Sometimes, Twitch streamer lucent_beam decides to take on what she calls ‘The Tower Challenge,’ a game where she picks a low-level Destiny player to help out. After some research, the plan unfolds with a message.
“The reality is that a lot of people won’t respond to a random message from someone in the Tower, thus it being a ‘challenge,’ lucent_beam told Kotaku. Luckily, in this case, it worked:
The player, who had put in over 600 hours into the game, had three characters—none of which had completed a nightfall or a raid at that point. Mostly, he was playing solo, and had only recently gotten a mic to play with others. You see, this player was not like most Destiny fans. He didn’t go online to learn the ins-and-outs of how Destiny worked, as lucent_beam tells it. He was a retired man, who preferred using auto rifles because they were the most accurate to play with hand tremors. He was the sort of player who solved Destiny’s big Sleeper Simulant riddle by “working on it a couple of hours a day for a few days, just randomly entering the code via process of elimination until it worked.” Not a usual fan, but definitely a dedicated one.
As they played together, the man started sharing his life story with lucent_beam. It’s honestly heartwarming to hear how a game like Destiny had provided him comfort during hard times, and you can hear that in the video below:
“This game actually kinda saved my life,” he said. “My wife actually passed away Christmas 2014...all my family is already passed away. My son passed away nine months ago. This game keeps my mind—I’m retired, so—this game keeps my mind pretty sharp. I feel like I live here. I have lucid dreams about living here. And those are really exciting. It’s so exciting. Most exciting time of my life, being in here.”
“I know there is a strong Sherpa community in Destiny, but those always seemed to be helping people who helped themselves,” lucent_beam told Kotaku. “Somewhere out there, there are people who don’t or can’t sign up for a Sherpa raid or don’t read the subreddit. Same thing with people who stream Sherpa raids: that person needed to know to get there to play. So then I made a hobby of finding people.”
Lucent_beam says she played with the grandfather for about two hours, during which they completed a Nightfall strike. Shortly afterward, she started sharing her adventures with the grandfather on social media. The tale has gone on to catch the attention of other Destiny fans and Bungie itself. Fans were so touched by the tale that they started raising money to send the player to GuardianCon 2017, a Destiny convention:
Better yet, others have come forth with their own uplifting Destiny stories too:
Damn.