Destiny

I can’t think of a game that has ever delighted and frustrated me in equal measure the way Destiny has managed to. It’s a game rewards efficiently plotting a course through environments to acquire upgrade materials. It’s a game that makes you play the same missions over and over again to increase your reputation with its various factions. It’s a game that strings you along with random loot drops that could be something incredible but more likely than not will be junk. Destiny is also a game where the core gameplay is so satisfying that 99% of the time I don’t care.

The tightly controlled, responsive shooting in Destiny is nothing less than what should be expected from the developer that revolutionized console first-person shooters 13 years ago. Every movement or pull of the trigger feels natural and the slight auto-aim Bungie shooters are known for is tweaked to perfection. No matter the weapon you’re wielding it’s undeniable that Bungie still knows how to make a top-tier shooting experience. Where the game falters is the overall mission design. Most objectives consists of running (or driving) to a location, scanning an object, and fighting off a few waves of enemies. This would be the mark of death for most shooters but Destiny’s 4 enemy races, each with their own unique combatants, manage to keep these encounters thrilling and challenging. Especially on higher difficulties the game requires players to utilize their full set of class abilities and pay careful attention to how each enemy unit operates. Fighting the bug-like Hive is a very different experience than fighting the hulking, militarily efficient Cabal.

Destiny’s structure often has you retreading old ground on your way to mission-specific locations. This could be a serious point of contention for many players but the effort Bungie’s art and design team put into each and every spot in the world is to be admired. The four areas of the game feel like actual places and are designed in way that the various locations naturally feed into each other. The cavernous Hive base on Earth’s moon has multiple points of entry and the cathedral-like chambers dug into the rock all intertwine as you dive deeper and deeper into the darkness. What’s more, the moon looks completely different than Venus, which looks completely different than Earth, which looks completely different than Mars. Each area has its own story to tell, from the buried city of Mars to the rusted airplane graveyard of Old Russia, these places are convincing relics of a by-gone era.

Having stepped away from Halo but remaining firmly in the realm of sci-fi, Bungie crafted a new universe for players to explore. Set centuries after the end of mankind’s Golden Age of space travel, Destiny has you filling the role of a Guardian. You and your floating robot pal set off to explore the inner solar system in an attempt to fight off a wave of evil referred to as the Darkness. Hardcore Halo fans know that Bungie can create complex, lore-rich stories that the average player can still enjoy without digging into novels and animated spinoffs. Where Destiny differs is that unless you put in the effort to read the unlockable Grimoirre cards the story is uninteresting and half-baked. Hiding the cards in a mobile companion app and on Bungie’s website makes the genuinely intriguing world building they offer unnecessarily annoying to access and is a downright baffling decision.

The odd design choices don’t stop with the story. Up until reaching level 20 the game’s three classes progress like any other leveling-based shooter. You shoot things, you complete objectives, you gain experience, and you level up. Once you hit that level cap, which for me was before I even completed the story, experience only goes towards gaining new abilities for your sub-class. Actually leveling up from 20 to 30, the current level cap, requires gaining Light. Light is gained by finding rare, legendary, and exotic equipment and leveling that gear up. Leveling your gear requires experience points as well as one of four materials found scattered about the main areas of the game. Once your gear hits a certain point in its skill tree (yes, your equipment has its own skill tree), you need special legendary materials to continue leveling it up. These special materials can only be acquired in specific ways and your stock of them is built very slowly.

You can see where the grind comes in.

Getting legendary equipment and the materials to upgrade them requires replaying story content, participating in 3-person Strike missions (essentially mini-dungeons with a powerful boss at the end), or playing in the Crucible, the game’s Player-vs-Player arena. Another one of those baffling decision Bungie made is to have weapons balanced for both PvP and cooperative content. Instead of making sure the Crucible is a well-balanced experience Bungie has inadvertently made their least compelling multiplayer mode. The Crucible is dominated by certain weapon types and unless you play to the obvious strengths of those weapons you’ll have a bad time. Additionally there’s currently no penalty for quitting a match so it’s not unusual to have a team that falls behind early and never recovers because they’ve lost half of their players. You do gain loot for completing matches but the system that determines who gets what is so shrouded in mystery it may as well be completely random. Bungie has been very vocal about changes it’s making to the balance of this and other modes but as it stands now the Crucible is a poor experience. That said, I was able to reach level 29 with minimal engagement with that mode because I was willing to focus on other activities, though that meant seeing the same content many times.

And that’s what will largely dictate your love or hate for Destiny. If you are used to the MMO-style end-game progression none of these systems will diminish your enjoyment of Destiny’s excellent core gameplay. If the end-game progression, which does lead to the Vault of Glass, a 6-person tough-as-nails experience, doesn’t appeal to you then the mileage you will get out of Destiny is limited. It’s a game that is often sublimely enjoyable despite itself. It’s not for everyone but for those who have Destiny sink its hooks into them will find it’s a hard game to shake off. 120 hours and two characters have left me wanting, if not needing, to play every single day. More patches and more content are both on the way, and for reasons I sometimes can’t explain, I’m coming along for the ride.