The past year has been one of the most voluminous ever when it comes to big name, AAA title releases. With so many high quality titles vying for our hard earned recreational dollars, it has been difficult to keep up. There was a litany of games that I should have played more of, or that I didn’t play at all. I burned my fair share of rubber in Mario Kart 8, accidentally killed myself plenty of times while attempting to keep up with my Super Smash Bros friends, annihilated legions of demons in Diablo III, and toppled cities worth of towers in Mortal Kombat X. These games and more deserved my attention, and while some managed to claw their way into my brain’s addiction center for a time, nothing ended up ousting the hyper-polarizing gorilla in the room – Destiny.
With a vocal community numbering in the tens of millions, developer Bungie has heard the chorus of complaints, weathered the hurricane of hype, and marched the dirge of ceaseless development. Change is the mark of engaging persistent online games and Destiny has certainly seen its fair share of mutation since 9/9/14. As we draw closer to the arrival of Oryx and The Taken King expansion, now is a good time to look back and try to understand why Destiny keeps players like me coming back—while simultaneously repulsing others.
During the months leading up to the launch of Destiny, the hype surrounding the game was everywhere in gaming media coverage. It was inescapable, especially for me working at GameStop at the time. Trailers bored into our heads and developer vidocs promised a veritable ocean of content to explore come launch. I’ll admit that I too was on that locomotive behemoth of a hype train. Many fans have fond memories of playing Bungie’s older titles like Pathways into Darkness, Marathon and Myth on Mac computers. Even more gamers have played countless hours of Bungie’s titles within the Halo series. With a pedigree of excellent games in their past, Bungie didn’t have to become legend on Destiny’s release day like the rest of us, they already were. The big question here is “did it live up to the hype?”
The answer almost certainly depends on how we look at what vanilla (original release) Destiny accomplished. The story was abysmal, marred by phoned in performances by some highly billed voice actors and a general lack of cohesion in presentation styles. This mess of a narrative was a shock, coming from a developer known for blockbuster action games featuring rich stories told through characters that matter to players. While the lore was solid, it was almost all locked behind the wall of a companion app that not everyone had the impetus to check out. I myself only recently read through these Grimoire Cards out of boredom on a long road trip. That promised ocean of content materialized as a mere lake, with a disappointing amount of story missions, only a few cooperative multiplayer strikes, a wildly imbalanced player vs player Crucible stocked with an underwhelming number of maps, and one six player raid that remained a tall order for more casual fans to accomplish. Hardcore players bemoaned the lack of end game, max level activities and any meaningful PVP ranking system. To make matters more upsetting, some extra content was reserved for PlayStation players only, leaving the Xbox fan base that helped make Bungie a powerhouse feeling slighted—even scorned. While players did have the choice between one of three character classes to play as, each with two sub classes, progression was altogether too cookie-cutter and rote to feel like characters stood out from others of the same class.
But surely, something had to have been done well for the game to merit the legions of fans who stuck through the vanilla release. Through the baby-steps and pitfalls, there was a lot done well. For all that Destiny did wrong with story in its initial debut, it did that much right with gunplay and character gear. The amount and variety of guns and armor to be found in Destiny is staggering. While not reaching the insane numbers of the arsenals offered by series like Borderlands or Diablo, Destiny’s weapons, I would argue, are more unique. The different categories of weapons all feel significantly different from each other, as do the different guns within each category. Unlockable upgrades make impactful changes to how players think about using a certain gun or armor piece, adding even more customization. Though they may not have much developer written story behind them, Legendary and Exotic items inherently come with their own player driven stories. Acquiring the game’s most prized possessions has never felt so personal in a first person shooter. Regaling my friends with the tale of how I wrecked face in Crucible for a couple hours to get Thorn while they struggled for weeks to accomplish the same, or hearing from a friend about when they conquered the hardest boss in the game at the time (without exploits) and snagged the sleek and destructive Vex Mythoclast – these stories are a very real form of narrative in themselves.
The painstakingly detailed environments players spend their time in also kept players involved in Destiny. Though we may be shooting endlessly wherever we go, the sheer variety of visual spaces there are to explore in the game is a feat in and of itself: from the methane-soaked tropical vistas of Venus to the sun-scorched dunes of Mars; the collapsed wasteland of old Earth’s Cosmodrome, its industrial corridors infested with enemies; the totally alien and macabre structures of the Hive’s subterranean architecture; and the almost ethereal realms outside time that the Vex inhabit. All of these settings feel exotic, original, and wholly apart from the usual tropes of the shooter genre. I’ve found myself staring in awe of many of the vistas in the game, and that sense of wonder doesn’t seem to diminish even though I’ve seen these places hundreds of times now.
Given the large amount of complaints about the lack of content, it’s obvious that there wouldn’t be nearly as many people playing Destiny today if Bungie had rested on their laurels. Along with constant updates to balance weapons and player abilities, fix item drop rates (yes, Rahool was a constant source of frustration in vanilla), and eliminate strike and raid exploits, the two year-one expansions did offer a substantial amount of new and interesting activities. As contentious as their pricing scheme may have been, both The Dark Below and House of Wolves provided veterans and newcomers alike fresh reasons to spend their time on the game; each expansion offered new missions, new guns and gear, more varied PvP maps and game types and challenging end game bosses.
While both expansions relied on the same broken storytelling of the initial release, the non-player characters were more relatable and comprehensively fleshed out than the ill-fated Dinklebot. The new story missions of The Dark Below felt more like cohesive set pieces in an epic story of struggle against an immense enemy, culminating in vicious battles against the soul and will of a god, and eventually a raid on the stronghold of the god Crota himself. The opening of a new social space in House of Wolves provided players not only a new place to commiserate but also a hub for collecting new missions and gear. Once again, the story took a step in the right direction, as missions tied together directly into end game content. House of Wolves was undeniably more accessible for newer players, offering a progression to max level that was based on completing content instead of blind luck. PvP also gained a new level of competitive grit in the ranked, 3v3 elimination matches of the Trials of Osiris, tantalizing players with substantial rewards for feats of team based skill.
Games are never perfect. Even the 10/10s and the Game of the Years will never be universally loved by every single person who plays them (that even includes The Last of Us). This critical reality is made readily apparent in the MMO/persistent online genres, as these games are constantly changing to meet player concerns and the ever evolving visions of their developers. Bungie promised us a lot with Destiny, and the game certainly fell short of the expectations of many, the developers included. Does this mean that as a whole, a year after launch, Destiny is an abject failure? Absolutely not. For a game that was designed from the beginning to take shape over the course of a decade, I look back at year-one Destiny as a launching point for a franchise that has now solidified itself in gaming culture. It’s been a fun learning experience for the fans and the development team. Bungie has some really creative minds working the mechanisms behind the game, and I’ve enjoyed exploring their vision as it’s become playable, even though I don’t have a Gjallerhorn yet, even though it took Xur almost a year to sell Gjallerhorn again. Love it, hate it, or sick of hearing about it, people know Destiny now, and they know it’s here for the long haul. If Bungie keeps listening to their fan base and replaces the failures of the past with new successes, they will have a franchise worthy of a decade long lifespan – and the hype.
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