Destiny 2‘s upcoming expansion is focused on one of the main characters of the game: Cayde-6. The Exo was a witty hunter, part of the Vanguard that everyone loved. One of the main reasons for the character’s immense success was because of its voice actor Nathan Fillion. However, Fillion has confirmed that he won’t be returning to the game this fall.
The death of Cayde-6 shown in the trailer for Forsaken really shook the Destiny community to its core. He’s a major character, arguably the best character in the game, who gets killed in a short 2-minute trailer. However, as the trailer started to sink in, people also quickly realized that this would be Nathan Fillion’s last appearance for this character, so it wasn’t surprising when news broke that he would be done with the game when the expansion drops.
However, according to Fillion, who spoke to Kotaku, he wasn’t available during the production phase of Destiny 2: Forsaken due to scheduling conflicts, so the Cayde-6 we’ll be seeing in Forsaken won’t be voiced by Nathan Fillion. Although we don’t get to hear Cayde’s voice in the trailer, several Youtubers and other people as well got a chance to play the first mission of Forsaken’s story at a Bungie event.
There’s a lot of dialogue between Cayde in the mission and many people who played it quickly noticed something was off with the character’s voice. This led to speculation that the character wasn’t voiced by Nathan Fillion himself, instead, it was Nolan North doing his best impression of Cayde. This is indeed true and it won’t be the first time North stepped in to fill the shoes of another characer in Destiny.
Nolan North was brought in to voice our “Ghost” in year 2 of Destiny 1 after Peter Dinklage decided to step down, and he’s stuck to the role ever since. North is well-known for his roles in various video games, he’s also the voice actor for Nathan Drake in the Uncharted Series, and the voice actor for Deadpool in the superhero’s console game.
Given how vocal Bungie was after the trailer during E3 about how Cayde is dead for good, fans have come slowly come to terms with it as they count the number of days before they say goodbye to their favorite character. However, Fillion doesn’t think so:
“How do I feel about Cayde-6? I absolutely love him. How do I feel about that character dying? I don’t personally believe it, because he’s a Guardian,” Fillion said. “He should be able to come back. I mean that’s their whole thing, is that they come back right? The whole thing is the resurrection.”
There are many theories out there that suggest that Cayde-6 can come back. The theories suggest that Bungie is staying true to their word in the sense that Cayde-6 is definitely dead, but since he’s an Exo (a robot), their system can be reformatted and rebooted. Once this process takes place, they lose all their memory and the number in their name gets incremented by 1, which shows how many times their memories have been rebooted. That would mean that Cayde-7 would be the new character in the game, which would mean that Nathan Fillion might not be done with Destiny yet.
However, this is all theory, only Bungie knows what direction they want to take with the game moving forward. In my opinion, it would be a really bad move to bring Cayde-7, because that would really take away all the impact the start of the game would have on us. It would be like the Vanilla story of Destiny 2, your light gets taken from you, but you know that you’ll get it back in the end, so there are no real consequences. Therefore, it’s best if Cayde stays dead and a new Hunter Vanguard is selected.
With all the theories and speculation aside, given how Bungie has constantly reiterated that Cayde is 100% dead, it’s likely that they won’t be going in the Cayde-7 direction. So it’s kind-of unsatisfactory that Bungie wasn’t able to get Nathan Fillion to voice the character given that fans would probably be hearing his voice in a Destiny game for the last time.
It seems that Nathan liked playing Cayde-6 as well, it’s a shame he couldn’t play the character, for what would’ve been his final appearance in the game. Although he’s done with Destiny, you can still find Nathan Fillion in video game-related roles including his most recent role in an Uncharted film where he plays Nathan Drake.
As far as Destiny 2 is concerned, the game’s biggest expansion yet “Forsaken” will launch in September which will bring heaps of new content and changes to the game, including 9 new supers, new weapons, armor, story content, areas and much more. There’s a lot to be excited about for the upcoming expansion, stay tuned as more info gets released.