Fans of Destiny 2 have known for a while that the next expansion for that game would take place on Jupiter’s moon Europa. They’ve also known that they would be facing off against the enemy factions known as the Fallen and the Vex. The most recent trailer for the Beyond Light expansion teases players about the why of the coming conflict.
The trailer is split into two halves each with its own narrator. The first half is narrated by Varriks The Loyal, a Fallen NPC from the Destiny: House of Wolves expansion. Varriks served the Queen of the Awoken and acted as a vendor and quest-giver in that expansion. Since then, according to the lore collectibles of Destiny 2, Varriks was responsible for the prison break that kicked off the Forsaken expansion and then fled and joined one of the Fallen factions scavenging the solar system. His somewhat low-key half of the trailer asks the player character what they have come looking for on the inhospitable frozen moon of Europa.
Varrik’s question is answered by the character known as the Exo Stranger in the second half of the trailer. The Exo Stranger is a character unseen since the original campaign of the first Destiny. In that game, the Stranger gave the player quests to complete while hinting at powerful forces in the universe that exist outside the light versus dark conflict set up by the rest of the game’s characters. Her answer to Varrik’s question is one familiar to Destiny players, the Vex has found some source of dark power on Europa and only Guardians can stop them from using it to cause untold destruction throughout the solar system. The new wrinkle that comes with Beyond Light and the return of the Exo Stranger is that the Guardians will make use of whatever power they wrest from the Vex instead of destroying or locking it away.
The visuals of the trailer hint at another long-running mystery of the Destiny series, the origin of the race of humanoid machines called Exos. Fans have known for a while now that the Clovis Bray corporation created the Exos but nor how or where in the Solar System this was accomplished. This new trailer shows and quickly cuts away from what looks like a pair of inactive Exos behind glass. It seems like players will finally get at least a partial answer to the mystery of the Exos.
