Story has never been the strong suit of the Destiny games, but things have gotten pretty interesting with Forsaken, Destiny 2‘s big expansion for its second year. Rather than drop everything in one big story campaign players ran through, Bungie has slowly been dropping new story tidbits with each week. Many of these specifically relate to the Dreaming City, Forsaken’s big endgame area and the home of the race known as the Awoken, and the Curse, a strange phenomenon that’s keeping the place in a three-week time loop.
This week saw a new cutscene that suggests a very big twist for the story–one that likely has serious implications for Destiny 2’s story going forward. The trouble is, it’s in a weird place and is easy to miss. Here’s where to find the new story cutscene in the Dreaming City, and what it all means. You can also watch it above.
Warning: Spoilers beyond this point!
The cutscene is located in Awoken Queen Mara Sov’s court, which you can only access by completing Petra’s weekly bounty for the Blind Well. As usual, you’ll take the offering you receive from the bounty to the Observatory, where you can make contact with Mara Sov. Since this is the third week of the cycle, when the curse is strongest, you’ll be able to jump through the Oracle Engine’s portal and visit Mara’s court, where usually, you can talk to her in person.
This week, however, Mara’s missing. Things have changed slightly here as well–on the left side of the court, where a purple hologram sits. This week, it shows a gazebo like those that are found around the Dreaming City, and maybe more notably, in the Ascendant Realm. If you approach the hologram, you’ll be prompted to “lean closer,” which triggers a cutscene.
In the video, we see a lone Ghost floating through the Dreaming City, before it happens across a body covered in a white sheet. A second later, the Ghost revives the body, revealing it to be Prince Uldren, Mara Sov’s brother. The scene mimics the first thing we ever saw in Destiny, when Ghost first discovered and revived the player character. It seems Uldren is going to be a Guardian, just like the rest of us.
Uldren’s resurrection is a pretty loaded twist for the story of Forsaken. The expansion began with Uldren murdering Cayde-6, one of the game’s major characters, and the first half of the expansion was all about hunting Uldren down and getting revenge. Players were aided by Petra Venj, the queen’s regent, in stopping and killing Uldren. But it turned out that Uldren was being manipulated by the Taken and maybe wasn’t fully in control of himself. In fact, the Taken used Uldren to open the way to the Dreaming City and start the Curse to begin with.
So Uldren coming back could be big for dealing with the Curse, and Mara’s absence from the throne room suggests she might have had something to do with it. Each visit to Mara has suggested she’s working on a plan to stop the Taken and the Curse, but she’s not really willing to explain it to anyone yet. Her brother coming back to life seems pretty significant, though.
A big lingering question is how this is going to affect the characters of Destiny 2. It sure looked like Petra was the one who pulled the trigger on Uldren, and Mara has always seemed a little weird about her brother’s possession and death. We also know that Guardians don’t remember their past lives, so will Uldren be a completely different person now? Will he still be the bitter jerk we knew briefly in Destiny 1 and in Forsaken? Will he remember how he wound up where he is in the first place?
Apparently, we’ll need to keep waiting to see what changes Uldren’s resurrection will have on Destiny 2’s week-to-week story. Between live content like The Dawning, Destiny 2’s holiday event, and the new Forge activities of The Black Armory, there’s plenty going on in Bungie’s shared-world shooter. Hopefully the story Bungie is telling lives up to the effort players are putting into discovering it.
