Destiny is a pretty cool video game franchise.

Not just because it offers some really great, snappy gameplay and satisfying loot chases, but because it takes itself seriously enough to explain how, just about every part of it, actually exists within itself.

That is, to say, that virtually every single thing in Destiny exists in-universe for one reason or another. The overwhelming majority of Destiny’s concepts, goals, guns, locations and even game modes aren’t just handwaved away as “well, it’s a video game.” There’s reasons for why they are even there in the first place.

Consider another media franchise: Star Wars is a great example. It explains how jedi and sith can exist and what The Force is, as well everything it can and can’t do. Generally. Those ideas are not only covered in its primary film franchise, but the Star Wars canon goes beyond that and explores and expands upon ideas and possibilities in books, video games, comics and so on.

When media does that, it allows fans to discuss and speculate about what could come next. It builds, for lack of a better term, a loyalty. That things will see a payoff and that its worth paying attention to even the smallest details because they matter. They matter because they can happen. Because there’s reasons that they can happen. And when everything matters, and anything can happen, then nothing is done on accident and things can exist. Writers, hopefully, will respect their own lore and understand that every single detail will be put under a microscope because, otherwise, the illusion shatters.

But if the illusion persists, like it does in Destiny, it’s actually remarkably easy to suspend your disbelief that yeah, a giant, insectoid-looking beast made of stars can remove your willpower and bend you to its thrall. And that it can do that because it killed one of its interstellar worm gods and inherited its power. And that its power existed in the first place because the concept that might makes right has an enormous cult following. And that’s because death and destruction actually have a currency-like value and can be used as tribute.

Easy, right? That’s called Sword Logic. And it’s a religion practiced by the Hive, an enemy faction in Destiny’s universe. But that’s a vast dumbing-down of what they’re all about. And they’re just one of the various forces you’ll battle against. The others all have their own backgrounds and goals and aspirations, as well.

But enemy forces being written to have a reasoning for the things they do are expected. You need to be able to understand why they are a threat and why they do the things they do. Evil for the sake evil just doesn’t exist.

So let’s start with something easier, and more unique, to Destiny.

How about this? Super Mario Odyssey, a great game for sure, doesn’t explain why Mario can miss a jump, plunge headfirst into a pit of lava and suddenly reappear just fine like nothing happened after a quick loading screen. For some reason, he gets to try to make that jump again. It doesn’t matter why in that game.

Destiny, however, does explain why you reappear just fine like nothing happened when you fall into a pit of lava and die. Not that that scenario really happens in the game, but you get it. At its core, it’s just a respawn system that exists in virtually every single video game ever made. But in Destiny, that mechanic, and the greater concept of resurrection, actually exists within its universe. In Destiny, just like in Mario, it’s expected that you will die and that you will come back to life. But unlike Mario, Destiny explains how you come back to life.

In the world of Destiny, around 500 years or so into our future, you’re a guardian, a once dead – literally dead – person who was resurrected through the power of “The Light,” a tangible blessing given to humanity via the Traveler, a big ol’ mysterious ball that’s been hanging in the sky over a place known as “The Last Safe City on Earth,” where most of humanity lives.

Much like how The Force is the reason for most things existing in the universe of Star Wars, it is due to the Traveler’s Light, and that developer Bungie gives enough of a darn, that Destiny can root things in its universe. The Light is the glue that holds everything together. This allows the question of “why can we be resurrected” receive the answer of “well, The Light!”

A floating machine called a ghost is what functionally brings you back to life, using The Light. And every guardian has one. This ghost can resurrect you an unlimited number of times, so long as the ghost itself doesn’t get destroyed.

(But what are ghosts? And what exactly is The Light? That’s where the writers give themselves a little wiggle room. While they can explain things, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they need to or that what they write is set in stone. There’s mystery involved and much of the lore of Destiny is just theory. Nothing firm is known about the Traveler or its Light. This is an ever-expanding universe that is slowly being added to. And questions, ideally, will eventually receive answers.

As for now, asking what The Light is is like asking what the sky is made of. And what that’s made of.)

Such rules regarding resurrection allow even the game’s multiplayer deathmatches to exist in the universe and be something that guardians, in the lore, at least, take seriously and even wager on.

Where other games often take pre-existing assets from their world to create different arenas for things like player-versus-player combat and leaves it at that, the Destiny universe gives a lore reason for why these areas exist, and for several, how they exist. There are some locations that, in the normal playing of the game, are exceedingly dangerous. But with the game’s justification, guardians can go there to kill each other.

Not maliciously, of course, but to hone their skills in live-combat scenarios. Guardians can resurrect an unlimited number of times, remember? Thus, The Crucible, the game’s PVP mode, exists. Not just for another fun way to play the video game, though, it also exists for a reason in the universe of Destiny.

The Crucible, as well as Gambit, another game mode that also exists in the lore, even have their own story threads: when, how and why they were formed; why some guardians died and couldn’t be resurrected because of an illegal gun; why some rewards, like The Mountaintop, an-incredibly-difficult-to-acquire weapon, have a revered status and legend to them; and why some people, including a loose-cannon warlock cop, want Gambit to cease all operations.

It’s even explained in the lore of the game why there’s a competitive mode for the Crucible. It was created by the developers to give another way for their players to play the game, yes, but it was also justified for existing in Destiny’s universe.

But despite a world with unlimited resurrection, death does exist. And while you can’t die, you can lose the game. There needs to be some challenge, after all.

You can infinitely respawn unless you enter what is called a “darkness” zone. The “Darkness” is, of course, the antithesis to The Light. (And, much like The Light, not very well explained, either.) Quite often, you’re battling the minions of The Darkness.

Kind of.

Kind of? Kind of. As it turns out, loyalties and allegiances, like with the Hive, aren’t always what they seem in Destiny. But sometimes those minions kill you. And you die.

If they kill you outside of a darkness zone, just wait a few seconds and you’ll come back guns blazing. But if they kill you inside one, you’re dead. No resurrection for you. While your teammates can pick you back up, darkness zones create challenge for the game, but also have a reason for them to even be a thing.

You can’t be resurrected in darkness zones because your ghost can’t utilize its unlimited reserves of Light in that particular location because of diverging timelines. At least, that’s the theory presented to the player. The idea is that there’s so much danger in this exact area that, in parallel universes, you’ve died in that exact place. And even if you haven’t died, you may as well have. And if not you, other guardians in other universes have. That’s why your ghost can’t resurrect you in that place. It has nowhere to pull a template of you from.

Note, that’s the theory presented to the player. No one really knows in this world, and really, how could they? That’s like asking in our world what happens when we die? We’ve got theories, but no one really knows. This is just the best guess that anyone in the universe of Destiny has.

And it’s cool that that’s a thing.

This method of explaining why you suddenly can’t respawn is a far different way from how, for example, The Division 2, does it.

Quick rundown: The Division 2 has you playing a government sleeper agent who is a human fighting humans in the modern world.

In that game, sometimes you can respawn and sometimes you can’t. You’re just playing a video game at that point. Not that that’s a bad thing. The Division 2 is just a game where its lore isn’t as important as it is in Destiny. Things can exist in that world, and the suspension of disbelief isn’t as important, because things already exist in that world. It’s the world we know.

Conversely, Destiny is a foreign universe that very rarely drops the illusion that its just a video game. It even bothers to justify why that when loot drops, it appears as this neat little polygonal shape called an engram. Those exist in the universe of Destiny and are the fourth state of matter, often containing raw data that can be given form, which is how you receive your weapons and armor. As for why enemies are dropping those engrams, well, that’s video games. But they do exist. In fact, at one point in the story, exotic engrams, the rarest of the rare, are mass produced as bombs in the hopes of being sent to the City to, well, you know, explode and cause chaos.

But should you die and need to restart something from the beginning, you do so because of a reason Destiny has justified in its self-contained universe. It’s still a gameplay mechanic designed to encourage perfection of execution and maintain a sense of difficulty, but it’s disguised as a story.

As for why you can retry again, well, that’s just video games. But you always win. You’ve always won and you’ll continue to win. Even if you yourself didn’t do a certain thing, in the game’s canon, your guardian has. I personally never killed Oryx, the giant, insectoid-looking beast made of stars who could remove your willpower and bend you to its thrall – the main antagonist from the first Destiny game – but my guardian did. I did kill Riven, the main boss, so far at least, in Destiny 2: Forsaken, but it took me and my group of five other guardians about eight real-life hours spread across two days of constant failure before we won.

And in the canon of Destiny, and other games with massive bosses like that, only the successful run exists. I like to think that instead of finally weaving together a perfect 10-minute attempt that ended in victory, it instead was an eight-hour battle against Riven that pushed my guardian and my friends to the limit. But that’s all up to player interpretation.

Unfortunately, because only the canonical runs exist, Destiny’s really got no way to justify replaying that kind of boss-killing content. While you can slay Riven every week for new rewards, you’ve only really taken her down the one time. That’s just playing a video game.

But there is some content in Destiny’s universe that does justify replaying it, like the public events that occur randomly on each destination. For example, the Fallen, another enemy faction, consistently needs to send squads out in order to obtain their food source. And you’re consistently putting an end to those efforts.

Destiny, like dozens of other online games, resets its activities on a weekly basis to encourage players to log in and play to receive new rewards. World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV do this as well, but neither of those bother to say why that’s possible. It doesn’t matter there. And in Destiny, it generally doesn’t either.

Except in one location.

In fact, that one location is integral to the greater overarching story that’s being told. As it turns out, killing Riven had some consequences for the Destiny universe.

In a place called The Dreaming City, wherein Riven was imprisoned and where you slew her, the activities rotate there on a three-week cycle explained in-game as being due to some sort of a time-dilation curse that was literally wished into existence by a dragon which could have shapeshifted into any form you or it desired. That was Riven, the last of a race of creatures called ahamkara. And killing her somehow set loose the curse.

But ahamkara don’t make wishes, they just grant them, so who made the wish? One theory is that it’s the sister to the giant, insectoid-looking beast made of stars who could remove your willpower and bend you to its thrall. She’s apparently somehow got that power now. But why curse The Dreaming City? Maybe to subvert her interstellar worm gods and destroy the very foundations of her religion? Actually, no one really knows. It’s a story, thus far, without a conclusion; one slowly being told since September 2018.

But one that can completely, justifiably, exist within this universe.

And while there isn’t a ton more content than that that Destiny justifies replaying, another of Riven’s granted wishes does explain why you’re constantly killing a boss called The Fanatic. While he’s not as big of a deal, he’s still a major force and has immortal properties, similar to your guardian, as a result of that wish.

Before Riven, ahamkara were referred to in Destiny, but never seen. Tricky and mystical, their stories are purposely vague and unclear. They are the perfect examples of unreliable narrators and their very patterns of speech wield ontological power. But they also break the fourth wall a lot which, for a video game that wants to maintain the illusion that it isn’t a video game, it’s kind of jarring when an ahamkara seemingly references itself as being inside one. But Riven was specifically noted as being the last known ahamkara. And nothing is done on accident in the world of Destiny.

Which leads to rampant speculation and possibilities among fans and the community.

This all might sound great. And it is! But unfortunately, next to none of it is presented in the game. Hardly any of this nuance is shown to the player. Heck, very little is even told. The greatest downside to Destiny’s story is that it involves a lot of voluntary reading. The player isn’t going to know what’s happening in The Dreaming City or why The Crucible’s competitive mode exists without wanting to learn it.

And this is a game that has gunplay nailed down so well that just running around and blasting aliens is a lot of fun. Like, a lot of fun. Super fun. Some of the most fun you can have. It’s difficult, then, to ask the player to ease off the trigger and instead turn pages of lore books in order to experience those stories.

But should the player do that, either in-game or through online databases that’ve compiled all of Destiny’s lore content, they’re going to discover a rabbit hole that goes shockingly deep. One that is not only easy to get into, but fun to get lost in and discuss with others.

There’s a lot of great content and storytelling going on in Destiny – though admittedly, and frustratingly, without any satisfying conclusions yet – it just takes a decision from the player as to whether or not they want to experience it.

But it’s hard to accurately describe how cool it is that every single thing in Destiny isn’t done for the sake of simply being a fun video game. There’s more to it than that. When every single thing in the Destiny universe obeys a set of rules, every single thing has meaning.

And when everything has meaning, everything can exist.

And when a giant, insectoid-looking beast made of stars who can remove your willpower and bend you to its thrall can exist, well, that’s just fun.