In what is likely to be the greatest Destiny content creator achievement in history, loremaster and story-relayer MyNameIsByf has just published his masterpiece, a ten hour complete history of Destiny as a series across two games, seen and unseen tales, ahead of the release of the final expansion in the Light and Darkness saga on Tuesday, The Final Shape.
Byf famously made another “Complete Story of Destiny” video four years ago that ran to the launch of Shadowkeep. That was four hours long, has 15 million views, and since then we’ve had the release of Beyond Light, The Witch Queen, Lightfall and a dozen odd seasons in between as we bump up against The Final Shape. So, six more hours, plus four of it is definitely not copying and pasting the first video. Byf is joined by a team who helped him make the video including editors, composers and artists who did visuals that need to span ten hours and a zillion different story events outside of existing game content to pull from.
It is, of course, a pretty tall order to have people watch a ten hour video to catch up with a game in order to play its new expansion. But there are also very few games like Destiny which have been building up an evolving world over the course of a literal decade. You could likely do this for World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy and some others, but Destiny is story-rich with the problem of so much of that being outside of the game and needing to be explained by people like Byf. It’s gotten better over the years, but there is still so much you can miss, or so much that can feel impossible to catch up on if you come back to play after time away, or for the first time.
While yes the visuals are great, you can also feel free to have this on in the background as you do…whatever. Sitting and staring at a YouTube video for ten hours, even broken up, is likely not viable for many people, so do what you have to. That’s what I’ll be doing, even if I know some of this stuff already. But I expect to learn plenty more given how detailed Byf gets with his content. No, certainly not all of this is “necessary” for The Final Shape, there’s certainly an abridged version (maybe I’ll write that soon), but this is the most in-depth way to catch up, probably even more so than playing all existing content in the game because A) a bunch got deleted and B) you’ll still miss a ton of stuff.
Happy viewing. This is going to be epic.
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