In mid-2004 I sat down to play the WoW beta for the first time. My only previous MMO experience had been six months spent in Final Fantasy XI. Two hours later I logged out of WoW, and, in some sort of fugue state, wrote down twenty-three reasons that WoW was better than FFXI. WoW was a revelation.

That list is lost to time, sadly (along with four years of WoW screenshots that would be even cooler), but in anticipation of House of Wolves next week I thought I would tell you the biggest ways that Destiny is better than WoW and every other MMO that I've ever played.

First, I know Destiny is not truly "massively multiplayer". But as someone who played WoW for four years, I can tell you that the number of times I said "there's a ton of people here, cool!" was very small, and was also dwarfed by the number of times I said "there's a ton of people here, [expletive]!". To me Destiny is exactly like a massively multiplayer game except it removes that irritating part where all the people are killing the guys you need to kill.

(Second Disclaimer: I haven't played WoW or any other MMO since 2011, so some of my comparisons may be out of date)

1. Enhancement by Omission

Destiny has no group loot, no auction house, no mail, and no trading between characters. Every piece of loot is dispensed directly from the game to your account and ne'er shall it depart those confines. This is much to the chagrin of the Destiny community.

Did I mention Destiny has no account hacking, no scamming, and no loot drama? Nobody is forced to spend hours selling crap on the auction house to afford upgrades. Destiny has neither gold spammers nor gold sellers nor the auction house jockies (that muck up the market for other players on their way to accumulating millions of gold coins).

I miss the interaction a little (it was sad that I couldn't mail my son a few neat weapons when he started) but the game is so much better for dodging all those giant problems.

2. The Combat

I remember a specific incident during my last days of WoW. I was doing a daily quest. I flew to a village, hopped my gnome warlock off my helicopter, and started dispatching bad guys.

That sounds kind of fun. But here's what it really was:

Find an enemy. Press Tab to select. Press 1 for spell. Jam 1 to cast spell again. Jam 1 again to cast spell a third time. Jam 3 for finishing spell. Run up to (now dead) enemy and double-click to loot. Find next enemy and press tab again until you wish you were dead.

Low-level enemies in Destiny are still fun to kill and they can still kill you if you're reckless. Turns out shooting computer guys in the head is way more fun than pressing tab, then pressing 1, then pressing 1 again.

3. It's A Really Light Time Investment (For An MMO)

I played Destiny for about twelve hours a week for the first five months it was out. In that time I had two max-level characters, one max-level-minus-one character, and minus one or two weapons had everything I wanted in the game. According to the destiny tracker I had around 13 days played.

Most of my WoW characters did not even hit max level in 13 days played.

In Destiny I have only every played with pick-up groups. I still have beaten both raids on the hardest difficulty a dozen times combined. A raid usually takes no more than 90 minutes. I beat the final boss of the latest raid tier with a pickup group in my third week.

In WoW I only ever raided after finding a suitable guild. Eight hours of raiding a week was considered "casual". It would still take a couple months to clear a raid, assuming the guild didn't fall apart first.

Now that I have kids I have so much less free time than I used to. Even if I wanted to play a traditional MMORPG I just wouldn't have the time to progress much. It's great that Destiny's small enough that I can still do everything (multiple times!) in my limited playtime.

4. One Big Server

When I was playing WoW I had the same conversation in real life at least a dozen times:

me: (something WoW)

other person: You play WoW, that's so cool! I play it too!

me: Oh that's cool, what server are you on!?

other person: (Not Your Server)!

me: I guess we'll never play together, ever!

other person: Nope!

Destiny has one big server instead of having hundreds of regional servers like WoW. I've run raids with teenagers from the UK. I even ran a raid with a duder from the UK and guys from the west coast. I can play with anyone who plays Destiny on the Xbox One. It's marvelous.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the expansion next week. I don't know if I can really get back into Destiny. But I know I had a ton of fun the first time around.

Oh, and if any duders want to play the expansion on Xbox One next week, feel free to send me a friend request (Boatorious). I usually play from 8-10 EST.

I've never played Destiny, but I did play a lot of WoW back in the day. To me it sounds like your personal taste has changed; I know mine has. I don't have the same amount of time to dedicate to WoW and I probably would be more vied into playing a game akin to Destiny over WoW, but I'd always be lustful for that original experience I found with the later.

Sure, engaging with the general populace was about as enticing as it is in the real world, but I met a lot of cool people in my guild and even some good raiding friends outside of that.

Destiny sounds more convenient but old WoW still sounds like a better experience to me.

You know, I love destiny. It's really too bad it was clearly rushed to market with what seems like half the content and features missing. Bungie has been so slow with updates and fixes it's become a running joke. I hope to god they can get their shit together for Destiny 2 because it's clear they won't fix destiny's problems with the expansions.

Have you tried Defiance? Not gonna say it's a great game or anything, but in my mind it pretty much did everything Destiny did, but better, other than the sad fact that it's not in first person.

It's got the same dumb grinding for weird currencies and rep, but where that part actively put me off Destiny, I found that an enjoyable side activity in Defiance. There's something ridiculous and kinda awesome about seeing 40 Dodge Challengers conveying at the same event marker and blowing things up for a few minutes.

But then, the most fun I ever had with Destiny was hanging out at the loot cave for 15 minutes. That's really the only time I felt connected to the other players in the world, and that what we did had any meaning whatsoever.

IMO destiny isn't an mmo. It doesn't even come close to capturing the same kind of essence that those games do.

Having played WoW for like 5 years, I hated Destiny. It was like the worst parts of WoW before they streamlined it a bunch. Grinding a ton of reps with these boring, meaningless quests. Just not something I have time to deal with these days.

Babby's first MMO.

Its an MMO stripped down in every single way that you can ever imagine.

Destiny is not a MMO more like Diablo, Borderlands and Warframe.

"Enhancement by Omission"

Somewhere, someone at Activision is sopping up their tears of elated joy with the cash money they saved by disemboweling this game and having their fans love them for it.

Destiny is jazz man, its the notes they're not playing that make it special.

Yeah most anything with an online component in the last 5 years is gonna be better than the WoW beta and early FF11. Limbo king couldnt get under the low bar you set.

Destiny is fun with friends, I still occasionally play it, and I'm looking forward to House of Wolves.

You did say it in your post, but your comparasins to WoW are heavily out of date now. Comparing a modern MMO to an MMO from 4 years ago isn't overly fair in a lot of ways, you can be raiding within a day or two game time, and if you don't want to commit any time to an MMO you can see every current raid instance through LFR in a few hours. Although you have to be lucky with gearing to see the later content straight away after leveling. Although the light system in destiny had the same issues when it came to raids as well.

Destiny is a terrible video game

by Jon Bois

I was about 10 hours through Destiny when I let out a big, long, "holy shit," tossed my controller on the floor, shut off my Xbox, and never played the game again. It wasn't out of frustration over dying at the hands of some boss. It happened on the middle of the Whatever Planet, while I was trotting from one loitering committee of dumb, easily killable aliens to the next in order to rack up points and level up. I'm in my 30s now, when I am more acutely aware of the value and finitude of time than I used to be, and a waste of time this thorough -- make-believe grunt work -- is a legitimately depressing experience.

Destiny both represents and precipitates a slow death of the heart. Ostensibly presented, as is every video game, as a refuge from our work and obligations, it instead re-packages that work and those obligations, rejoicing in them, blissfully conflating "doing stuff" with "fun." It doesn't want to say anything, nor does it want you to express yourself or see your handiwork or fingerprints in anything. It is a profoundly shitty video game better suited for the idle subroutines of a dreaming, hibernating console than any human being.

Since you, the player, are in this dream, you must make sense to the soulless automaton having this dream, and so you are assigned Roomba-like objectives: get a better gun! Get a better better gun! Get a scarf that stops bullets (?)!

We don't hear much from stamp collectors anymore, and as it turns out, this is where they went. They are all playing Destiny, heaping the dead livestock of time upon the pyre in tribute to The Collection Of Things.

This has worked fine in plenty of games through the years, from Deus Ex to some of the Rainbow Six games to Far Cry, the crucial difference being that those games let me feel some element of ownership of what happened. They did this via challenging me to strategize, think, prepare and learn something whenever I died. When I beat a boss in Destiny on the fifth try, it wasn't because I had gotten better or figured anything out. It was because I went back to a level I had already played, pushed a button at a gaggle of dumb aliens until they died, accumulated more of Destiny's various currencies, and came back to the boss with some slightly more effective weapons. In other words, I clocked the hours and got my paycheck. To play Destiny is to be patched from department to department until you end up with the person who can fix your Verizon bill.

The story, of course, is barely present. (When we finish a level, our little Flight of the Navigator-lookin'-ass sidekick remarks, on multiple occasions, "We have to tell the others! They won't believe this!" What "others" could you possibly be talking about? The NPC merchants who just mutter and grunt at you? There are no "others," Dinklage. The people who made this game forgot to add them.)

I'm usually fine with this in a video game, because I take it as a cue to tell my own story, however big or small, meaningful or trivial. Hey, just let me tell a story about flanking these guys, finding a hill, picking them off with a rifle, employing a strategy that mattered. That counts as a story.

Destiny clearly can't or won't tell one itself, so damn it, just -- here. Here. Let me do it. Nope. It does try to fake like it's giving you choices: would you like to play this level you can't beat yet, or go replay this world you've already been to, full of the exact same shit, and this is honestly your only real option? Would you like to equip the gun rated 65, or the gun rated 57? More compelling dilemmas are found in the tabletop games at the dang Cracker Barrel.

There are people who will tell you that 10 hours aren't enough, that "the game gets good at level 20." These are the people who felt the first dozen-plus hours were worth their time, so I do not believe them.

And strangely, there are so many of those people not to believe. Destiny is an immensely popular game. It's a boring game that asks you to wander through the cockles of its boring little heart, and incentivizes you to keep doing it with the promise of ... more of the same shit. It doesn't want you to think or plan or improve, it just wants its literal buttons literally pushed. It's a game of bean-counting and thing-collecting and checklist-filling.

Y'all dummies did this at work all day, and now you come home and play this what-you-did-all-day-you-goofus simulator. There should be games coming out all the time like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Civilization, or Silent Service, or Red Dead Redemption, or Portal -- works of gaming that challenge you, make you feel something, make you obsess over strategy, let you tell your own story.

Those games are rare, and spiritually sterile games like Destiny are common, because y'alls' bad tastes and badly-spent money are feeding that monster. Y'all suckers are fouling this up for the rest of us, showing up in the millions to buy a $60 cup-and-ball toy. Please stop it.

Source

Keep in mind Blizzard implemented an Auction House in Diablo III, then went to the trouble of implementing a "Real Money" Auction House, then eventually killed them both. Bungie just cut out the middle-man of implementing it before they thought better of it and cut it.

Why are people so violently angry about the early game of Destiny? I will be the first to admit that the grind up to 20 is bad, and that the real game doesn't start until 26 or so once you can get into end-game activities, but it is absolutely no different than the early game of Borderlands, Diablo, or Guild Wars - when I started playing those games, it was just me pecking away at things with garbage items and few skills, but as my character grew in strength and get more powerful items, the world of the game opened up. Could the pace of progression have been better? Absolutely. Could there have been more content to enjoy while leveling up? Of course. But what's there does not merit the vehement responses that people on the Internet led me to believe Destiny was like before I started playing it back in February. Maybe enough changed between launch and February for me to fall deep into the addiction, but the core of the game is still enough the same that I do not understand the difference in opinion.

Destiny sits in a weird space. It turns out many of the people who complain about the grinding and rep systems simply don't like MMO's (myself included). While many of those who normally do like MMO's are unhappy with Destiny's stripped back take on the genre. In the middle of those two camps however lie a group of people who love it and that's fine too.

The backlash against Destiny came from the fact that so many people bought it not fully understanding what they were in for. It'd be the same if a whole bunch of people who don't like traditional FPS games suddenly bought Call of Duty and then complained they didn't like it.

The response to Destiny 2 will be much more tame I think as everyone knows what they are getting in to and only those who like that sort of thing will buy it.