Destiny: Wot I finally think (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 12:14 (3520 days ago)
edited by Cody Miller, Wednesday, September 17, 2014, 12:23

Destiny is strange because it is less than the sum of its parts. It's got some really good parts, but ultimately you have to ask yourself during the time you actually play it, how much bad is in between? The unfortunate fact is that if you play the game beyond level 20, most of the time you spend with this game is worthless, tedious, and boring.

What's right with Destiny is almost everything. The shooting feels fantastic, and every weapon has a place unlike a lot of games where there are clear bests for every situation. Like the original Halo, each weapon in Destiny fills a role and has weaknesses. Precision is rewarded with 3X or 5X damage depending on the weapon. So you get things like the hand canon, which can drop many enemies in one shot if aimed correctly, but if not it will kill slower than the autorifle, and it is not good for large mobs but rather smaller packs. The AI seems pretty advanced, and will run when they are weak, and charge when YOU are weak. The art direction is some of the best I've seen.

The PvP is very fun, however even in vanilla non iron banner mode what you do outside of it has way too big an effect on your ability to play. While weapon attack power and levels aren't taken into consideration, everything else is. What weapons you acquire, their stats like range, impact, stability, etc, the weapon's learned abilities, your learned abilities. I got a sniper rifle that gives me radar while scoped, AND makes me invisible. How do you think that's not an advantage over someone who doesn't have that? I'm okay in theory with it being the way it is, but it also needs a mode where there are loadouts everyone has access to where you bring nothing in, and select your character class during matchmaking. Like the equivalent of the 'Arcade' mode in Gran Turismo where nothing from outside that mode matters but your own skill.

Also don't fucking make salvage weekend only. All playlists should be active all the time, there is no reason otherwise.

But all that's right is undermined with all that's wrong. I would say that overall the biggest things wrong with Destiny are the investment system, the story, and less significantly the level design. The investment system is the biggest elephant in the room, which ruins so much of Destiny that if it were not included the game would be an instant classic. Nothing about the investment system does anything but get in your way of enjoying the game. Awesome content like the raid is locked out if you are low level or have bad weapons, when it should be available for at least everyone to try. The barrier to entry should be game skill, not random numbers and time spent.

What we had for free in the past, we have to waste time for now. Halo let you choose your difficulty from the start, but Destiny gives mission difficulties levels, and doesn't even let you play until you are within a few levels of the requirement. If you want to play on hard, you have to grind away to get up to level 26-28. Going from 28-30 is literally impossible without gear from the raid, seeing as how those pieces have more defense (and thus light) upgrades. All the modifiers and skulls from Halo you had access to are gone. No longer can you choose what challenge to take on yourself by flipping on a combination of skulls, but are instead relegated to what Bungie gives you in the weekly and nightfall strikes. The raid itself, which is a blast, has a huge barrier to entry beyond simply finding 5 other good people. Even just upgrading your Legendary weapons to be formidable in the raid is incredibly tedious, with common and rare resource collection.

There is also a bug apparently where Ascendant Motes are not in the game, making FWC armor impossible to fully upgrade. I imagine this will be fixed, or their upgrades changed to require ascendant shards instead.

I think that's mitigated somewhat by the fact that there is nothing substantial to do other than the raid after level 20. When Bungie said that the game begins at level 20, I imagined 1-20 being the warm up / tutorial, and 20 to be the meat of the game. I imagined tons of cool, unique missions to do now that we are familiar with the game. There's nothing. Everything is just a repeat on a higher difficulty, which you should have been able to select at any time anyway like every other game ever made. I don't know why Bungie is obsessed with having players play this game over a long period of time, rather than creating something compelling that lasts as long as it lasts without filler. After doing the raid, my thoughts are now that I can finally put this damn game down, and from now on just do the parts that are fun on occasion. From now till december will be a much more enjoyable, but significantly less frequent experience. That's the way it should have been from the beginning.

Still, overall if you break down the time you spend playing destiny, most of it is doing stupid stuff.

In terms of story, I think most people are on the same page in that what was presented in the game was extremely weak, and the grimoire didn't fill that gap, nor should it have been expected to. When people try to make the excuse that it's supposed to play out over ten years, that doesn't hold water. Each aspect and each 'episode' of the story needs to be good and substantial. If over the next ten years all you get each time is what we got with Destiny, or more likely less in each DLC, then it doesn't matter.

It's fine to have mysterious elements and some mystery in your story, but it's not okay to do what Bungie did. One of the big problems is that very little felt connected to other things. Cosmodrome and the moon felt like completely different dimensions. We go from disconnected mission to disconnected mission, often with seemingly important information that is then promptly forgotten about - Raspitin, what the hive are doing on the moon, who this doctor the AI thinks you are, etc. There is a severe case of amnesia in the story, and when we run missions they should be critical, and more importantly propulsive of the story. One should move us to the next aspect of the story because of the actions of our character. Like Halo 1. Instead, we select a mission knowing nothing about it, a blurb comes up explaining that intelligence found blah blah whatever.

There's also a lack of questions. Someone here mentioned they found it odd that your guardian never asks what the hell is going on. This is true. You've been dead for 300 years, and even your ghost says "You're going to see things you won't understand". A lot of times stories with strange unfamiliar settings have characters who are out of their element, since other characters explaining how things work to another character is a believable way for them to convey to the audience what's going on. That's why in Inception you have Ariadne, so that Cobb can explain the rules of dream infiltration to her since she is new, and by extension the audience. So when you have a guardian long dead, that's the perfect way to get the exposition out of the way naturally. Instead, the speaker tells you that he COULD tell you all these tales, but he won't.

Similarly, the stuff with the Exo stranger onward is also confusing as to exactly how it fits into thing. Why exactly is the traveler doomed if the heart isn't destroyed? Why if that's the case doesn't the speaker send an army of guardians to destroy it? Why is the Queen and her brother being mysterious for no fucking reason? So much is just not contextualized correctly, that the disconnect is as wide as the Hellmouth.

Another problem with the story is that the world is not set up well. I think I made the comparison to it being like the Wizard of Oz if Dorothy just stepped right out of her house into the Emerald City instead of making the journey. We need to see this world, not just be told about it. I get that everything is supposed to be dead after the collapse, but we never see the city as contrast. The very thing we are fighting to protect, you don't get to experience. All parts of this game feel like tiny little self contained places, as opposed to a big connected universe. The reef exists literally only as a throne room. Small pieces that don't feel connected. Individual threads not woven together to make a tapestry. That is how Destiny feels.

Level design is hugely important in an FPS, and I've already talked about why Destiny has lackluster level design, and how to make strikes more replayable. The raid in particular exposed how the game could be throwing much more interesting stuff at you. I'm not saying everything should be like the raid, because it's hugely demanding and having the entire game require 6 player co-op at all times is unfeasible, but I feel like there should be some middle ground. There should be some 3 player missions that require a little bit of teamwork and outside the box thinking, as should there be a more diverse experience if you are playing alone. The jokes about how Destiny is a game where you go to a place, hack it with your ghost, then defend it are really mostly true. You also sometimes kill a boss. There's so much that could have been done with the game beyond what was there, that it's just a shame whoever designed the raid didn't also create some cool story mission objectives and scenarios.

We are at the point where I can finally stop grinding, and I play destiny for fun again, albeit infrequently. It shouldn't have come to that though - that should have been the experience from the get go. Literally the only reason I'm going to buy the DLC is because I'm told there is a new raid with every pack. Otherwise, I'm not sure I'd rush out.

Overall a very bad good game, and Bungie's worst since Oni.