Some Thoughts on Destiny

I have been playing Destiny a lot lately. My life is a bit of a mess right now, and as a result I’ve been gravitating towards AAA comfort food. And Destiny is very good AAA comfort food. It’s the game you play when you are down; it’s the game you play when you don’t know what else to play, or when you want to warm-up to playing other games; you play it when your friends are under attack on Twitter, when people are treating you like shit, when things generally don’t seem to be going your way. And it’s glorious. Destiny is everything I love about a game: a game that’s a joy to play but remains enough of a mess in other aspects to keep it interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately, so here’s my thoughts in no particular order.

1.) In many ways Destiny doesn’t feel like a Western, big-budget, AAA game. Western AAA games have increasingly invested in bigger, more open worlds. The worlds have gotten so big and out of control that the phrase “See those mountains…You can climb those” has become a mocked marketing cliche. Destiny bucks this trend. Instead of a true, continuous open world it offers a series of self-contained “stages” (planets) partitioned into sub-areas. The level structure more than anything reminds me of Demon’s Souls, with its discrete levels divided into subsections that give the impression of a larger world without actually providing one. But unlike Demon’s, where the only goal is to get to the end and beat the boss, Destiny expects you to replay those limited number of maps over and over again. It’s much more like Dynasty Warriors or Monster Hunter in expecting you to repeat variations on a core set of tasks to progress, or like Animal Crossing, where you are encouraged to turn incremental progress into a daily ritual. It’s no wonder that early reviews of vanilla Destiny were confused about what sort of game Destiny is. Despite the claims of being an MMO coming from Activision, Destiny feels more like a mid-budget Japanese title rather than the most expensive game ever made.

2.) The plot of vanilla Destiny is an indecipherable, incomprehensible mess. Early critics claimed the plot was generic- I find it too confused to even be called generic. I prefer describing it as pure gibberish. It’s fascinating because you can clearly see the contours of a story arc here and there. There’s the mysterious ally, there’s the slow rollout of the Vex (“a evil so dark it hates other evil”) as your ultimate opponent, and an ending where you triumphantly save mankind. But all these story beats consist of nothing but empty, content-free signifiers of what the game expects the player to feel. The plot could almost be read as a minimalist parody of the standard FPS story arc if it wasn’t clear that Destiny was serious about the plot. And as it later surfaced, this bad plot was a direct result of a messy development process.

3.) Many critics have seen Destiny as nothing more than an elaborate Skinner box. Tevis Thompson has most eloquently voiced this line of thought by accusing Destiny of being a shallow, empty game that is lacking in dignity. I must disagree with Thompson’s assessment here. Destiny does have a certain dignity, even nobility, lying under its surface. As has been frequently noted, Destiny is notoriously skimpy for a Skinner box. While in games like Borderlands every enemy death is like a tiny Christmas exploding with goodies, Destiny is far less giving. The glow of an engram on the ground always feels like a pleasant surprise, almost a brief interruption from the shooting. Despite advancement being linked to better and better gear, Destiny makes it clear that the gameplay still remains the focus. Once you reach a certain point more progress is made not by grinding for more gear, but by getting good with the gear you already have. Destiny does a wonderful job of slowly teaching you the moves and giving you room to improve. This was welcome to me as someone who has a slight allergy to multiplayer. Destiny managed to coax me out of my native shyness as I explored new multiplayer modes and challenges. The game encouraged me to experiment and move out of my comfort zone to get better at the game. Speaking of multiplayer, I love, love how no one uses the mic in the most popular Crucible and strike playlists. The best strikes give me a distinct Dark Souls vibe, a shared, wordless victory with people you just met. In these strikes you have to play a quiet coordination game communicating to your teammates only by space and positioning. If that isn’t “noble,” then I don’t know what is.

4.) And on a further note about item drops, their sparsity feels correct with the world. As a Guardian you are defending a shitty outpost surrounded by enemies with overwhelming might. The Earth is on periphery of the universe not only spatially but temporally. Humanity is a relative upstart to races that are billions of years old and have conquered thousands of worlds. One flaw with Destiny’s story, I would argue, is that it is not quite clear how you and humanity actually stand a chance against foes like ROBOTS WHICH ARE ABLE TO CONTROL TIME. It seems silly a collapsed civilization that barely understands technology from their own past can somehow fend off such overwhelming foes. But this is to digress- the point is, huge bundles of goodies popping out of every enemy would feel wrong in this world. Destiny’s world feels best when you are on patrol, stemming off the Darkness small skirmish by skirmish. The low drop rate of engrams makes you feel like a scavenger amongst the collapsed ruins of humanity’s Golden Age. Destiny feels best not when it is narrating big space battles with numbers in the bajillions, but when it is narrating stories of humanity surviving and eking out small victories against insurmountable odds.

5.) Despite Destiny’s reputation for unnecessary grind, the pacing in The Taken King is perfect. For most of the main game’s 40–60 hour playtime I was never annoyed with the tasks at hand. I went on some patrols that many would consider grindy, but only because I wanted to just bum around and shoot things. It was not until the post-game I started encountering unfulfilling and annoying grind. This is quite a major accomplishment, and a testament to the core of Destiny’s systems. Even great games like Monster Hunter force you early on in the game to grind when you don’t necessarily want to.

6.) Destiny has far more character than many reviewers granted it. Its huge problem is that it is terrible at selling itself. First impressions are where it stumbles the most. The plot, as I talked about above, sounds like it was written in chicken scratch by a third-grader. The environments, while beautiful, borrow too much from generic shooteyman environments. The first alien races you meet are the most generic, and the shooting rarely feels different from one race of bad aliens to another. The game at first glance exudes polish rather than anything resembling personality. But go beyond the surface sheen, and little details begin to emerge. For instance, the death animations, one of the most common yet often overlooked parts of a game, are superb, and even in some cases have deeper significance for the lore. The Fallen’s heads pop off with a crackle of ether; the lifeless husks of the Hive clunk to the ground as they are drained of the dark magic that animates them. The Cabal writhe as a black viscous liquid that resembles oil spurts out of their armor. This “oil” is far from insignificant, as it links the industrial-military empire of the Cabal with the American empire. The Cabal, with its Latinate unit names that recall the Roman empire, seems to form a slight critique of human imperialistic empires both past and present. In this case death animations have an actual meaning and connection to the lore of the world. And to speak more about the Hive (they seem to be the alien race that Destiny invests much more meaning in than others), I love the architecture of the Hive structures. The repeating elements manage to suggest both funerary coffins as well as alien larvae. I also appreciated the Norman-style ceilings in the depths of the Dreadnought that suggest a crypt. The imagery here ain’t subtle (they literally call the Hive ships “Tombships”; your Ghost idly muses how the Hive seem to worship things associated with death) but at least Bungie takes the imagery as far as they can. And some of the ways that Destiny shows its character are ones that many male critics would miss. Destiny’s hairstyles are unique in actually being fashionable, and its clothing options are top-notch. Saving the universe has never been so fabulous. The game’s character, I’ve found, can be found in the details rather than the overall scope.

7.) The DLC is really badly integrated into the main game. If you are starting with The Taken King expansion, you will early on run into The Taken …without any idea of who they are. And the ability to trace several paths through the story and DLC quickly leads to confusion. I only started to figure out the entire arc of the The House of Wolves DLC after replaying those missions as Heroic Daily missions. Destiny’s story is already gibberish, and the open-ended nature of the mission structure does not help clarify things.