Destiny

“That’s it?”

Never before has a game left so little impact on me. And it’s not for lack of trying. I was skeptical of Destiny, Bungie’s new game and what Activision hopes will be it’s next exploitable franchise for the next decade. Masked in secrecy for years, I was initially skeptical of the project. It will be hard for people to remember a time when Destiny was nothing more than a poster with the title, some concept art of Earth, and the tagline “From the people who brought you Halo and Call of Duty“, but that was the image that dominated my idea of the game from the get go. But after a very positive public beta earlier this year (Which I didn’t really participate in) and some amazing concept art, I can admit to be being on board for the idea. A sort of post-apocalyptic, spacefaring adventure with a beautiful, distinct style and gunplay from the people who essentially created the console FPS with vague MMO elements? Sure, I’ll bite.

And so I write this literally checkpoints away from finishing the final checkpoints of the final story mission as I have been for over a week now and I have no drive to go back and finish it. Through my 20 or so hours with Destiny, I can barely remember any of it.

“Destiny is set seven hundred years into the future in a post-apocalyptic world. The setting follows a prosperous period of exploration, peace, and technological advancement known as the Golden Age.^[20] In a universe where humans have spread out and colonized planets in the Solar System, an event known as “the Collapse” saw the mysterious dissolution of these colonies, the end of the Golden Age, and mankind teetering on the brink of extinction. The only known survivors of the Collapse are those living on Earth, who were saved by “the Traveler,” a white, spherical celestial body whose appearance centuries before had enabled humans to reach the stars.^[21] The Traveler now hovers above the last safe city on Earth, and its presence allows the Guardians — the defenders of the City — the ability to wield an unknown power, only referred to as “The Light.”

Upon mankind’s first attempt to repopulate and reconstruct after the Collapse, it is discovered that hostile alien races have occupied mankind’s former colonies and civilizations and are now encroaching upon the City. The player takes on the role of one such Guardian, and is tasked with reviving the Traveler while investigating and destroying the alien threats before humanity is completely wiped out.”

That was ripped straight from Destiny’s Wikipedia page. It will inform you on the situation far more than I could, as all I can recall there were a handful of poorly directed cutscenes where a bored Peter Dinklage mumbled some nonsense about wizards, The Traveller, and The Darkness. I think there was a queen involved somewhere and she said I owed her one because of something I did for her. Oh, and I almost forgot that occasionally a message would appear on the bottom of the screen during gameplay directing me to www.bungie.net to read some cards I unlocked that would explain more of the lore and setting. At least Final Fantasy XIII had the decency to have that crap available in game.

No, ultimately Destiny is not about it’s setting or context, it’s about loot. Randomly-generated, color-coded loot, the hit players regularly take in order to convince themselves to keep playing a game. I can appreciate the mindless fun loot-driven game can provide, but I am of the mind the genre was perfected with Diablo 2. Since then, no other game has captured me in it’s addictive process in the same way and the artifice has become more clear, including replays of Diablo 2. Repetitively killing monsters to slowly increase the power of the gear you wear ad infinitum just doesn’t make for long-lasting or compelling gameplay. Destiny is no exception.

In fairness, shooting things in Destiny works well. Halo slow jumps aside, the core combat mechanics are rock solid. But nowadays being able to shoot things effectively is no longer enough to set you apart from the competition. In exchange, Destiny attempts to be an RPG. Or rather, it has stats, races, and classes. Not many stats, races, or classes, but present nonetheless. Classes are identical except for the slight differences between their grenades, melee, and super attacks. Weapons divide their stats into generic things like damage, accuracy, handling, etc. And finally, you have Strength, Intellect, and Discipline. Strength reduces cooldown time for melee ability, Intellect reduces the cooldown for your Super, and Discipline reduces the cooldown of grenades. And that’s the extent of the game’s RPG elements. You do level up and unlock skills as doing so, but besides for an optional subclass per class, leveling is an equally linear process. Characters level to 20 naturally, but can break into higher levels by equipping certain items that boost your level further, a necessary feature if you would like to involve yourself in any endgame practices.

Gameplay is split up between story missions, patrols, Strikes, Raids, and PvP with “Heroic”, high-level versions of each. Story missions are easy and forgettable, except for one where you are given a sword and you realize the game missed its true calling as a 3D action game or at least become aware of how underdeveloped the mission design is that merely changing the camera angle counts as highlight. Patrols are the dullest form of mission where you walk around the open areas of a planet (These areas are largely shared between most game modes) and complete random missions you find while wandering around. During this time random events can sometime happen, but all they really change up is the area you have to defend for X and for how long, though sometimes different enemies make an appearance. Strikes are a series of missions where you are forced into a group of three people and feature unique enemies and scenarios despite sharing the same map. This is as far as I got and it’s obviously the direction Bungie wanted to take the gameplay. By forcing three players in the mode, the game gets extra design space as far as encounters go, but mostly this directly relates to giant monster having huge health pools and easily avoidable attacks.

Raids do not become available until late endgame and as such I did not get around to it (Soon to be them). From what I have heard Raids, which are a party of six, changes up the gameplay considerably, making their long dungeons filled with puzzles and platforming, a genuinely interesting change to the game that sounds like it would be legitimately fun. So why is locked behind tens of hours of grinding? Why weren’t these present from the beginning? The content you decided to front load your game with is so boring that I don’t even want to work my way to the interesting-sounding end game. Is it because we have to level up? Why do we even have to do that? Like most games of this type, the levels mean little and the differences in classes even less so. The RPG elements of this game are so bare the only possible reason they exist is to justify the loot system, which is another unnecessary element to begin with. There just aren’t enough variables in the stats and classes to justify the having randomized equipment in the first place.

It also throws a wrench into the games PvP elements. I’m not much of a competitive multiplayer guy, but if you had told me the people who had made Destiny‘s PvP had designed Halo, I wouldn’t have believed you. Gone is the great level and weapon design, replaced with repeatable, one-hit-kill heavy weapons and supers, which dominate the game type. There are no choke points or weapons spawns to hold (Outside of the Control match, which is the entire point of that game type), instead just a lot of people running around charging up heavy weapons.

Destiny wants to be a big, epic game on a galactic scale, something like an MMO version of Mass Effect but it runs into the same problem all MMOs run into: repeating the same content over and over again, no matter how epic you claim it to be, ruins the feeling your going for by making it routine. For some the, social elements (which are lackluster in their own right) and the sense of community the game gives, both in and out of the game, may be enough to cover up for this, it isn’t enough for me. All the cool looking armor in the world can’t cover Destiny‘s shallow interior.