My Breakup with Destiny
The Rise of Iron and Year 3 of Destiny have begun. She looks good, but I don’t think I should go say hi. That time is over.
2014 was a pretty good year for me. I moved into a much nicer living space, got a much better job, and accidentally helped one of my best friends get into the healthiest romantic relationship he’s ever been in.
As far as videogames went, it had its solid ups and downs. inFamous Second Son gave me reason to get a PS4. Watch Dogs reminded me that you could still screw up driving controls in the modern day. Dragon Age Inquisition had me doing marathon stints of 12 hours gobbling up all the content, and while it wasn’t always perfect I had a great time. Far Cry 4 proved to be a fun romp for me, but after the honeymoon phase wore off I could see a lot of things I’d take issue with hard enough to avoid picking up Far Cry Primal when it came out around the beginning of this year.
It’s was also the year that Destiny came into my life.
Having grown up with Sony’s consoles with some supplementary Nintendo and PC, I was largely unfamiliar with Bungie and had utterly no investment in their previous success at redefining the console FPS and opening the door for the world of Battlefield and Call of Duty as we know them now. What I did see as it neared release though was a class-based co-op shooter with some very sexy art direction and some sweet sweet sci-fi sauce covering the crunchy mechanics.
Each of the classes had some clear inspirations on its sleeve and I really liked the look of each. The titan who cut a stark, bold silhouette that roared armour and physical power. The hunter, lithe and sinewy, a scarf or cape billowing out behind them to add emphasis to their acrobatics. The warlocks with their long coats and calm stance that spoke of wisdom and some innate inner power. Even now I look at the design of Bungie’s classes and I’m impressed by them. They’re easily distinct from each other even in their similarities and put together they look like a trio prepared to take on anything.
They toted a collapsed golden age in human civilisation, an empire that once stretched across the solar system and maybe further that was systematically crushed by the oncoming tide of foes that quite expertly put humanity back in its little cage. Facilities on the moon gutted and abandoned. A great academy in Venus with most of its records trashed. More than just earth, we were to strike out into the stars.
My dad has always been a big fan of sci-fi, and he passed that down to me simply by watching and playing it whenever I was around. I got to know Star Wars at a young age (although I feel as a child of the 90s that’s not so outlandish) and watched a great deal of Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis with him, as well as episode after episode of the revived Doctor Who whenever I was with him. Suffice it to say that I think people should care more about sci-fi as a genre. Destiny was going to be another great game on the repertoire then, something that could pull the masses in with a great tale of flying out into the stars to retake humanity’s lost past.
When the public beta (read: stress test/demo) released I jumped in and ate it up. I played and replayed missions and zipped around the overworld we were given looking for nifty little tidbits. “Oh yeah,” I thought, “I’m gonna enjoy this.”
I certainly won’t say I was wrong either. When Destiny did at last release I picked it up happily, steelbook and all, and sat down to begin my big old space quest. I had fun too. Fighting my way through Old Russia against the Fallen, whatever it was they actually were. Brushing with the Hive, the insectoid… magic… things from the moon. Tracking them back up there to figure out what was going on… and then an hour or two later I was on my way to Venus. The first of my trepidations hit here. I was still high on the rush of a new game, on levelling my warlock’s second class and figuring out which I liked more, on discerning which guns I wanted to pack and playing with the equipment screen, but even then I had the thought: oh, we’re already at Venus? Is there more than one region per planet?
No.
I kept going anyway. I was still having fun, so I was going to see how long I could ride that train. I chewed through Venus, went on my merry way to Mars. Somewhere in the middle of that I visited the Reef, an area on the space map that existed solely for a couple of cutscenes. I fought my way through the Vex, who were apparently some kind of teleporting robot that hated the other races for a reason I’m not sure was ever explained. At the end of it I faced off against the bad thing that was poisoning the big floating ball that kept humanity safe. Guardians 1, Nebulous Black Oozy-type Stuff 0. Home in time for dinner, where a character who doesn’t do much explaining of anything demeaned my victory while everyone celebrated and then roll credits.
I know the idea was that Destiny’s plot would stretch over a series of expansions and sequels, but holy crap what did I even accomplish for all of that campaign? Oh but I kept at it. A disappointing story of that magnitude is a cardinal sin but I was determined to enjoy the gameplay aspect, and I did for a lot of things. Then the loot cave incident happened, and I really started to question things. People started mentioning numbers and how it was more efficient to stand and shoot into a cave that had a bugged respawn timer than it was to rerun the same missions on their highest difficulties in order to get high end gear. Furthermore it was revealed that the ‘engrams’ which dropped in place of actual loot (which you’d then cash in for the actual loot item at a vendor back at the hub) actually only had a chance to be at the rarity they displayed. True, they had a chance to actually be higher, but they also had a significantly larger chance to be of a lower rarity.
This meant that even if a player ran some of the hardest content in the game and came out on top, a purple tier reward, even if it spawned, still had a good chance of not being a purple tier reward once you unboxed it. I hung on a little bit after this, still having a bit of fun, running around with other players killing things and trying to get the coolest gear I could. Pretty sure in the end I acquired an exotic — the highest loot tier — but it was for a hunter, which didn’t do my warlock much good. I played a bit of PvP but that’s never been my jam when I’ve got some co-op PvE on the table, and I even briefly fiddled with the Destiny website’s grimoire feature, where most of the game’s actual backstory, flavour text and information was stored.
It was disappointing, honestly. The plot literally featured the line “I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain”, as a way of vaguely alluding to bigger problems without ever giving any of them any weight, the different races of aliens that formed the enemy all seemed to hate each other as much as humanity but for some reason had all colluded to crush that one particular civilisation, and somewhere behind it all ‘The Darkness’ was trying to harm ‘The Traveller’, the big slightly broken orb humanity called its saviour and knew absolutely nothing about. It became very apparent that for all the mentions of great battles of old, dark forces pulling strings and men behind the curtain there wasn’t really much of any of that, and that’s why nobody ever actually mentioned the events or things themselves. There wanted to be a big, interesting world here. The grimoire even had some good worldbuilding and backstory squeezed in there. The enormous problem was that none of it featured in the game.
At this point I knew I wasn’t really a fan of Destiny anymore. I was still playing it, but it felt like the morning you wake up with a dry taste in your mouth and realise you’ve formed a bad drug habit and you should work out how to quit… after this next hit.
I told myself I was probably in it for those two teased expansions. An opportunity to see some new plot; maybe fine-tune some of the issues the game had? I’d just keep gearing myself up, maybe try and tackle the Vault of Glass once I thought I was ready for it, and get on board.
When Shadow of Mordor released I swapped the Destiny disc out of my machine and put in a game that had an actual plot (even if it wasn’t a great one) and some excellent gameplay mechanics. I spent a few weeks terrifying orcs, nurturing strong foes so that I could break them in front of their pathetic minions… you know, having fun. Something I realised I hadn’t been having in Destiny for quite a while by that point.
I put Destiny down after that. It sat in its case where I didn’t touch it while 2014 became 2015 and bigger and better games came along. The Dark Below, the first DLC for Destiny came out in time, and I decided if I was going to be pulled back in I’d wait to hear if it was worth it. Based on what I observed, no. Nothing to write home about. The House of Wolves followed, and apparently featured some more substance, but I was well beyond caring at the time. Other games like Bloodborne and the Witcher 3 had tempted me in and I wasn’t the least bit interested in a return to Destiny. Maybe later, I thought. After I was done with games I still enjoy going back to even now, more than a year later.
Then came The Taken King.
Now I know opinion on The Taken King from those who played it has largely been that it’s good. It addresses a lot of problems people had with Destiny’s base game, it carried a lot of changes to the gameplay formula for the better and it even added an extra subclass for every main class, something it had become clear was already planned when one looked at the elemental bent on each subclass in the base game — for example the warlock’s subclasses which were based on the void and solar elements but lacked an arc element while hunters made out with solar and arc subclasses without a void one, and so on.
Everyone rounded out their subclass list, it added new styles of weapons, it expanded out the way equipment influenced characters, fixed up factions, changed the way levels past max were determined by a specific stat on high end weapons that basically functioned as post-max exp, Nolan North replaced Peter Dinklage’s phoned-in performance as the ghost, and an actual attempt at putting a damn storyline into the game was made… basically it turned Destiny into an entirely new game.
All you had to do was buy a new, fairly substantively priced block of DLC, and you could have the game Destiny was supposed to have been a year prior.
If it had been cheaper I might have even gotten on board. I wanted a reason to go back to Destiny. I still kind of do. But Bungie proceeded to add specific things you could only get in The Taken King by buying the ‘Legendary Edition’, which was Destiny’s base game packaged in with all of the DLC up to The Taken King. Even if you’d been a faithful supporter of Destiny up to this point, Bungie wanted you to know that real fans buy the full game twice. Now yes, you could just buy the expansion online and forget it, but there’s a principle here — marketing a piece of DLC as a full game rubs me the wrong way. Even CD Projekt Red didn’t do that with Blood and Wine, and that was easily bigger than half the games that released this year.
The Taken King by most accounts is a grand improvement over Destiny’s base game. It addresses problems raised, it smooths out the game, it provides more to love and more to play and makes it easier to work with in the process. It’s what Destiny should have been on release by the sounds of things. I haven’t touched it specifically because of that though. I feel betrayed that I essentially purchased an early access game and now to get the full, completed thing I have to put down another not-insignificant wad of cash. I don’t agree with that, even if some people believe what we got with base Destiny was good enough to justify the price.
Perhaps it’s a testament to what Destiny did right that I can feel so deeply betrayed by it all. The universe they created and the art style they did it with looks gorgeous. I want to build a cool character in this world. I want to enjoy the incredibly smooth gunplay and just plain near-perfect gameplay in general. I want to run around with friends and slay demigods and demons in space. I’ve seen the end of the King’s Fall raid in The Taken King, and I’m not ashamed to say it made me want to play it. But not for half the game’s price again, Bungie. I wanted all of that in the full copy of the game I bought when it released.
Now Rise of Iron has arrived to crack open the new year of Destiny content, and I’m about as far removed from the game as I’ve ever been. I hope it does well, I genuinely do. But I wanted to play Destiny in September of 2014 when I bought it. Not now that it’s out of early access and has all the tweaks it needed back then. I don’t think anything short of a new game that’s what it ought to be out of the gate is going to convince me to return to that world of potential greatness.
On the positive side though, it’s definitely better than The Division.
