Destiny 2’s Latest Controversy Is A White Shader That Isn’t White Enough

While there are large-scale problems with the direction of Destiny and questions about its overall survival, it’s nice to circle back to a traditionally pointless and minor controversy for once.

This time it’s about a mini event that Destiny is running at the tail end of the episode here that requires small tasks to unlock Destiny 1’s famed Chatterwhite shader. At first, there was a whole lot of complaining that it was timegated, but it was quickly revealed that A) you could glitch your way easily to get it day one, or worst case, you had to wait three days until other challenges opened up on Friday. Oh no.

But once players got their hands on Chatterwhite, a new controversy began. It wasn’t white enough. As in, on some outfits there were some areas that were more of a light blue than pure white.

To me, this is a metaphor about Destiny 1 nostalgia as a whole, as this is…how the original Chatterwhite was. It did not make every outfit blinding white in every context, these slightly differently shaded patches were in fact present in the original shader, as global community manager DMG pointed out:

Chatterwhite is in fact close to pure white on a lot of outfits, but not all of them. There is actually a shader that is more pure white than Chatterwhite which has been in Destiny 2 practically since the beginning, Honors of the Nine. Yes, it is definitely whiter that Chatterwhite but no, Chatterwhite was not changed from its original look and people are just remembering wrong. As tends to happen with a lot of things in Destiny 1.

I guess one problem is that Honors of the Nine is not remotely available now, and you had to go flawless in a Trials mode that doesn’t even exist anymore, Trials of the Nine. I bet either Bungie now either makes Chatterwhite more white or they bring back Honors of the Nine somehow.

My personal take as someone who is really into Destiny fashion is that I pretty much hate all of these shaders. What they end up doing is making people make a bunch of Guardians that are pure white, which almost always looks super boring and bad, or before this, Superblack, to make them all black in a way that people with bad fashion sense thinks look edgy. I think using those shaders for individual pieces to create a look is fine. I hate the all-black and all-white armor sets though.

This complaining will probably lead to some sort of change, but yes, I believe this is dumb and D1 nostalgia blindness wins again.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.