Just about every week brings something new to Destiny 2, whether it's story beats, new activities, or interesting new combinations of elements that let players devastate each other in the Crucible. Iron Banter is our weekly look at what's going on in the world of Destiny and a rundown of what's drawing our attention across the solar system.
We've only got a couple of weeks left in Destiny 2's Season of the Haunted, and with the upcoming content season on August 23 comes a new raid. Or rather, we're getting an old raid, returning from the original Destiny, but reshaped and improved to play in Destiny 2, much like Vault of Glass. We now also have a date for that raid's release: August 26.
Speculation has been rampant about what that raid will be, and while Bungie released information about the date we can play the raid, it still hasn't told us what that raid will actually be. There are a few possibilities: Crota's End, the raid in which players delved into the depths of the moon to defeat the son of the Oryx, the Taken King; King's Fall, a raid on Oryx's ship in which we killed the Hive god himself; and Wrath of the Machine, a raid that took place in a section of the Cosmodrome called the Plague Lands.
For a while now, King's Fall has felt like the probable choice. It stands out as maybe the best raid of the Destiny 1 era, as much for its gameplay as its immense, cinematic sense of scale. Its return would work well with the recent story of The Witch Queen to provide context on the Hive for Destiny 2 players who missed out on the Destiny 1 era--all that Oryx stuff is really important story-wise, and this would be a good opportunity to revisit it (or learn about it for the first time). And it could provide a backdoor means of re-releasing the Dreadnaught, probably the coolest location in Destiny.
The return of Wrath of the Machine has amazing potential to weave together a lot of hanging threads in Destiny 2's story.But there's a better choice for the returning raid, at least in terms of where Destiny 2's story is going (or where I think it's going). The returning legacy raid next season should be Wrath of the Machine, and it should open up a whole host of new story developments that would lead right into the Lightfall expansion this winter.
Wrath of the Machine was part of the Rise of Iron expansion, Destiny 1's last add-on and one which established a lot of fascinating story stuff, but which has largely been sidelined ever since. Rise of Iron told the story of the Iron Lords (of which the Iron Banner's Lord Saladin is one) from way back in Destiny's "Dark Age," the period between the Collapse and the rise of the Last City. Back then, Ghosts flew around resurrecting people and giving them the power of the Traveler's Light, but they were unorganized. Many of them became warlords, drawing small armies to themselves and marauding around Earth, taking what they wanted and killing as they pleased. Some of the warlords actually protected the people they ruled over, like Lord Shaxx, but they weren't so much superheroes as immortal tyrants.
The Iron Lords were a group of proto-Guardians who rose in opposition to the warlords. They banded together to fight other Risen (read: immortal folks with Ghosts) and to protect humanity from alien threats, like the Fallen. There were several Iron Lords, but as of now, only two still live. In Rise of Iron, we discover what happened to the rest of them.
Rise of Iron is all about Fallen in the Cosmodrome accidentally uncovering a Golden Age technology called SIVA, coming to worship it, and using it to gain incredible power. SIVA is a red goo made up of nanomachines that was originally created by industrialist Clovis Bray's corporation. Bray is a big figure in Destiny's lore--his company also invented the technology that makes Exos, robots into which human brains have been downloaded to give them immortality, as we saw in the Beyond Light expansion. The machines composing SIVA are microscopic and self-replicating, and the idea was that they could use their huge numbers and tiny size to build nearly anything, as part of humanity's extrasolar colonization efforts. In Rise of Iron, we learned that the Iron Lords discovered SIVA in a Bray bunker, and hoped to use it to aid humanity and rebuild Earth.
SIVA turned out to be much more dangerous than the Iron Lords realized.When they went into the bunker, however, the Iron Lords were attacked by SIVA under the control of Rasputin, Bray's powerful artificial intelligence Warmind. SIVA infested the Iron Lords like a virus, killing them, remaking their bodies, and puppeting them. The stuff suddenly represented an existential threat--if SIVA got out, who knew how far it could spread and what it would do to humanity and life on Earth. The Iron Lords sacrificed themselves to seal SIVA in the bunker, with Lord Saladin believing himself to be the only survivor. Thus, he remained on Earth for centuries thereafter, dedicated to keeping an eye on the SIVA situation to make sure the threat never manifested again.
After the Fallen discovered SIVA in Rise of Iron, it did, in fact, sweep through a huge portion of the Cosmodrome. It became your job to destroy the SIVA replication chamber to put an end to its spread and stop the Fallen from using it. Wrath of the Machine was the final step in that process, in which a raid team delved into the Cosmodrome to find the leader of the Fallen, an archon named Aksis who's been twisted and remade by SIVA, to kill him.
That more or less ended the "SIVA Crisis" at the time, and SIVA has only barely been acknowledged in the game in the aftermath. The Plaguelands area of the Cosmodrome has been under official quarantine by the Vanguard ever since, which is the in-game explanation for why you can't go there even now, and suggests that SIVA is contained in a single (albeit kinda huge) location.
Still, SIVA has appeared on the periphery in the post-Rise of Iron game world, popping up in story beats and lore from time to time, and in spiffy cosmetic items in the Eververse Store. The biggest acknowledgment of the stuff was in the Zero Hour Exotic mission, released in the Joker's Wild season after the Forsaken expansion. In Zero Hour, players were directed to return to the Old Tower, which was destroyed in the Red War campaign in vanilla Destiny 2, by Mithrax, the friendly Eliksni captain who would become a main character in Season of the Splicer. Mithrax's intelligence led players to discover that a group of Fallen under the command of Eramis, the leader who would become the big bad of the Beyond Light expansion, were attempting to break into the Tower's old vault and steal an incredibly precious item: an old SIVA-infused rifle from Rise of Iron called Outbreak Prime (or in its Destiny 2 incarnation, Outbreak Perfected). Completing the mission thwarted the heist, leaving the SIVA gun in your possession.
The tale of Felwinter dominated Season of the Worthy, and the return of SIVA could make all that backstory extremely important to the current story.We also learned some more key information about the whole Iron Lords-SIVA situation in Season of the Worthy, after the Shadowkeep expansion. That season was all about Rasputin, revealing that the Warmind created an Exo frame specifically to live among and learn about humanity. In Destiny's world, Exos are all human people inside robot bodies, but the Exo Rasputin created was wholly robotic, an infiltrator that could pose as a human and be an agent of the AI for its own ends.