A Reddit user has shared a batch of screenshots allegedly taken from an early trailer for Destiny 3, and they are so incredibly fake that I don't even know where to begin.
Let's start with the Reddit post itself. User iplay4us claims that a friend of theirs "works at an editing studio that is currently editing one of the trailers of Destiny 3," and that this trailer is where these images came from. On top of the fact that Bungie apparently hired an "editing studio" to handle a trailer for its own game, judging from the playback timeline in the images, the first "trailer" for Destiny 3 is a whopping 11 minutes long. Hmm.
It's also worth noting that the only prior Destiny-related Reddit post from iplay4us was submitted in 2015. That's a few red flags right there, and they've got some powerful "My dad works at Nintendo" energy. To this user's credit, they've since acknowledged these images as fake, claiming they were fooled by their friend and "would not have tried to troll." But if you think that's going to stop me from skewering these images, you've got another thing coming.
Before we get to the timeline around Destiny 3, let's look at the images:
The second and third images are just photoshopped mockups of an alleged augmented reality weapon preview, which is one of the most pointless features I've ever heard of, so we're going to focus on the first image because it's the real goldmine.
The UI here is, frankly, a disaster. I have no idea what this is supposed to be. We're not even going to talk about the four ugly circles on the left, which I think are meant to be new stat icons, which is odd because Destiny has used the same icons for going on seven years. We're also not going to talk about the fact that the "Material Details" button in the top-right corner uses the Iron Banner emblem for some reason.
The "Level 30" label suggests this is a shot of a Guardian's overview, but the Titan on display here is so dark that he looks like a fighting game character that hasn't been unlocked yet. A game menu would never darken your character like this, but a Reddit user might if they wanted to hide the fact that this Titan's armor looks very similar to the Noble Constantine Red set from Destiny 2. Then there's the "257 Defence" stat, which seems to have been pulled from the preview of an individual armor piece. Defense hasn't been a thing since Destiny 1, where it was spelled with an S, at least in English, which is the language that the rest of the image uses.
Then there's the flavor text, "When the last war comes we will be the victors." This sounded familiar, so I looked it up to double-check. And what do you know, it's from the Future War Cult armor sets in the original Destiny, specifically the boots.
We haven't even gotten to the best part: as Redditor Pooripk pointed out, the character silhouette and laser rifle are lifted wholesale from The Terminator. Here's the original image:
This is a hysterically fake leak, and it's also a good opportunity to remind everyone that even if Destiny 3 is in development, we won't see or even hear about it for some time. Bungie has repeatedly stressed plans to focus on Destiny 2 for at least another year, probably two. Destiny 3 may be worthy of discussion by the end of 2022, but until further notice, it's safe to assume that any purported leaks are just Terminator photoshop-tier trolling.
Among other things, Destiny 2 is still waiting on a big weapon retirement update.
