointless. Our creator made a way to save us from its other creations. That gives the cycle meaning. Letting us all succumb to the Vex would be pointless. Holding us by the hand defeats the point of being alive and free will. As said in Clovis Journal. But a bored species who learned ultimate power got egomaniacal and decided they were special enough to claim the cosmos for its own and kill every species the Traveler helped. It is hypocritical and stupid. I mean you’re assessment of humanity is absurdly biased. Climate change and overpopulation? The latter has been claimed throughout the 1900’s to present. And yet we’ve doubled twice over? Just like climate change. Heck fifty years ago they thought it’d be a freeze. Not one prediction comes true. And this illustrates how personal feelings of doom and gloom aren’t inherently true and don’t justify extreme action.

The Witness’s people did cause the Traveler to leave them, but who says they were the first or that it would’ve remained forever? The only implication of that nature we get is that the Traveler is initially buried, but it obviously wasn’t made by them. You even specify stayed with them while they were growing, as the Traveler did during our Golden Age. Perhaps the advancements were simply not finished. The Traveler also very much enjoys offering choice to beings. It’s entirely possible it remained simply to see if these people it had raised would attempt to harness divinity themselves. And where are you pulling this information about the Traveler uplifting civilisations to combat the Vex and that conflict predating its discovery by the Witness’s people? For all we know the Vex did not exist at this point in time, but with how they work that’s difficult to ascertain. Though if they can only travel between timelines and not through time itself, that would still very much be a possibility. Also I’m not talking about Humanity from our reality, I’m talking within the Destiny universe. Earth is described as being overcrowded in an old Rise of Iron Grimoire card. Micah actively makes mention of climate change poisoning the air and killing off species. Humanity had actively begun constructing underwater facilities where military personal took vacations. And regardless of these natural occurrences, the Vex provide a much slower ticking clock on Venus. But in large part your main catching point is seeing the Witness wiping out civilisations and calling that hypocritical. The Witness is attempting to end the cycle, stop the gears from turning. Without its intervention all these different races would live, be raised up and eventually, when their time came, die, only for new life to replace them. That’s the point. It actually might well explain its habit of recruiting a single Disciple from a species and giving them a Pyramid that, at least in the case of Rhulk, acted like a Mausoleum of sorts for his species. In its twisted mind in intervening it has spared the generations to come from all pain to follow. It doesn’t even blame the Traveler for its actions, saying as much in the cutscene that became Lightfall. But again, let me reiterate, I and most others would see this way of thinking on this large a scale as ludicrous. In the same way MCU Thanos wiping out half the population of the universe so that the other might thrive is seen as ludicrous. Bungie only need to convince us that this character believes that. MCU Thanos failed to save his species despite proposing a plan that he believes could’ve worked and in that traumatic extinction event he was galvanised to carry out his plan for all other species. Bungie need to give us the same explanation with the Witness. Not vague poetic waxing.

Whose to say? You made your own counter argument there. The video showed it come up from the ground and thus their whole idea that it posed a threat and merited such extreme action was baseless; the sole example was utopia. The Witness became worse than what they were imagining was the worst case scenario. Thanos people tried and failed with alternatives, he had a basis. It’s not about agreeing, it’s cohesive logic of the perspective. Where do I get it from? A few places. The lorebook Unveiling details the birth of the Vex and the reasons why the Gardner added paracausality to the cosmos, to stop them. For the timing, we work backwards and yes it’s a rough estimate. Oryx’s Dreadnaught alone is older than Earth. So adding in more time for pre-dread. Five billion. The Witness had been doing his thing for X amount of time, then add the span of time the Traveler spent uplifting its people from a nomadic people to civilization to the high tech state we see. Which they termed eons. Eons has been used to describe billions. So give it three, the Witness gathering his people up until the hive and the development of his people. 8 billion Then the basic cosmic timeline of big bang to habitable worlds being made. 9-10 billion Out of 13.5ish . So about a quarter of all cosmic time isn’t accountable. So fair enough just wanted to give you my thinking process. Can’t say I remember anything about pre-Traveler state of affairs but okay. To not intervene dooms billions. The idea that some species [i]might[/i] replace us is hypothetical and isn’t what the Witness wants anyway. Another difference between Thanos and the Witness. Thanos worked towards his ideal. The Witness’ problem and it’s solution are at odds.

[quote]The lorebook Unveiling details the birth of the Vex and the reasons why the Gardner added paracausality to the cosmos, to stop them.[/quote] Even if we were to take Unveiling as a reliable source of information, which it isn’t, that’s a twist of the Gardeners motivation within the text. It’s not specifically seeking to stop the Vex, it simply wants to game to progress past the point of the same inevitable conclusion. It’s not even clear if the Vex existed in the flower game, it could well be that the pattern of repeated singular conversion to one outcome became or created the Vex when our universe was created. [quote]Can’t say I remember anything about pre-Traveler state of affairs but okay. [/quote] It’s not nearly touched on enough in-lore tragically, but even though we started in the present day with the Ares One mission we’d already diverged so much from our own universe. [quote]To not intervene dooms billions. The idea that some species [i]might[/i] replace us is hypothetical and isn’t what the Witness wants anyway.[/quote] But that’s the point. The Witness doesn’t seek to allow that cycle to continue. It wants to end it altogether. Again, it’s sticking a pipe in the gears and causing them to stop turning. No advancement, no chaos, no clashing or cooperation. It might even be why it refers to the Traveler as being made both victim and perpetrator especially within the grand calculus of existence. The Witness isn’t on an anti-Traveler agenda. It’s goals come into conflict with our giant orb but it’s more against existence itself. End all life as we know it, end all suffering. Which again, leads us back to how Bungie handle this character in Final Shape. Unless they want to introduce some last minute twist, there’s only two approaches. The Voldemort approach Tear down the Witness so that by the end of it we see it laid bare as the temper tantrum of a species too blind to see the good that came alongside the bad. The Thanos approach Show us the trauma and loss that coloured the perception of the Witness’s people before they turned themselves into a monster. Show that real emotion drives this entity despite its appearance of indifference and have us convince it that, in those final moments before it’s destruction, that it was wrong. But hey, who knows. Hopefully once marketing picks back up in April we get a few glimpses of how the expansion is handling the Witness and we can start theorising with anything that isn’t the cobbled together scraps rushed out the door because the executives wanted another expansion.

And on what basis are you throwing out a whole book? Cause you know Bungie only said the Gardner/Winnower/Garden section wasn’t literal and is more complicated than the book presents. How you people take that an an excuse to throw the whole thing out is stupid to me. Just using it as an excuse to dismiss lore than contradicts your ideas. Well if that was the state of things pre Golden Age then it’s not even based on what was our present time but some deluded ideological version. You’re stating the end goal as his motivation when the video clearly states they deemed the Traveler too dangerous and manipulative with its Light, posing a danger. So no, their argument is the Traveler has manipulated things so badly it’s also a victim of its machinations. And a universe so corrupted can’t be redeemed.

The book has never been reliable from the start, Eris Morn actively warns us of this fact when she decrypts the first message and gives it to us. It was being beamed straight through a Pyramid Artifact for crying out loud. Unless corroborated by another source we can trust the information is unreliably factually. [quote]You’re stating the end goal as his motivation when the video clearly states they deemed the Traveler too dangerous and manipulative with its Light, posing a danger. [/quote] Except it doesn’t. [quote]They already knew much about the Light. How it could bend the laws of the universe and create life. But they came to realize that it could bring ruin... just as easily. The cosmic events it set in motion could wipe out entire civilizations in a heartbeat... without reason. And so they saw the Light not as a source of prosperity... but of unfettered chaos. [/quote] The Traveler isn’t actually mentioned in this context at all, just the Light itself as fundamental paracausal force of the universe. Immediately following this it touches more on the Final Shape of course: [quote]By studying the Veil, they came to know the Darkness. A power that was shaped by thought and consciousness. And in the Darkness, they found the means to carve away the chaos of existence. To calcify it into a final shape. Eternal... and perfected. [/quote] [quote]Thus began the Witness's pursuit... its campaign to impose meaning on a meaningless universe. [/quote] The Witness sees the finite nature of life in the universe as lacking purpose, with no set path to follow or goal to achieve. The Traveler did not provide these, so it seeks to do what it could not. Render reality into its imposed form, whatever that is, forever.

And what would Eris know about it? She knows the origin story? Didn’t think so. Which means she’s in no position to judge the accuracy of the content. An ignorant person making a claim isn’t evidence or proof of anything. That crap happens all the time, we wouldn’t have our alliance if we listened to every naysayer. Everyone says we shouldn’t trust the hive but the BoS is taken at face value. So no, you don’t get to dismiss it out of hand because Eris has said the same about the Hive and you don’t toss out their book. Unveiling is the only lore that touches on the origin and motivations of the creator and the mindset of the Gardner is repeated in BL lore with Clovis. You have no lore to cite to cast doubt on it. I’m supposed to ignore how you’re ideas break if Unveiling is true? And I’m supposed to believe that has nothing to do with your dismissal of it? No dice. Double standards/hypocrisy. Oh, so there is some other entity besides the Traveler using Light to manipulate the cosmos? Wanna point that out in lore somewhere? Oh that’s right, there isn’t. So they could only be speaking of the Traveler using Light. Making that argument a silly attempt at semantics. It began its pursuit after the Traveler rejected its attempt to take divinity and fled. And you deliberately omitted that part from your quote. “The Gardner would not allow it and so it fled their world. But they would not be deterred. Having witnesses the truth in the darkness. They used it’s binding power to merge themselves into the salvation they craved. Thus began the Witness pursuit…” The Witness people powered up to take it on and chased after it.

[quote]Everyone says we shouldn’t trust the hive but the BoS is taken at face value.[/quote] The Books of Sorrow are a historical and religious text written by the Hive for their own consumption. Oryx actively hid the blueprint for Touch of Malice within them because he wanted his killer to understand him and his journey because he thought anything mighty enough to slay him would worship the Deep and mantle him. There’s also the fact that the Books of Sorrow have always had particular pieces that stuck out. The Traveler being blamed for the oncoming God Wave. The Siblings Bargain with the Worm Gods. Savathûn’s note about the pages being filled with lies. These are all aspects of the Books that have been scrutinised. I myself have always refuted the first claim because I have never ascribed to the Traveler being evil or even selfish in its intentions. Unveiling on the other hand is made up of message being addressed to us, the Guardian, in real time. They are attempting to make an argument, to us, to convince us that the author is true and that we should join with them. Do you see why there’s a discrepancy? It’s why I have always reiterated, even before the infamous Unveiling being metaphorical statement was made, that the default position should be scepticism. [quote]Unveiling is the only lore that touches on the origin and motivations of the creator and the mindset of the Gardner is repeated in BL lore with Clovis.[/quote] [quote]"It always ends the same," the gardener complained. "This one stupid pattern!"[/quote] [quote]"They're as dull as carbon monoxide poisoning," the gardener groused, although carbon monoxide did not yet exist, and neither did anything that could be poisoned. The gardener kneeled to flick a patch of sod with their trowel. It struck an open flower, causing it to shut.[/quote] Small quotes like these paint the Gardener in a negative light to the benefit of the Winnower, the claimed author, and you never once stop to question why it would have any reason to lie? [quote]I’m supposed to ignore how you’re ideas break if Unveiling is true? And I’m supposed to believe that has nothing to do with your dismissal of it? No dice. Double standards/hypocrisy.[/quote] Not to mention Unveiling being true doesn’t actually toss out anything I’ve touched on regarding the Witness, because the Witness isn’t the Winnower. The only thing it would confirm is that the Vex predate our universe entirely. The motivations of the Traveler or Gardener have nothing to do with the Witness. [quote]Oh, so there is some other entity besides the Traveler using Light to manipulate the cosmos?[/quote] The Arkborn are an entire race of sentient arc energy. Your issue here is you are asking for an alternate puppet master, when there isn’t. Nothing in the quote from the cutscene implies any guiding force being the observed Light, it’s simply natural phenomenon. It may be paracausal, but it’s a part of our universe. [quote]"The Light lives in all places....In all things...you can block it...even try to trap it...but the Light always finds its way."[/quote] [quote]It began its pursuit after the Traveler rejected its attempt to take divinity and fled. And you deliberately omitted that part from your quote. [/quote] The Witness pursuing the Traveler to enact the Final Shape doesn’t imply actually change anything I’ve said though? The Witness’s pursuit of the Traveler began when it fled, yes, but as soon as it’s people discovered the Veil and decided to bring it back to the Traveler and attempt to reshape reality they sought the Final Shape. The Traveler leaving changed nothing about their motivation.

It was written by Oryx for his killer to mantle him. To understand him. Doesn’t mean it’s factually true, especially when you can cite things in that are wrong. Where’s the corroborating proof? And since when do you get to arbitrarily apply this standard selectively? Because all you just did was admit that a book can have false information in it and still be otherwise viable… Thanks for that. No, I think you’re trying to use obvious faults with the book to just wave your hands and invalidate the whole thing. Dude, who do you think made detailed posts explaining why some parts aren’t true and some are not? I’ve already been over this here. That the Witness was trying to convince us of something doesn’t automatically mean everything said is a lie. That’s a discrepancy of basic logic, that because you don’t like the source that everything is false. And it just so happens it needs to be false for you not to be wrong is just pure coincidence… Oh I knew quotes like that were meant to make it look bad. But that’s because the Gardner isn’t wholly good to begin with. That’s an assumption that the game intentionally established in order to break later. Light = good and Darkness = bad. Everything since Forsaken has been about changing that perception. Making friends with enemies, the Hive gaining Light, our using Darkness. However that quote you used, when you add in the rest it shows the Gardner added Light to prevent the pattern from taking over. In other words, saving the other species from being consumed. And the Witness posing as the Winnower claimed this was a bad thing. Now, either you are silly or hopelessly naive not to see that for not being true. It doesn’t invalidate the description of the sequence of events. It’s draws doubts on the [i]conclusions and opinions[/i] of the Witness as Winnower. Just like when the Hive in the BoS say their way is right, that opinion being wrong doesn’t invalidate the historical accuracy of events listed. And a being made of Arc energy isn’t the same as the Traveler terraforming and altering living species to be more than what they are, and be able to give said power to others. It isn’t the same as Light, Light encompasses all aspects of it. Not just one. Bad semantics. And if Light was in everything and everyone, how come the Cage stopped our Light? We can extract it from what sources besides the Traveler and what it has imbued with its power? Didn’t think so! Quoting the speaker about something he knows nothing about and was actually disproven on base D2. Did we go to a rock or a stream of water and get Light from there? No, we went to a big freaking piece of the Traveler. Tell me you aren’t desperate…. Except that you’re ignoring that their evaluation on the state of the universe being flawed and needing changing was predicated on the Traveler using Light to potentially cause chaos and change things against natural law…. Light doesn’t do anything on its own, it takes someone to use it. If anything, Darkness posed the danger since it was freely obtainable. As shown in Inspiral. Whereas Light is only ever used or given out by the Traveler. So yeah. You called it wrong and trying to throw out lore you don’t like cause it pops bubbles? You wanna rub elbows with the spinfoil people, be my guest. And also should note, the Witness would of had access to the Veil and through it, a way to know what happened. Cosmic memory bank remember?

👏🤣 HAHAHAHAH! Ooohh this was absolutely beautiful, Lasombra! Thank you once again! I, for one, believe that whatever the original intention with Unveiling was has now been subverted and sabotaged by others at Bungo into something a whole lot stupider! Or maybe they’ll go with whatever the original intent was but executed way worse! Maybe they’ll excuse it as another wonderful experiment! I can only hope! Also, if I’m being completely honest here, the fact that people can even have arguments about what the motivation of the [i]main antagonist[/i] in a narrative even IS at [i]this[/i] point of it should spell out a preeeeetty clear picture of the overall execution so far! Way to go, Bungo! HAHAHAH!

I’ve always thought Unveiling was a reimagining of the OG ending, the Ulan-Tan theory of Symmetry. I think they’ve been fairly settled on that since base D2, when they made the Grove of Ulan-Tan on Io and the Travelers Dream cutscene showing the final battle on Io. I’ve been looking at the ending through that lens the whole time. They just had to work it into the retcons and developing narrative. So it’ll end with Sacrificing our creator instead of our powers to stop the baddie. It’s the ultimate fail, in my books. They thought they could do better than Staten and had to tuck tail and use his idea anyway.

Hold on a sec, since when was Ulan-Tan’s business with symmetry part of the original ending?

Because Darkness was actually Light, just corrupted. That’s why base D1 fallen called our Guardians ‘Darkness’. There’s also some TTK talking about Light being corrupted before being consumed or something along those lines. Then the leaks about what the base game was going to be: Crow intercepting us after our being reborn and warning us about the Vanguard being corrupt and knowing that Darkness was also Light. Think of the question posed by Ulan-Tan and the severity of the Vanguards reaction to his ideas. Would you sacrifice immortality and space magic to stop the Darkness? And he was exiled for it. When we all know that the good guys should be willing to do that. So when you take that stuff and then how the story was meant to end definitively? We were going to beat all the minor enemies first then deal with the Formless One in the final battle. So with all threats removed, we would no longer need the power. We would be the last threat and sacrificing the powers to save the cosmos is a nice bow tied ending. That’s why when I saw the grove of Ulan-Tan and the Dream cutscene? It was the only theory from that card to be pulled into D2. I’ve know it was going to end like that somehow, It’s just been a matter of how we

Wait, is Darkness originally being just “corrupted Light” actually confirmed to be what the original plan was? I’d never even heard of that before now! If that’s true and the ending involved sacrificing the power of the Light itself, then the original plan NEEDED to die so Bungo could continue their live-service trashfire indefinitely! HAHAH! Hilarious! Wow, if Light and Darkness were actually way more two sides of the coin before than whatever schlock we have now, that probably would’ve resulted in a better execution of that idea. If they’re trying to play them like they’re both inherently grey, I feel like having the power system behind them as coming from the same initial source is better for that angle. I mean, even if they still would’ve been throwing around nebulous terms like “corrupted” with no explanation behind what that actually means, I think it would’ve served to save us from the paracasual word-salad crap we ended up with.

Not confirmed per se. I mean Bungie did admit in a vidoc for base D2 that they didn’t know what the Darkness actually was. So when you combine that admission with the stuff in the game and the cut content, it all lines up. Shoo man, I read and watched everything back in those days. Even nabbed the leaked contract that circulated for a bit. Their was even a reason why the Vex and Hive never attacked the City. Yeah, far as I could tell, corruption was just the evilness of the person fouling the power. Is why there was that Sky and Deep philosophical stuff early on that got dropped. And yea, the OG ending had to be changed. Likely they wanted to move in a new direction, realized they didn’t have the chops and then started modifying the OG storyline to this mess. They’ve basically gone back to the powers having the same source. They’ve just been cagey with saying it, slowly revealing it. I mean the only major change is making the end not the end. And the Vex, they got totally retconned. I’d have to dig it up but a dev posted pre-D1 release about a race of liquified people. Not a race of liquid people but liquified people. The Vex were originally likely meant to be the converted survivors of Darkness conquered civilizations. Hence why they had to be shelved for long. That’s why we get so much vague word salad and nonsense fluff, just spinning plates to buy time and retcon crap or ham fist the old with the new. Bad sloppy fan fiction. I’ve seen better on amateur sites.

[quote]Not confirmed per se. I mean Bungie did admit in a vidoc for base D2 that they didn’t know what the Darkness actually was.[/quote] Heheheheh! I remember this! Oh, how vindicating! [quote]So when you combine that admission with the stuff in the game and the cut content, it all lines up. Shoo man, I read and watched everything back in those days. Even nabbed the leaked contract that circulated for a bit. [There] was even a reason why the Vex and Hive never attacked the City.[/quote] Yeaahhh, I remember looking into all of that too. That one leak that posited that the Darkness was related to the Traveler and so were the Vex. I just never saw it through that lens of the Darkness being "corrupted Light". It then would make sense as to why the Vex and Hive don't attack the City, because without the Traveler, their strength would be severely diminished. Are these tidbits related to the Destiny story supercut that Joe Staten made during D1's development before Jason Jones decided to pull the rug from under everyone? I remember something about the Traveler being the twist villain of base D1's story from when a leak about the supercut dropped way back when. However, didn't a Bungo dev come out on Twitter and say that the leak was flat-out untrue? Could he be right about that? Or just Bungo poorly trying to cover their tracks again??? HAH! Either way, all paths led them to this mess! Love to see it! HAHAHAH! [quote]That’s why we get so much vague word salad and nonsense fluff, just spinning plates to buy time and retcon crap or ham fist the old with the new.[/quote] Oh, but this was obvious from the very very start of D1 Year 1, friend! Why ELSE would a dev team who have no clue what they're doing or making waste everyone's time so [i]efficiently[/i]? HAHAHAHAH! [quote]Bad sloppy fan fiction. I’ve seen better on amateur sites.[/quote] Really makes you think. Just how many ways can they pull out of their asses to desperately keep this shambling corpse going? Good thing I'll get to see ALL of them! HAHAH!

Ah, well the idea that the Traveler was the twist villain was likely wrong. It would of been a victim of a Lightbearer turned against it. The Alpha Lupi cards showed it under some sort of negative influence. Hoping we’d save it. So more like a victim of one of its Lightbearers gone rouge who leads the Darkness chasing it, the real villain. Like now, another revert they had to make lol No, I think it was a twist that was revealed right from the beginning. As the fallen dialogue was just recycled assets, so it was in the original base game content and just slipped by or they didn’t care at the moment. So the reveal would of happened fast and the Black Heart would of been the evidence that something was to the claim. The Black Heart was draining the Traveler and turning Light into Darkness that was meant to power the Vex. That hits on all the leaked plot points.

Understood. I just wish we could know for sure the true extent of the mismanagement at play here! Maybe one day... A man can dream...