On June 8, 2024, the Destiny 2’s Salvation’s Edge raid, the newest end-game challenge, was completed for the first time after over 19 hours. The team that crossed the finish line first wasn’t one of the front runners or career raiders. Instead, it was Clan Parabellum, a group of six players who had been trying to reach World’s First and only ever came close during the past two and a half years of Destiny.
The frontrunners, streaming their attempts live on Twitch, wound up taking precautions to prevent others from taking their methods to heart. They blacked out their screen, muted all their audio, and. blurred their text-chats and buff indicators. They did anything to keep their lead. It didn’t matter. In the end, Clan Parabellum, a group who wasn’t even featured on the official raid race stream, was the one who took the first clear. They hadn’t even been streaming on Twitch at all.
This victory feels intensely in line with the entire themes of The Final Shape, Destiny 2’s latest expansion and the culmination of the ten-year-long saga. In triumphing through frustration, exhaustion, and the dangers that The Witness, the antagonist of the entire saga, threw at them, Parabellum’s six-man crew showcased the things that make Destiny 2 unlike many other multiplayer looter-shooter RPGs. The new raid featured intense mechanical complexity, for one. The fourth stage of the raid, Verity, kept many teams stuck for almost eight hours, and others far beyond the World’s First clear. It focused on symbol memorization, positional precision, and clear communication between team members. All this happened while fending off hordes of dangerously strong flying bats with guns.
Contest-mode Destiny raids are always fraught with doom. Stress is high, enemies are hurting you way harder than they normally would outside of the highest difficulty challenges, and the limited team revives in this engagement make the smallest mistake costly. This one, the longest raid race in Destiny history at 19 hours, was nothing short of grueling.
Destiny is full of outsized heroes. The Awoken Queen, Mara Sov, Savathûn the Hive God of Lies, and Cayde-6 the Gone-but-not-forgotten Gunslinger, all factor into major world-changing events in the game’s narrative. Similarly, certain figures in Destiny’s real world community have made their names by doing challenging activities.
Datto, one of the frontrunners of the race, makes in depth guides for raids like Salvation’s Edge. Esoterickk, another contender, is famous for his solo completions of endgame activities and helping people figure out how to follow in his footsteps. Saltagreppo, the person who’s team was in the lead for the majority of the event, is a three-time World’s First Raid champion, belts from the dev team proudly displayed in the room he streams in.
But Destiny 2, its world, and its gameplay, are about something smaller. It’s about groups of friends coming together and, through teamwork, coordination, and focus even when things are getting tough, defying the odds and coming out the other end. The lore is peppered with this and the game is designed around it.
In the interview segment in the most recent This Week at Bungie entry, folks from Parabellum talked about their favorite parts. They talked about coining the mechanic “Anime Eyes” the moment the Verity encounter made sense to them, and the good feeling and outpouring of support and excitement from the Destiny community. For it to happen in this raid, the completion of which unlocked a new 12-player mission to close out this saga of Destiny history, seems like a triumph out of a fable. Against the odds and racing against time, six teammates and their friends cracked a puzzle that stumped the very best. They flung themselves forward and seized their opportunity and now are immortalized parts of Destiny legend.
No one could have seen it coming, but that’s the beauty of it. After all, Guardians make their own fate.
Destiny 2 is available on the Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and PC
