The best gun in Destiny is the first. Unlike most of the gear doled out in Bungie’s multiplayer shooter, it arrives in the hands of every player in the same way.
You awaken in a sea of ruined cars, and you run. A voice in your head tells you that you need something to fight with, and it appears, tucked away near a pile of bones in a long-abandoned industrial wall. Simple, black metal, barely functional: This is the Khvostov. It fires in erratic but predictable lines, recoil sending the broken sights arcing always upward. It vomits implausibly old bullets into implausibly hideous aliens, the insectoid scavengers of The Fallen dying in bursts of crystallized gas. For the first time, you engage in a ritual that any seasoned Destiny player has engaged in a thousand times over. You stand and fight. First, you cut through the small, fast Dregs with their glimmering knives. Then you focus fire on the hissing shock troopers with wireframe pulse rifles—these are the Vandals. Then you shoot at the shielded Captains until they, too, fall in your wake. You collect some loot, you get in your new ship, and you go home.
Inevitably, you’ll abandon the Khvostov. It’s only intended as a tutorial gun, and is outclassed by any other weapon in the game. Until recently; in the latest (and final) expansion, Rise of Iron, Destiny offers the player an optional quest to forge a new version of the Khvostov, a highly customizable iteration of the original with destructive capability matching any other piece of equipment on offer. My reunion with the Khvostov in this fashion has cemented, for me, what I always knew to be true: the Khvostov is the best gun in Destiny. In an experience all about shooting aliens with guns, the Khvostov stands alone. It is the purest expression of what Destiny is.
This is my ode to the Khvostov.
Its surface is matte black, a magazine poking out of it just in front of the trigger, a thin stock extending from the back for stability. It’s utterly plain, designed to look like an AK-47 in a world of high-tech space guns from the future. Its real-world resemblance would feel discomfiting in many games, but here it casts the weapon as an ancient relic. Unlike every other gun in Destiny, the Khvostov has the feeling of history. You can see dirt on its side every time you reload. Its glass sights are cracked. Like so much about Destiny’s aesthetic, its inclusion is anachronistic, offering hints at a place that’s faded from a retro futuristic dream to a scavenger’s wasteland.
Destiny’s environments borrow imagery from the Space Race era of the 1950s and ‘60s, using the shadows of multi-stage rockets and the simple, iconic designs of our first space-faring equipment to build a grounding for its world. By jamming its ruined future into an aesthetic of optimism—humanity's capacity to reach out into the stars—Destiny does just enough to make us believe that there’s something worth fighting for beneath its landscape’s lifeless facade. Like every salvageable rocket in the ruins of Russia or the moon, Destiny’s first gun is a glimmer of hope set amongst a tableau designed precisely to communicate a hope broken.
