I really miss Swordbreaker, a shotgun from the first Destiny game that became a staple of my loadout back in the day. Over the three years that I played Destiny, no part of my loadout felt as central to my identity as it did. I changed subclasses depending on the task before me, and I shuffled primary weapons in and out of that main slot with every new content drop, but after I got Swordbreaker, it followed me practically everywhere.
I can’t really tell you what it was about it that impressed me so much. Maybe it was the aesthetic of the gun, which looked like it was carved from the skin of a Hive grunt, that made me love it. Maybe it was its particularly wide spread that made it such a potent bruiser when I inevitably got too close to a powerful enemy. Maybe it’s all in the name—Swordbreaker goes pretty hard as far as weapon names go. What I do know for sure is that Swordbreaker was never a “meta” weapon that I pulled out because it’d guarantee me kills in PvE or PvP content. It was just a shotgun I was rewarded with for completing one of Destiny’s many adventures, and it’s the one weapon that stood out above the rest. Whether it was as a fashion piece or a display of power, Swordbreaker came to mean something to me.
Destiny and its sequel have always prided themselves on gear like Swordbreaker—weapons that come with a story and help you tell one. Coming some years after the promise of several billions of “unique” guns in Borderlands, Destiny offered a bit of a different relationship to its equipment than similar loot-driven games. It offered a real connection to a definitive armory of some of the coolest guns and armor, rather than a randomized set of stats and buffs applied to basic archetypes. In comparison to most of its ilk, Destiny probably featured one of the smallest loot pools of any loot game out there, but it was also curated and specific. Rather than chafe against the audience, this helped grow the reputation of its loot and allowed players to nurture relationships with those individual pieces and build a history with them.
In order to earn Swordbreaker, you had to at least participate in the Crota’s End raid, a fairly straightforward, kind of unremarkable gauntlet. An auto rifle that I currently have in Destiny 2 is a remnant from a dungeon I did years ago when I convinced my best friends to give the game a chance. My favorite pulse rifle in the game (Piece of Mind) has followed me for more than two years now, and the Choir of One exotic that has dominated my loadout for the last few weeks comes from the lengthy and difficult Encore mission I recently undertook. The Gjallarhorn, which has been featured across both Destiny and Destiny 2 several times, is the series’ most lasting weapon, having been memorialized and reprised a dozen different ways since the first game was released in 2014. Destiny loves its gear, and especially enjoys spinning a story from your acquisition of it, which lays the foundation for all the adventures to follow.
Swordbreaker went on to accompany me through The Taken King and probably helped me clear mobs of grunts during the expansion’s raid. It helped me blast holes in enemies as I grinded for strike-specific loot from the Sunless Cell mission. It was my companion throughout the drought of content immediately after the aforementioned expansion and the “spring update” of 2016. And finally, we went on one last adventure together in the melancholic but awfully nostalgic Rise of Iron expansion. When the time came to move on to Destiny 2, I didn’t have the good fortune of being able to bring Swordbreaker with me, but that didn’t diminish the years it’d spent by my side.
Destiny wasn’t always great at cultivating that sense of history and ownership. In its earliest incarnation, exotic and legendary gear was exceptionally rare to come by. The Vex Mythoclast was a highly sought after gun from the series’ first raid, the Vault of Glass, but getting it to drop came down to sheer (and bad) luck. People would let out cries of relief rather than joy when they got one, since the game seemed to care little for the time and effort players would sink into their pursuits.
Years after this, once Bungie began more explicitly tying gear to specific activities and missions, the game was simply too full of weapons to balance, resulting in the studio “sunsetting” a large swath of them, or making them effectively obsolete. To this day, it’s one of the biggest sins the studio’s committed against the game and its community, especially after years of preaching about the relationships players could build to their armories. Prized possessions like the Hung Jury scout rifle became relics as Destiny tossed aside the legacy it’d built.
Nowadays, the studio has not only repealed that controversial design choice, but celebrates its weapons and reprises them more than ever. Dozens of exotics from the original game have found a home in Destiny 2. Hell, for its 10th anniversary, Bungie’s even bringing back yet another popular weapon, Icebreaker. Hung Jury, and indeed many of the series’ most beloved weapons, returned to Destiny 2 as part of the BRAVE arsenal featured in the Into The Light content pack earlier this year. And most importantly, Swordbreaker is back in Destiny 2, since the game eventually reintroduced the very same raid that dropped it in the first place from the first Destiny. I’ve yet to actually complete or run the raid since, but the promise of being reunited with one of my favorite weapons ever remains one of the game’s most tantalizing pursuits.
I love that there’s a narrative to these things. In many loot-driven games, you may find a cool piece of gear, but it’s likely to be supplanted by another within a few hours or days of playing. You might swap out some nondescript sword for a similarly vague ax. Maybe you trade up a submachine gun with freezing capabilities for a rifle with acidic ones. That’s fine and all, but it has also always diminished what felt like the point of games like that: the ability to cultivate your own character, loadout, and story. If none of it means anything beyond some infinitely growing numbers, it’s pretty unlikely to impress me. If I can never settle on something that looks and feels like the best version of myself, then what am I really doing here?
By stark comparison to most of those titles, I know what I’m doing in Destiny 2: I’m fully realizing my favorite version of myself. I’m paying off years of stories I’ve told myself and have long arcs with countless pieces of gear in Destiny, like Swordbreaker or the Stag helmet I simply refuse to take off. My character has a definite shape and a legacy. This has all helped me connect to this series in a way I never have with any other games. As I write this, I’m planning to run Crota’s End as many times as I must to find my way back to Swordbreaker. And who knows, along the way, I might even unearth some other piece of equipment that’ll follow me for another five years, or however long Destiny 2 remains a part of my life. Such is often the case, and it’s why I expect I’ll keep coming back to this world and continue telling my story, one weapon or armor piece at a time.
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