Ten Details You May Have Missed From The Witch Queen Trailers in Destiny 2

The Witch Queen is only a matter of weeks away, and we’re getting very close to the next chapter in the Destiny 2 saga. Today I want to comb through the trailers we’ve got so far and pick out 10 details you may have missed, expand on them and dig a little deeper. It’s all aboard the hype train for The Witch Queen on Feb 22nd, and I hope you come with me.

Before I get into it today, I am giving away a copy of the Witch Queen to one lucky person. All you have to do to enter is check out the competition link the in the description. There are a few ways to enter, and I’ll be drawing the winner at random at the end of January, just in time for the Witch Queen DLC.

Let’s dive into the details

Osmium and Alchemy

Throughout the trailers, we see a reference to a chemical code or chemical signature. In a lot of the promotional material for The Witch Queen, we see these chemical references. In the latest Throne World trailer, the chemical signature is of Osmium.

Osmium is a metal, described as a hard, brittle, bluish-white transition metal in the platinum group that is found as a trace element in alloys, mostly in platinum ores.

However, more importantly it’s a reference to The Osmium King, Savathun’s Father. The Osmium King was a proto-Hive who ruled the floating continent called the Osmium Court on the gas giant Fundament. He had three surviving daughters, Xi Ro, Sathona, and Aurash. Aurash would go on to eventually become Oryx, The Taken King.

Oryx Fighting Akka

There’s a statue in the Throne World trailer, depicting Auryx fighting Akka, one of the worm gods. Given this is Savathun’s Throne World, and it’s a manifestation of her mind, it shows she still holds Oryx in high regard, and at least still thinks of him, given the grand scale of the statue.

There’s a little bit of history related to the Osmium King and his 3 daughters, referred to earlier which link to the statue. After the Osmium King died, the 3 daughters fled and encountered the Worm Gods, who drew their power from the Darkness itself: Yul, Eir, Xol, Ur, and Akka, the Virtuous Worms. The Worm Gods claimed that they had lived and grown in Fundament’s depths for millions of years, trapped by the Leviathan and the Traveler. They had called many species to Fundament, hoping one would be tenacious enough to find them. They offered Xi Ro, Sathona, and Aurash immortality if they would allow themselves to be hosts for the Worms’ larvae. The stronger the sisters became, the greater their Worms’ appetites would be.

The sisters accepted the pact. Xi Ro took the knight morph and became Xivu Arath, the God of War; Sathona took the mother morph and became Savathûn, the Witch-Queen; and Aurash took the king morph, transforming into a male and becoming Auryx, the king of the Hive. Over the following years, the siblings returned to their people and spread the Worms among them, creating the first Hive and enabling them to first liberate the Osmium Court, then drive Taox and the other fearful species of Fundament to Kaharn Atoll, and finally to build spaceships and break free of Fundament entirely.

If you want to know more about this story, The Book of Sorrows is an excellent read, or check out MyNameIsByf.

Take Back The Light

This tag line is all over the trailers, telling us to Take Back The Light. We know we’re getting a rework of the void subclass with Void 3.0, and that’s going to be more in line with how Stasis works in the game right now, which isn’t tied to 3 subclass trees like we have now with Void, but it’s going to give us more agency to choose, through the aspects and fragments model. However, getting Void 3.0 may not be as easy as we think it is. In the Throne World trailer, we can see Savathun setting a trap for a Hunter, them fainting a bit, and then Savathun appearing, and finally flying up and disappearing. Could this be the moment where our Void Light class is temporarily stolen from us, and we work through the campaign to get it back?

Void 3.0

We’ve seen a few examples of abilities in the trailers for Void 3.0. Bungie does have a good article on their website talking Void 3.0, which goes into plenty more detail. But we see a HUGE Titan Bubble, plus a new Titan Slam move with their shield. Plus we see a Titan throwing their shield, which I think is going to be removed from the Super, and turns into a charged melee ability. We also see a Warlock throwing out a smaller orb projectile too.

Eris Morn

This one is from The Game Awards 2021 trailer, and we hear Eris Morn involved in conversations with Ikora Rey and another female Guardian. We haven’t heard too much from Eris since she went to Europa for Beyond Light, and then it all went quiet from her point of view. In the Game Awards trailer, we hear Eris’ voice, and given her previous involvement in The Taken King, Shadowkeep, and Season of Arrivals, I expect Eris to be heavily involved in the upcoming Witch Queen Expansion.

Glaive

The Glaive is a new weapon type that is going to be introduced in The Witch Queen. This is a tough one to miss, as Bungie really wants us to know about The Glaive. This thing looks huge and deadly, plus they are going to be tying artifact mods to Glaive, so we’re likely to get one in the Witch Queen campaign, and I’m sure we’ll probably tinker with it through weapon crafting at some point too.

Mars

We know we’re going back to Mars in some capacity. We’ve seen Ikora Rey standing in front of a whiteboard, with loads of sticky notes and a map of mars on it. Then in The Game Awards Trailer, we saw boots on the ground with Guardian’s battling Cabal on Mars. But we don’t know which Mars we’re going to get. Is this going to be Destiny 1 or Destiny 2 Mars? From the Game Awards Trailer, it looks like we go to Mars to gain access to Savathun’s Ship, so it may be a similar situation to the Taken King, where I think we went to Phobos to access The Dreadnaught.

Osteo Striga

This is the name of the exotic Submachine Gun we’re getting with Witch Queen, this is the preorder bonus, much like we got No Time To Explain with Beyond Light. Osteo means Bones, and Striga could mean a couple of things.

“a pointed appressed rigid hairlike scale or bristle” – This could refer to the look of the weapon

“a genus of seed plants living as root parasites especially on corn, sugarcane, and other grasses in the eastern tropics” – The parasite meaning could have an interesting link to the Worm Gods or parasites inside the Hive Gods like Xivu Arath. Savathun, in theory, is shedding her worm at the back end of this season.

Either way, Submachine Guns are making a comeback, and the Osteo Striga is going to be a deadly weapon in The Witch Queen.

The Scorn

In the Throne World trailer, we see a Titan diving into a bunch of Scorn like an Arc missile. We’ve seen The Scorn on the Tangled Shore, but also in the Presage mission, which was part of Calus’ experiments in communicating with The Darkness. Also, in Season of the Lost, we’ve seen The Scorn in the Shattered Realm, and they appear to have been evolving and developing their own rituals, as we’ve seen them fighting each other for sport. It’ll be interesting to see where the story goes with the Scorn, are they under the control of the Hive – through either Xivu Arath or Savathun, or are they being controlled by some higher power?

The Darkness & Pyramid Ships

That brings me neatly onto my final point. The Darkness and the Pyramid Ships. Since they arrived in the solar system and took away a number of destinations including Mars, Io, Titan, and Mercury, the storyline with the Darkness has gone quiet. We know from lore entries Calus tried to communicate with Darkness, and Savathun tried to obscure our communications with the Darkness in Season of Arrives before Beyond Light. In Season of the Lost, Savathun has been referring to a higher being. She mentioned us, standing on the line between the light and the dark, and all we simply needed to do was lookup. But look up to what?

We do see a brief glimpse of something in the Throne World trailer, which looks very Pyramid-like. It’s going to be interesting to see where this story goes, are we going to kill Savathun in the main campaign, or perhaps more likely we’re going to end up teaming up with her to take on this higher power in The Darkness. I’m not sure how we’re going to get from her stealing the light, to teaming up, but it’s going to be interesting to see. Personally, I don’t think we’re simply going to take out Savathun in the campaign or the raid, but I think we’re going to be facing something else.

Let me know in the comments what you think about the trailers, and if you have any theories for The Witch Queen I’d love to hear them.

That’s it for this closer look at the details in The Witch Queen trailers. For more Destiny 2 content like this check out This Week In Video Games on YouTube and subscribe today.