I'm not entirely convinced that the death of Cayde-6 that's coming in Destiny 2: Forsaken won't be undone with some superhero-style twist, but Bungie is certainly playing it as though he's gone for good. In a new "Story Insight" trailer on Game Informer, Bungie developers talked about the impact his loss will have on the game, and the more "personal" style of narrative that will result.
"It feels like it's just done for shock value at the start, but it's not," Bungie head of community Eric Osborne says in the video. "It makes the world feel rich. You start to see the way characters are reacting to that death and the vacuum that leaves in the universe."
Bungie said in an interview last month that Forsaken is at its core a Western-themed expansion (the genre, not the location), a point echoed by Matt Tieger, game director at co-developer High Moon Studios, who described the boss bad guy Barons as "twisted Western archetypes." Uldren Sov, their leader (and the one who pulls the trigger on Cayde-6), is also an unusual antagonist.
"We've always like Uldren as a bad guy, because he's so shifty. Even in D1, you don't know if he's actually a good guy or a bad guy," Forsaken art director Shiek Wang says. And because he's not a giant alien monster, the expectation is that there will be a more visceral reaction to him.
"It's got high stakes, but the stakes are not about saving the universe," Forsaken game director Steven Cotton explains. "They're personal stakes."
Destiny 2: Forsaken is scheduled to go live on September 4.
