Remember Old Chicago? Fanbyte remembers. Long ago, before the original Destiny was released, Old Chicago was supposedly going to be one of the locations featured in the game. It was going to be an overgrown city, housing research centers and labs in the Golden Age. That never transpired, and Chicago has yet to appear in Destiny 2 either, despite many fans initially thinking that the Witch Queen expansion was going to take place there. But Old Chicago has been mentioned in Destiny 2 lore.
Cast your mind back to the Season of the Hunt, released shortly after the Beyond Light expansion. While most of the lore and narrative in that season focused on Xivu Arath and Crow, the lore attached to the seasonal armor described several Guardians’ time in the city. This was back when seasonal armor had different lore for each class, so it’s spread out over a few pieces. Actually, the lore itself mostly covers the now-vaulted Tangled Shore. The bits pertaining to Old Chicago are mostly in the “quote” field.
The fireteam that explored Old Chicago is none other than the same one featured in the Trials armor — Shayura, Reed-7, and Aisha. Apparently, they were exploring the ruins of the city when Ghaul attacked during the Red War and Guardians became lightless. They’d been hunting some kind of creature, but it soon became apparent that they had in fact been lured down there to be hunted themselves. Whatever the creature was took out a number of Guardians, and the Trials fireteam were the only ones to escape.
It’s unclear what the creature beneath Old Chicago was. The last time the city was mentioned in Destiny 2 was on the Pyrrhic Ascent gear in Season of the Chosen, which immediately followed Season of the Hunt. Here, the fireteam’s experiences of terror and isolation in Chicago seem to set up Shayura’s decline into madness, the story of which was then told in the Trials gear lore over the next several seasons.
So, is Old Chicago ever going to appear in Destiny 2? At this point, it seems unlikely. The city’s description as a lush, overgrown swamp makes it unlikely that it will ever show up. Savathun’s Throne World already fits that description, and Bungie typically doesn’t double up on biomes — in fact, it’s possible that Old Chicago was converted into that location at some point. Additionally, we already have a couple of Earth-based locations, so adding a third probably isn’t a priority.
Honestly, it’s kind of nice to have locations in games like Destiny 2 that are merely alluded to rather than explicitly shown. Like a locked door or a window looking out onto an inaccessible location, hearing about places that players can’t actually visit can make a game’s world feel bigger and more mysterious. And maybe that’s Old Chicago’s role in Destiny 2.
