For years, Future 2 gamers have been questioning when the sport would take them to a location teased approach again earlier than the unique Future was even launched: Outdated Chicago. With the discharge of its newest enlargement, Fringe of Destiny, it seems to be like we’d have no less than a imprecise reply: quickly.Echoes of Destiny appears delicate on this level, at first. Although the story is ready on Kepler, a brand new location flung approach out towards the sting of the photo voltaic system, it offers loads with time-bending seems to be again into the previous, and some hints towards the long run. You get your first trace about Chicago when Lodi, the enlargement’s new character, will get a glimpse of the long run. He mentions standing with the Guardian, Future’s participant character, on the shores of Lake Michigan–the Nice Lake on whose shores Chicago is discovered.After which there’s the practice. The marketing campaign’s opening cutscene sees collection mainstay Ikora Rey almost getting run over by a subway practice seemingly zapped throughout time to seem in Future 2’s far-flung futuristic post-apocalypse. Trains are all around the enlargement, performing as a narrative touchstone, a type of reality-bending entry level for various areas within the new location of Kepler, and the enlargement’s defining picture.That practice automotive positive seems to be like Chicago’s “El” practice, the elevated railway that runs all through town, when you’re primed to search for it. And in case you zoom in on the Fringe of Destiny key artwork, you’ll be able to see the practice’s vacation spot printed above the door. It says “Ravenswood,” a north Chicago neighborhood.See that practice automotive in the course of the picture?However any sleuthing turns into pointless when issues get actually express in a while, as you close to the top of the marketing campaign. In one of many closing missions, Future 2 mainstay Ikora Rey actually says one thing to the impact of, “Perhaps quickly we’ll go to Chicago.”Outdated Chicago is a giant deal to Future gamers who’ve been round for some time. The situation has been questioned about, mentioned, and even teased for years. Bungie first dropped the opportunity of visiting Outdated Chicago again earlier than the unique Future was even launched. Since then, references to town have come up again and again in lore and story. When Bungie first confirmed off pictures of its 2022 enlargement, The Witch Queen, gamers speculated the situation in its first trailer may be the swampy outskirts of Chicago.It might be a big location to go to, as a result of whereas Future 2 has locations set on Earth, they’re pretty nondescript. The European Lifeless Zone, or EDZ, takes gamers to a destroyed, fictional European city known as Trostland. There’s additionally the Cosmodrome, an airplane and spaceship graveyard and management facility positioned someplace in Russia. However each areas are invented for Future 2–they do not actually reference wherever particular from our world.Chicago, however, can be a recognizable place from our actuality, and it might be the primary. Whereas the previous cities of Earth are all destroyed a whole bunch of years earlier than the occasions of Future 2, certainly town will nonetheless seem like the Chicago we count on, and seeing it in its ravaged, post-alien invasion state can be attention-grabbing in and of itself.A cutscene throughout Fringe of Destiny’s marketing campaign reveals a distant metropolis that is additionally the situation of the Division of Exterior Commentary. Primarily based on the panorama and the freeway signal, it may very well be Chicago.It’d even be the primary American location to get Future 2’s futuristic therapy, so we would get to see how Bungie may play with town and alter it via the course of each a whole bunch of years of progress and a whole bunch of years of decay. That is to say nothing of what gameplay alternatives the ravaged metropolis may afford, or story implications of the opportunity of any people nonetheless eeking out a dwelling there.There are hints throughout the Fringe of Destiny marketing campaign that Chicago may very well be an essential location as Future 2’s story develops, too. Cutscenes within the enlargement bounce again in time to Earth in what seems to be the Sixties, and one features a distant metropolis skyline. That metropolis can be the obvious location of the Division of Exterior Commentary, a authorities company from the previous centered on the opportunity of alien contact and abduction, which performs a big function within the enlargement. So if Chicago is, the truth is, a future vacation spot, it appears very possible the DEO is just too.That is a variety of hypothesis, however it actually looks like Fringe of Destiny is establishing Chicago as its subsequent massive vacation spot. If that is the case, it’s going to be the fruits of ready and hypothesis that is lasted all of Future’s life–almost 12 years.
