Destiny 2’s live blackout event was absolutely worth it

Well, here we are three hours later. After a whole Due to the great stress that server problems could prevent me from seeing Destiny 2’s live event before Beyond Light tonight, I managed to see the whole thing despite knowing that others weren’t as lucky and many players were up Login errors encountered long lines all night long.

Bungie promised that this would be a “small” event, what I termed smaller than the Almighty, but … I don’t really think it was, and overall I think it was both conceptually and in execution better event was.

So what happened, here is a rough timeline of what happened (all times are east):

19 o’clock – After finally signing in after downloading a small patch, you could see certain parts of the broken Traveler glowing green and blue.

8:30 p.m. – A notification window opened saying we needed to investigate a glitch in the streets of The Last City. A quest node will appear and (after a lot of loading attempts) you will have walked through parts of The Last City. I don’t think we’ve been in the Red War for a few missions and some new areas. The final zone is a huge rooftop viewing area with a full instance of players where you should wait around 90 minutes to see what happened next.

9-9: 50 a.m. – Things … escalated from here. More and more energy poured out of the traveler. All Guardians were given a buff that increased their movement and jumping and made them glow. Towards the end, the air was filled with so much light energy that it was almost difficult to see.

10 O `clock – Eris answers on the radio and says that something is coming and the traveler is healing himself, which would be seen as an “escalation” into the darkness. We get a black screen and everyone freaks out thinking they’ve been kicked, but instead we load into a director cutscene that mirrors the very first Destiny cutscene. In it, the vault zones are “consumed by the dark” (unclear whether destroyed, but probably not) and the traveler is healed.

From 22 o’clock – Players are now greeted with a loading screen that says the light can’t help us and we should go to Europe, which we do … tomorrow. Fate social feeds have been changed to black images. Here they are really emulating the Fortnite Black Hole event “Shut the Game Off”, which however will not be offline until tomorrow when reset, when Beyond Light starts.

Aside from the stressful server issues, this was … very cool. I feel bad for the people who couldn’t get in or where it was 4am in Europe, but congratulations to Bungie because overall I enjoyed this a lot and it was a lot more complicated than I expected. I hope that they really keep doing more of these events and that as they learn how to do them, they will get bigger and more engaged and have more access to better technology and tools to make things like this.

Very good stuff, and of course I’ll see you all tomorrow.

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