Destiny 2's Season of the Haunted lives up to its name. Set largely in a new location, the Derelict Leviathan, the season has given the game a distinctive, sci-fi-horror atmosphere as part of both its gameplay and its story. What players experienced aboard the Leviathan is a bigger, more involved version of what Bungie first created in one of its very best levels. The Exotic mission Presage sent players to a ghost ship and told a story of madness and murder--and now we've seen what it prophesied.

The ideas that would become Presage and, later, Season of the Haunted were born when Bungie was figuring out what story it wanted to tell with an Exotic mission in 2021's Season of the Chosen. The team had been throwing around the idea of revisiting the concept of Nightmares--manifestations of memories and trauma, first introduced in the Shadowkeep expansion, that coalesce into powerful enemies players actually have to fight.

During a group interview near the start of the season that included several Bungie developers who worked on Season of the Haunted, senior narrative designer Robert Brookes explained that as the writing team was riffing on possible ideas, one derived from a particular horror movie broke loose.