It has taken me a few days to collect my opinions of Destiny. Destiny, being such a divisive game, is hard to critique because each player was hoping for something that this game didn’t end up delivering. Once we all can agree that Destiny didn’t deliver the “goods” we had anticipated, this is where the player base divides.
One group are those who got “butt hurt” when the game didn’t pan out the way they had expected it to. Some of these people were hoping for the next Halo. Some of them were hoping for a Call of Duty replacement. There are a million different reasons why they turned against the game. Some of these people put too much hope in these games, they yearn for these games to become the next “it” game and they want to be there when “it is happening. It pains them when these games that they invested too much into turn out to be just another game.
The other group of people are, like me, people who expected something more but have decided that we are going to keep plugging away at Destiny and continue to try to mine more fun from the game. The issue with this is that it very much is like farming. It is laborious, but, when you do find that vein of gold in the rock, you know you are going to enjoy yourself for a little while longer.
I think that what Destiny presents to it’s audience is very much a refinement of where we are in game design. Destiny is member of the nouveau shooter class, a class of shooter that focuses on daily online content in lieu of spending development costs on single player content. Destiny is like a race tuned Skyline GT-R; they have taken out a lot of the bloat and streamlined the product to be good at one single thing. For the car, they take out things like air conditioning, radio, seats, etc. For Destiny, which in my opinion is a detriment, they took out the story. What we were left with was a thin story that was peppered with bits of interesting plot points that, sadly, only accentuate the dearth of overall story in the game.
I think Bungie made a great shooter. They made a great game that is fun to log on and shoot stuff. Each of the different guns controls very differently. The pistol is amazing. I haven’t really chosen my favorite among the assault/SMG type guns that fill out your main guns. Your secondary gun can either be a shotgun, a sniper rifle, or a charge/fusion rifle. I’m not the biggest fan of the fusion rifle, and it doesn’t sound like the rest of the community is either. The developers have made some changed recently to these guns. I never really like sniper very much – in any game. But, in Destiny, I love the sniper rifle. The shotgun is really nice as well. Finally, you also have a heavy weapon. You can choose either a chaingun or a rocket launcher. (I don’t think there is a third. At least I haven’t seen one yet.) Also, you have grenades and some class based abilities that are on a cooldown, etc. Blah, blah, blah.
Of course, Bungie made improvements on the tried and true first person shooter, with games like Titanfall, another member of the nouveau shooter class, and COD: Advanced Warfare breathing down on them they had to. I think that Bungie, with Destiny, is falling in line with EA and their approach with Titanfall; they recognized that people who play first person shooters play online much more than they play offline and most people don’t finish single player games. The data is there. These companies who see dwindling profits year-after-year and they are in a fight with Activision, who have a huge war chest of funds – from COD, and they are moving with the times and moving these games into a much more online focused market where, these companies believe, they don’t need to focus on story as much.
I think I am going to keep with Destiny for a little while longer. I am now level 23. I have been playing Crucible matches finally and it is fun playing against other Guardians. I am still combing through the Grimoire trying to find more information about this story – and where it went.
