Game Spotlight: Destiny

Destiny, a game that has been through years of conceptualization, all the way back to the days of Halo 3: ODST where a mysterious poster informing us that “Destiny Awaits” stared us right in the face and meant NOTHING to us at the time.

Now, we’re here, three months after the games release and the first expansion, The Dark Below, has been released. I guess it’s time for me to give my thoughts on this game so far before I go play the expansion which will end up being a different entry entirely.

Become Legend

When a game gives me options to customise my character, I love being able to create a character that will become the person that I think best represents how a lead character should look in a game. With Mass Effect, I created a character who closely resembled the way I look in real life, while in Star Wars: The Old Republic, I created myself as my main, but also created a cast of characters who had their own distinct looks and styles.

In Destiny, despite having a few facets of being a role-playing game, does not give you a lot of options. Sure, it’s a first person game and the only time you ever see your face is while you’re hanging around the tower, but it’s still a little disappointing regardless of the amount of time you can actually see your face.

Originally, I was going to create another representation of myself in the game, but the lack of options to create anything that remotely looked anything like me convinced me to do something else. Seeing as there’s very little female representation in a lot of first person shooters, I decided to create my best representation of an Indian woman as possible for my human female Titan.

Actually, I decided, for Destiny, why not make ALL of my characters female? I usually I choose to start male characters or create a mix of genders when I can, but for Destiny, being a shooter, it felt like the best thing to do. So, after my Titan main, I create a awoken female Hunter and exo female Warlock. Currently, they’re all hovering around lv28-29 with my upgraded armour… unfortunately, I haven’t been lucky enough to get enough pieces of raid armour to reach lv30 and I wasn’t one of those people who created three Titans just to farm gear each week.

Destiny is Destiny

So what exactly is Destiny? It’s a first person shooter by Bungie, a developer most famous for the super popular Halo franchise and is one of the most respected developers in the industry because their games are generally well polished and work very well. When you think of a game coming from this developer, you expect A LOT from them, which is why, for a lot of people, Destiny has been pretty disappointing.

This is a game that could have been so much more, but from what we can tell without going into all the unconfirmed rumours, it’s a game that went through A LOT of difficulties in its development process meaning that content was either cut or rearranged to the point where we got a game that doesn’t seem quite complete or, at the very least, not filling enough based around all the hype the developers generated for their game.

With that said, I’ve still played a tonne of hours of this game on all three of my characters and feel like I’ve gotten at least some kind of value from this game. However, this value that I speak of isn’t from the price I paid for the Limited Edition version of the game that comes with the little bonuses and the code for the first two expansions included. The majority of the value I got from this game was from my social interactions with random people in the game as well as the group of friends and friends of friends that I know in real life.

Bungie does enable me to play socially this way, sure, but I still feel that the majority of my enjoyment of playing this game didn’t come from them, rather from myself and other people who wanted to play with me in this game. This game helped me play with others, but if I didn’t have my friends there in the game playing alongside me, I would’ve dropped this game less than a month after it had come out.

Actually, the truth is that I haven’t actually played Destiny for about two weeks now because there’s really not that much for me to do since I’ve done everything, acquired a tonne of armour and weapons and upgraded them all with the only things left to do is acquire the last pieces of raid armour to reach lv30. The problem with that last bit is that it’s all based on luck, whether that raid armour drops for you, so I decided to spend my time playing other games than relying on luck.

After all this time with Destiny, I truly enjoy the game, it plays well and I’ve had a lot of fun playing with friends and people I met in the game, but it’s still not enough. The game still feels lacking despite how fun it is.

And that’s the big shame about Destiny, it’s fun but it lacks overall content which seems, for whatever reason, was cut out or saved later for expansion content. Bungie has a supposed 10 year plan for this game and have already talked about how there’s going to be a Destiny 2 with all of your characters, gear, etc moving on to the sequel. This is their long-term game after Halo and it’s started with a pretty lacklustre introduction.

Were we all expecting too much from Bungie? I don’t think we were, we know what this developer is capable of and what they can achieve with a long running series like Halo, so most people expected Destiny to take all the great things about Halo and add things on top of that. What we did get were only a few things that made their previous franchise great and some new concepts that were half-cooked and are constantly being updated through various patches.

Overall, the big problem I have with Destiny is that the developers built a game with not enough content but with the expectation that people will simply redo missions over and over and grind for better items. I did that for a very long time in SWTOR, I don’t really want to do it again with Destiny.

Glass raid

Speaking of content, or the lack thereof, the only raid in the game, which unlocked a while after the game launched has been done to death a million times. I’m totally sick of running the Vault of Glass, to the point where I don’t even care about reaching lv30 because the luck factor in acquiring the necessary armour parts is just ridiculous.

That said, it’s still extremely fun and even better than the rest of the game before it. I remember when it finally came live and a group of us went through it, we all agreed that this was SO MUCH better than all the other parts of the game which just involved going through a linear course, fighting waves of enemies and waiting for Dinklebot to scan a thing as you fought more waves of enemies.

We need more of the type of stuff we saw in the Vault of Glass in the general story missions of the game just as much as we just need MORE story missions to begin with. And I think that’s the fundamental problem with Destiny, it treats too much of the game as a generic shooter, tries to add in the role-playing elements and a fairly open map design (not really, it’s pretty restrictive once you find the edges of the map), but then cuts everything way short.

The entire game feels like a prologue to something bigger but stops short of going anywhere and then gets you to grind through the rest of the content. The raid, initially, was very promising because it felt like I was doing something different, but even that didn’t last as long as I had hoped.

This video shows one of the first attempts… actually, I think it may have actually been the first time we beat the raid not long after it was released.

Ghost recordings

Taking a break from the criticisms in this entry, one of the best parts of the PlayStation 4 version of Destiny is the ease in which you can record gameplay, though, of course, the Xbox One has that feature too… I just don’t have an Xbox One.

Also, note that these are all unedited videos and there are a couple of moments in these videos where I just stand still for a couple of minutes doing nothing because I was doing something else for a bit.

This first video is a simple one where I’m doing the Sword of Crota mission on the moon with a little detour when I realise that there’s a public event happening in the area.

In this second video, I’m doing The Garden’s Spire mission on a harder difficulty to complete a bounty. I think there’s a bit during the video where I’m standing still for a minute and a half for whatever reason though, so just skip ahead from that.

The third vid is a random run on the Devil’s Lair strike mission with a couple of random dudes.

Little light

I’ve ragged on the game quite a bit in this entry, but I still enjoyed my time with it. The problem is that despite Bungie having a supposed 10 year plan for this game, it’s not doing a whole lot to keep me hooked. I don’t want to spend my time grinding, I want to play a game and experience new things.

Well, I guess now it’s time for me to see what The Dark Below expansion has for me…

After all of that here’s a four and a half-minute video of my screwing around in the tower… one of the biggest time wasters in the game which EVERYONE ends up doing at one point or another because… I don’t know, we just do. There are moments where I’m talking to friends on party chat and spend all that time jumping on everything around the tower. Play the game by not playing the game.