I think that bringing him back but not having him be relevant would be worse. Like, how would they bring him back without making a significant plot out of it? It would be very weird. He would just return and exist and contribute nothing? What would be the point? Not to mention that it would completely invalidate everything from Forsaken onwards and then not even do anything with it story-wise.

I can sympathise with relating to Cayde; he was very accessible to new players and easy to relate to when I had no idea about anyone else. I also remember that when I first started playing, I didn’t really understand that the game isn’t a fully serious game until Cayde. Like, his comic relief added an aspect to the setting that I really liked and that I later found in other lore as well. There’s a lot of lighthearted and funny moments in Destiny! Cayde was, to me, kind of an introduction to the overall feel of the setting.

But I would definitely recommend looking more into other characters. Clinging onto the hope that Cayde specifically will be back can be really detrimental. There’s so much else that happened since and so many new characters and new stories were introduced.

From my own experience: I never played D1 (no console). I played D2 vanilla all year long. When they announced Forsaken and the trailer was out and it became obvious that Cayde was going to die, I was pissed. I didn’t know much about lore, but I knew I liked Cayde and didn’t understand why they would spoil his death in a trailer and then use it to promote the expansion and make jokes. Due to that and also the changes to the game that they announced which I disliked, I stopped playing. Didn’t get Forsaken and just stopped playing for a year. I got back when Destiny 2 came to Steam because hey, it’s free and I have all the content anyway so might as well check it out to see if I’ll like it. And I did! I bought Forsaken, bought Shadowkeep, got into lore and at that point, I was no longer in this weird place where my enjoyment of Destiny hinged on a single character. And that made the game and the setting better to me.

Bit rambly, but I wanted to address this because I’ve been there. And honestly, expanding my knowledge of the setting and learning more about other characters was so much better for me and my engagement with Destiny. I can’t imagine focusing solely on Cayde and still hoping he’ll come back after 3 years of storytelling very obviously telling us that won’t be the case.

You definitely shouldn’t feel bad for liking Cayde! I like him too! He was my first fave character, although I didn’t know much about Destiny at the time so my options were limited. But I still enjoy Cayde as a character and think he’s interesting and cool. And yes, I cried all three times playing Forsaken. It’s an amazingly crafted storyline full of tragedy of all sorts.

There’s definitely a subset of his fans that took liking him to an obsessive level though. And it’s honestly tiring and putting people off the character himself. This isn’t isolated to just Cayde or Destiny btw, this sort of a thing happens in every fandom. Even in real life. Some people take admiration and love for fictional characters and celebrities too far.

With Cayde in particular, it’s become a tiring trend of seeing these people sidelining everything that’s currently happening in the story and trying to spin it to how it could mean Cayde can come back. Or, worse, that Bungie is messing up by not bringing him back. It’s such a disrespectful way of looking at the developing story of Destiny.

Cayde died. It’s over. His death caused a lot of things to happen and start moving in different directions. His death will never not be an important point of Destiny’s story. His story is over though.

I swear we’ll be waiting for The Final Shape to drop and people will be saying “Maybe it’s about Cayde coming back!”

From the Vanguard we’ve had in the games, Cayde and Crow have, to my knowledge, only been shown using Solar. And the only other previous Hunter Vanguard we can speculate on is Caliban-8 due to the Caliban’s Hand exotic which is Solar-only. So we’ve not seen any Hunter Vanguards using anything other than Solar.

Meanwhile, both Ikora and Zavala have nearly everything except Solar. Zavala was shown as both Void and Arc, and most recently as Stasis. Ikora also Void and Arc, as well as both Strand and Stasis.

As an aside, Saint is known for all three Light classes (most famous for Void, Sunbreaker in the early days, shown using Arc in the Osiris comic). And Osiris is the only one who was in some way shown using all subclasses (both Light and Dark).

This isn’t accounting for Prismatic, but personally I think that Osiris using several subclasses at once on at least two occasions passes him that test.

Thanks!

I know it may come as a surprise, but I like Cayde too. He was my fave for a long time and I got so mad over his death that I stopped playing Destiny for a year (and interacting with Destiny content in general). Lmao!

So I understand being angry about it or grieving and all that jazz. However, at some point you should move on. And if you can’t move on and you can no longer enjoy the game without this one character, maybe the game is no longer for you.

I mean that in the nicest way possible. I can’t imagine still being as mad as I was when Forsaken trailer dropped and hateplaying the game hoping Bungie will delete everything they’ve made and remake it to include Cayde or just re-add him to the game for no conceivable narrative reason. Genuinely can’t be good for your health. Fanfics exist for a reason.