The announcement of Destiny 2’s imminent end of live service development wasn’t entirely unexpected news, given Bungie’s well-documented struggles in recent years, but it’s an abrupt conclusion for a game series that’s now left with an uncertain future. Reportedly, Bungie hasn’t yet greenlit a project for a Destiny 3, meaning many of the setting’s ongoing narrative threads are being left without resolution for the foreseeable future.
The threat of the Nine has gone unaddressed. The inscrutable machinations of the Vex network are still a mystery. And we may never face Xivu Arath, the Hive god of war—an antagonist that Bungie had invested years of seasonal storytelling into shaping an apocalyptic menace. But according to former Bungie senior narrative designer Robert Brookes, Destiny’s devs had tried—repeatedly—to give Xivu Arath the debut that players have been left to dream of.
Players first learned of Xivu Arath back in Destiny 1’s Taken King expansion. As Guardians unearthed the hidden history of the Hive and their adherence to the cruel calculus of the Sword Logic, they learned that the race of intergalactic necromancers worship a trio of siblings who had ascended through ages of ritualized violence and occult sacrament into a trinity of omnicidal gods.
Chief among them was Oryx, the Taken King himself, who players felled at the end of his expansion. Savathun, the Witch Queen, would later serve as the titular antagonist of her own expansion in Destiny 2 after snaring players in schemes and plots that stretched across the setting. And finally, Xivu Arath—a bellowing, belligerent warmonger who had been built through multiple seasons of storytelling into one of the greatest extant threats in the Destiny universe. She’d become a beloved figure in the process, despite only briefly appearing on-screen—and now she might never arrive in earnest.
According to Brookes, however, that wasn’t for lack of effort. Responding on X to one of the many players expressing disappointment over Xivu Arath never getting her own expansion before Destiny 2’s abrupt ending, Brookes—who had worked at Bungie from 2020 to 2024—said “you’d be surprised how many times this was pitched for D2.”
Brookes’ comment indicates that there had been a repeated effort to give Xivu Arath a full story campaign treatment, and while that’s frustrating, I don’t know that it is surprising. She was the central antagonist of 2023’s Season of the Deep, which granted her a striking amount of humanity even as she spent her interactions with the player howling caps lock-captioned threats. She remained a driving force in the following Season of the Witch, and—in the wake of The Final Shape—appeared for the climactic capstone of Episode: Heresy with fellow beloved Destiny baddie Eris Morn.
Xivu Arath’s continued emphasis in Destiny’s ongoing narrative felt like an obvious escalation towards her own expansion. But as the fallout of Sony’s troubled 2022 acquisition of Bungie compounded, causing continued layoffs and studio turmoil as Bungie’s new owners were left footing the bill for damage dealt by years of misguided leadership under its former CEO and vintage car enthusiast Pete Parsons, Xivu Arath’s time in the spotlight never materialized.
Instead, Destiny 2 was made to suffer through Edge of Fate, an expansion that earned a dreadful reception and dwindling player numbers. Renegades, the Star Wars-themed followup that must have seemed to someone in a boardroom like a surefire way to coax revenue out of D2’s remaining players, couldn’t manage a redemption arc.
Maybe someday we’ll get to clash swords with Xivu Arath as players had expected to for years. Until then, she’s yet another casualty in a long and sordid history that, as far as we know, has been brought to a sudden end.
Read the full article here
