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Destiny Is Exactly The Game You Think It Is: An Alternate Perspective

Published Wed, 24 Sep 2014 23:30:00 -0500

By Sage Ashford

At some point in your gaming career, you will be guilty of falling for hype. Not long ago, I was sitting in my friends' apartment, discussing how my Playstation 4 had gone woefully underused over the summer. Aside from Watch_Dogs (which I'd sold weeks ago) I hadn't even turned it on in weeks. This lead me to pose a question to them all: buy the soon to be releasing Destiny (which I'd already played for several hours), or the upcoming Middle-Earth: Shadows of Mordor game. Unanimously, they all voted for Destiny–they cited how it looked so much better and the countless hours of multiplayer fun it promised.

So, a few days later (the Sunday before the release), I went down to my local GameStop to reserve a copy. Two weeks later, I have come to the following conclusion: Destiny is exactly the game you think it is.

If you've done any type of research about the game at all, then whatever conclusions you've come to are most likely 100% correct. Ignore overly hopeful FPS fans, ignore all the Bungie loyalists–go with what your head's telling you. If you think it's just Space Borderlands or Borderlands Halo? That's not too far off the mark. If you played the alpha or the beta like I did and thought the gameplay wouldn't change too much, for good or ill, you guessed it.

And if you think despite all these things you're going to enjoy it…you're probably still right. After all, with the game 's sales at over $300 million at last count, surely some people will find this game to be the game they were hoping for. But, you should read this review anyway to know what you're getting into.

A lot of my initial impressions haven't changed very much. It's a really fun first-person action/shooter game, with a decent variety of guns that feel incredibly satisfying to use against the large variety of enemies that populate the game. It's got some creative levels filled with rich, vibrant colors that bring what make what could have been just another "brown" shooter unique. But that's just about all of the good part.

The biggest problem with Destiny is a massive identity crisis. It's a cross between an FPS, an MMO, and an open-world game. That's okay, but it really only gets the FPS bits right. It's certainly a competent shooter; its only sin there is that it doesn't really do anything new with the genre, but only the most hardcore of shooting fans were asking for that in the first place.

The persistent, online world is neat…except generally you spend most of your time playing through things alone unless you have your own Fireteam. This is actually quite irritating; instead of giving players the option to work solo, instead you're stuck with a game where you're largely alone most of the time anyway, aside from running into the occasional two or three players every now and again in a world that can feel depressingly empty due to the lack of NPCs to populate it. A world where, if your connection isn't good enough, you're kicked from the game entirely instead of just kicked from the online part. It's the worst of both worlds.

To be fair though, playing with a Fireteam is another great element of the game. If you have a ton of friends playing Destiny with you, many of these complaints become easily overlooked as playing co-op is a blast. It's easy to ignore the title's flaws when you're busy blowing things up alongside your friends.

Still, those flaws are still present…like the tiny open world. Destiny allows you to explore four different "planets"–the Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Mars, with each planet having a number of remarkably similar missions to be carried out before moving on. Each section is actually pretty large, but exploration is tapered by the fact that finishing a mission sends you back to orbit, and once one area is cleared there's little story reason to ever return.

For that though I don't find it completely fair to blame Bungie for this. The limitations of world design come largely from Destiny being a cross-gen title, developed for systems that are nearly ten years old and have more limitations than their more current counterparts. Actually, the memory limitations of the last console generation seem to have led to a lot of unfortunate design decisions. Such as the game's spaceships being used as decoration, and as fancy loading screens, rather than allowing you to personally fly from planet to planet. Worse than that, each planet is so heavily limited you can actually be auto-killed by falling off a quite frankly ridiculous number of cliffs or going "outside of bounds". Considering the number of goals in the game that include "do x activity y number of times without dying", I think I would have just preferred invisible walls to being instantly murdered by the game.

Destiny has some light RPG elements as well, but it seems to be so terrified of being identified as an RPG that literally everything that would identify as such has been stripped out, aside from the vague hit point damage and the ATK/DEF stats that help players decide which weapons and armor should be used over another.

There are "levels" to gain, but those only serve to put you near the level of stronger opponents, while weaker opponents can still kill you if get careless. Overall, the level of customization between builds is pretty low, and as I said before, the first few levels merely serve as a gateway to unlock abilities the game could have just taught you how to use within the first 15 minutes. The rest of them mostly serve as upgrades to existing abilities, but on the bright side, since all the upgrades can be swapped out at any time, so there's never a need to commit to a certain playstyle.

I only recently topped out my character (the picture of my character is from some time ago), but end game grind is nothing special–you spend most of your time re-running through the same missions for new weapons/armor (loot farming), in order to get ready for Bungie's massive "raid", the Vault of Glass.

On that note, the loot aspect of the game combines with the solid gameplay aspects to create what's actually the most insidious aspect of the title. The problem here is that Destiny is just good enough. Players will become frustrated seeking out new weapons or armor, only to have it appear just as they're giving up, encouraging them to play on. Meanwhile, the game's solid mechanics will leave players completely ignoring other glaring flaws, resulting in a title that players will continue to complain about but never actually quit.

Saddest of all is the story. It isn't that it's bad…it flat-out doesn't exist. There's clearly a lot of lore and history in the game, but Bungie doesn't seem to be interested in actually telling us about it in-game. Instead, it feeds you exposition before each mission through your partner, a small machine known as a "ghost" (played by Peter Dinklage), and that's about it.

Initially, I'll admit I didn't think much of it–but at a certain point in the game I saw a glimpse of what Destiny could be, and I was truly impressed: around mid-game, you're encouraged to head out beyond the Milky Way galaxy to make contact with one of the non-human races. Upon going the player is confronted with an absolutely breathtaking cutscene that displays not only what it could be like to fly through the final frontier, but what it would be like to actually meet the cultures from other races and other planets. While watching this scene play out, I could picture a game that was much different–one that allowed more interaction with its world than merely "shoot this thing", one with more characters than just your nameless "Guardian" and his little ghost. One that lived up to the "Lord of the Rings" narrative Bungie claims they want this title to have.

Unfortunately, Destiny is not that game. But it could be, one day. Destiny may very well be this generation's Assassin's Creed; a series that does a far better job of living up to its promises with the second installment. With the creative work behind creating the various worlds, their environments, and different enemies already done, combined with the feedback from fans and hopefully the next installment being designed solely for the current-gen systems, Destiny 2 could be quite the game to look out for.

But for now, Destiny is exactly what you think it is. A first-person online titles where you shoot lots of things in colorful, exceptionally beautiful backgrounds. And that's okay. Just so long as hold no illusions about what you're getting into.

Post-Release Thoughts:

One thing that's actually disturbing to me about Destiny is the post-release content. Bungie promised us an ever-changing world, and game. To some extent that's true, but I'm not sure how I feel about a developer being able to actually take content away from a game whenever they like. It's one thing when it's a random MMO event like those in Guild Wars or Final Fantasy XIV…but Bungie's taking entire game modes. They had a 3v3 appear for a brief period only to take it down, and seemingly this week's upcoming "The Queen's Wrath" will be along those same lines.

The other issue I have is that for a game that lacks in content as much as Destiny (I'm what one would call a "slow" player and even I finished the story in just over 15 hours), they really shouldn't be stripping their game of anything that could add playtime. Just a thought.

Sage Ashford is a college student with far more hobbies than he has free time. You can find him on Twitter @SageShinigami, but also at his own blog Jumping in Headfirst.

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