Love or hate Trials of Osiris, it has some pretty cool lore. The game’s story is structured to encourage players to investigate and explore at their own pace to connect some separate facts into one cohesive plot. And the deeper you dig, the more interesting stuff you find out. Reading item descriptions and listening closely to what NPCs have to say about each other are the main means of uncovering the lore.
In this sense, the backstory of the Trials is actually pretty interesting. First, you have to imagine why anyone in the game’s world came up with such a challenge. We all know that the Guardians are immortal. Therefore, fighting each other to death, demonstrating, and improving their combat skills is considered a very noble kind of sport. Lord Shaxx said it himself, that this is the way of forging Guardians. Then there’s the improved version of this sport, hosted and established by the Iron Lords. It exists to teach the Guardians “the ways of the old.” But then there are the Trials, which are much more mysterious activity with a more complicated origin.
As you might know, the Trials’ foundation takes us back to the days of the first game, and more specifically, the end of its first year. There is an organization within the game’s world called Followers of Osiris, or how the sequel calls them the Osirian cultists. You might have met Osiris already, but what’s essential to this story is that he entered the Infinite Forest and fought the Vex there at some point while being exiled. Now, that’s where things take an interesting turn.
The Complicated Relationship With The Followers
The thing is – the Followers believed that Osiris went there to fight a much more dangerous threat than anything the world has seen before. So, they have come up with Trials in order to prepare for the imminent apocalypse. The followers were encouraged to bring Guardians into this, and they kept saying that when in Trials, Guardians are to be watched closely and even judged. Those whose performance will be outmatched will be noticed by Osiris himself. In reality, the followers have been preparing for some kind of the end of the world that even they couldn’t describe in detail. This is why we have a winning streak and loses mechanics. It is all to determine the worthy and the unworthy. Guardians that demonstrated outstanding results are rewarded with special items and loot, whereas the least lucky have to begin anew every time.
Osiris himself has a somewhat interesting relation to his followers. To say the least, he doesn’t like them and believes that whatever they’re doing is just irritating. In his travels, Osiris has gathered a lot of information that he was going to make public to everyone, hoping it would help everyone better understand the universe’s dangers. But once his cultists have gotten their hands on his research, they named it the Prophecy. Then they went an extra step making this info as convoluted as possible.
Hopefully, this little insight will encourage you to further investigate the Trials’ origins. Thanks for sticking with us, and we’ll see you in the next one!
