I got my $80 worth from Destiny, and I'm sad about it (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, June 24, 2015, 17:50 (3676 days ago)

This is basically the confusing fact of Destiny for me. I definitely got enough playtime out of the game to justify an $80 purchase. Hours and hours and hours and hours of playtime. WAY more playtime than I expected, to be honest.

BUT, not all of that playtime was actually fun. A huge amount of it was repetitive, uninspired, and sometimes downright felt like work instead of play. It still does. The progression systems and ranking systems and unbalancing of top tier pvp systems mean that I have to do lots of work in order get my gear in order for the small amount of play that I want to eventually participate in.

All that work makes me feel like I should be getting some sort of compensation for it, and the RNG based loot system makes me feel like, nope, I'm not getting squat. It feels like wasted time, wasted effort, and why should I bother.

So I'm left with this confused feeling about the game. I like moving around the game. I like the setting of the game. I like most of the people who make the game (and don't really know much about the other people involved). But when I paid $80 for a game, what I got was really 1/4 game and 3/4 chore. I didn't buy a chore, I didn't want a chore, and I'm mad that the chore feels like the only portal back to game land.

In fact, the whole experience of Destiny is an exercise in disappointment. Marketing showed me all kinds of stuff that simply isn't in the actual game at all. Gating the fun of using a new gun through the time sink of leveling it up. Gating the fun of top tier PvP through the necessity of being level 34, which means playing PvE activities. Gating upgrading your gear through RNG based loot systems that rarely give you what you need and or want and turn into seemingly endless time sinks.

Even the fun stuff, like the raids, are designed so that you have to run them so many times if you want the loot that they become un-fun. It's like the game is designed to suck all of the fun out of itself.

But, of course, if you've burned out on the game then you've played easily a hundred hours of it, which means you got your money's worth, right?

Personally, I'd rather have an incredibly satisfying 8 hour game than a deeply disappointing 100+ hour game. I don't want my fun time to be dependent on hours of not fun time, and I like thinking back to the shorter but wholly satisfying games I've played with joy than the way I think about my time spent in Destiny with regret. /sadface.