Destiny

Story(ies)

It is not a secret that during the launch of Destiny the games PvE (Player Versus Enviroment) content was lacking in the story department. But what the game did do very well was set up a massive universe with a vast range of characters, enviroments, enemies and even weapon foundries.

Vanilla

In Vanilla Destiny the story is more about setting up the universe and history of Destiny rather than tell a direct story revolving around a macho dude in a spacesuit saving the universe. The campaign takes you to many places, it makes you fight a variety of enemies while doing so, it introduces you to a very wide range of characters without really going in depth into any of them. "The Stranger" is the most extreme example of this lack of character development that Destiny suffers from, but this issue is definitively not exclusive to only that character. Some of the characters recieve a more proper level of character development thanks to the "Not-In-Game Grimoire card system", which was and generally still is heavily criticized and regarded as a potentially major cause to the lack of story in the original Destiny. An example of such a character is Cayde-6, who is voice acted by none other than Nathan Fillion. Fillion has been featured in multiple Bungie games, such as Halo 3: ODST, a small voice pack in Halo: Reach and of course Destiny. In Destiny, Nathan Fillion plays Cayde-6. An Exo Hunter, one of three members of the "Vanguard" leadership. The grimoire tells us that Cayde-6 had an interesting battle on the moon many years ago, where he ended up fighting side-by-side with an enemy against a greater enemy. And thats as far as his background goes, not very interesting, but in the world of Destiny where character development is so lacking, this little piece of info helps bring Cayde-6 above most of the other characters in Destiny, it also helps Nathan Fillions performance is stellar in this installment. Your Ghost is the Cortana of Destiny, and if you're not familiar with the Halo franchise, your Ghost accompanies you during your entire journey throughout Destiny, spouting exposition, opening doors and the likes. The Ghost was originally voiced by Peter Dinklage, but due to scheduling issues Nolan North took over as VA as the "The Taken King" Expansion was released.

The actual linear story is simple, there is a greater enemy, the greatest of them all (?), That enemy is the Vex, and just like very other enemy in Destiny they are a threat to us, humanity because they want to kill us all! The difference is that these Vex are closer to accomplishing this task than the other factions/races. This theme of a new greater enemy persists throughout the subsequent expansions. The original story ends with us Guardians (Not Spartans, they are guardians!!) defeating the Vex in what is called the Black Garden, which is located somewhere unknown and if not defeated would result in the death of us all. It is not difficult to see why the original story was panned as hard as it was, coming from Bungie I expected something much greater.

The Dark Below

TDB, as it is generally referred to, is the first expansion for Destiny. TDB tries to implement a new story, a side-story if you will. This story focuses on one enemy, the hive. And what the short story in TDB does much better the originaly story is that it focuses on a single threat, a single villain. Crota, Son of Oryx is his name. The background is interesting and brings you in, a new character in the tower (Your home, a social space) called Eris says that Crota is a threat to humanity and you must help to defeat him. Eris tells you of a time when she and a fireteam of guardians attempted to defeat Crota but ultimately failed, with her being the only survivor... If you can call it that... At first glance Eris might scare you, she is disfigured and has three, green, glowing eyes very much like the hive, she sees what we can't, and knows what we don't, and that is our advantage here in this story. The story transitions from story missions, to a strike and then into the raid where it climaxes. In the Raid you finish what Eris and her dead fireteam started, you defeat Crota in a challenging battle. This Expansions does quite a bit of foreshadowing, one of these bits of foreshadwing is in the name of the main villain you fight. "Crota, Son of Oryx". As you can imagine, Oryx isn't very happy that you took his son away from him. However, little did we players know when originally defeat Crota that we wouldn't get any more development on this interesting story until much later, about nine to ten months later when the "The Taken King" expansion released. Spoiler, the Taken King is Oryx!

House of Wolves

HoW, is the acronym for this expansion, and the Destiny Subreddit sure does love its acronyms. Anyway, similarly to TDB, HoW does its story by focusing on a single villain. This time we are chasing Skolas, Kell of Kells (Yeah, he gave himself a promotion). Skolas is a big fallen dude, he has a big gun too. He tries to unite the different houses within the fallen race in order to fight humanity together, which would likely result in us all dying, and as such we have a cool story to play. I like to think of the houses within the fallen and their individuality in a similar fashion to how we humans are right now! But with houses instead of countries, and Kells instead of Presidents, Kings, Prime Ministers or more accurately, Dictators. The story missions end in you capturing Skolas after a somewhat short but well fought battle, and the story continues into the Prison of Elders, a new activity within Destiny introduced with the HoW expansion. In the Prison of Elders, we kill Skolas. Pretty simple

The Taken King

TTK, as it is called. Deserves a bigger font than the other expansions. It contains many story missions, multiple strikes (Three of them!!), a new patrol area and the best raid yet, Kings Fall! What makes this story so great is not just the cool locations and enemies you'll fight, but also the fact that the background isn't delivered via dialogue or grimoire cards, no, you are the background! We killed Crota, Son of Oryx, and now, 10 months later he is here and is seeking to avenge his son! The Story is delivered through multiple missions, strike and the story climaxes in the raid. TTK is generally considered to be the place where the story that Bungie wants to tell with Destiny has finally reached a read-able state, but personally I think that we started to see this new formula all the way back in The Dark Below, which featured a very similar setup, just on a smaller scale, and without nearly as much background build up as this expansion had. The soundtrack here, just like with vanilla and all the other expansions that had come out and would come out after the Taken King is excellent.

Rise of Iron

RoI is the final expansion for Destiny, between the size of HoW and TTK it is the child that became after Destiny 2 ultimately ended up being delayed a full year. The expansion also features a somewhat new patrol area, it is essentially Earth but with snow and new locations to explore and some old refreshed ones (You can backtrack and return to the first area you see in the game!) This expansion, unlike TTK focuses on a threat we hadn't heard about. SIVA. SIVA is a tool, a machine. Think of it like a 3D Printer, but with much, much more possibilities, wether this is for better or worse you get to see in the story. The fallen have taken ahold of SIVA, and they have used it on themselves to "perfect" themselves, and as such the new enemy of RoI came to be. They are the SIVA FALLEN. There is one new strike, and many old ones remixed. This is where RoI differs from TTK. TTK featured tons of new original content while RoI went back and remixed/refreshed old content with a new coat of paint. Now that Eris has done her job with TDB and TTK, you get introduced to an old friend. A character that had literally no character development previously but is now the opposite, he is Lord Saladin (Also known as Lord Saladbar), and he is the focus of this expansion. Saladin and his fireteam of Iron Lords attempted to capture SIVA but failed, they were all killed except for Lord Saladin. In their memories the Iron Temple was built. And you get to pay your respects there, as well as do quests. The Iron Temple is the third social space, with the first being the Tower and the second being the Reef that came with HoW. The story is fairly interesting, with the clear goal/task of clearing VISA, sorry... SIVA. The raid is fun, but ultimately isn't as good as Kings Fall, is definitively better than Crotas End and the Vault of Glass of course.

Multiplayer, both casual and competitive

The multiplayer in Destiny is fairly simple, but features something that isn't very common in FPS Shooters. Special time-limited events, recurring on set schedules. There are of course the base modes, from rumble to control. A month into release Destiny introduced the Iron Banner, a week-long event that would come once every month. In the Iron Banner you play one specific gamemode over and over again grinding Iron Banner Reputation to get Iron Banner stuff.

Trials of Osiris the competitive mode of Destiny, except without the ranking system. Instead you have score cards that when filled give you loot, and if you do really well you even get access to the "Lighthouse", a cool little area on Mercury only accessible through filling up the score card without any loses, you also get some sweet loot in the Lighthouse. ToO comes every friday and lasts until Tuesday.

Both ToO and the Iron Banner have just now had their final runs in preparation for Destiny 2, so unfortunately you won't be able to play said modes anymore in Destiny 1.

Grinding and how it has changed over three years

Destiny allows you to grind in order to get to max level, previously this was 30, then 32 with TDB, then 34 with HoW. Then the system was changed all together and 335 became the max, and then 400 which is still the current max.

In order to get you have always had at least two options, Raiding or by playing the Iron Banner. With the HoW you also had Trials of Osiris for more PvP oriented players and with TTK Nightfalls started giving higher level loot. In HoW Etheric Light also dropped in PoE and the nightfalls.

Overtime, the difficulty of reaching max light level has changed, with vanilla Destiny there was a term that got thrown around alot, such as "Forever 29" which means that the player had reached level 20, which is the softcap. Then reached level 29 through playing the raids and Iron Banner and getting level 30 gear. But in order to fully reach level 30. All your gear had to be level 30. And finding that last piece was usually difficult, exotics helped but only got you so far. This problem persisted until HoW, when Etheric Light was introduced. Etheric light allowed you to bring any legendary piece of gear up into the max light level, 34 that is. This meant that you didn't specifically have to wear PoE or ToO or Iron Banner gear in order to be max level, but you could just bring any legendary gear to max light.

The result? A much wider variety of guardians in the tower. Which many, including me consider to be a good step in the right direction, but this wasn't enough.

TTK brought in a new system, called Infusion. Infusion allows you to use a high level piece of gear, and infuse it into a lower level piece of gear. Essentially eliminating the middle man that used to be Etheric Light. High level gear became much more valuable to everyone regardless of the item rolls. If the gear had a high light level but bad rolls you could simply use it as Infusion fuel for when you get that perfectly rolled item.

RoI simple added on this infusion system, "perfected" if you will. It removed the dissapearing light levels that went away during Infusion and gave you a simple 1:1 conversion.

Finale

Ultimately, while Destiny may have launched as a 3/5 or a 4/5 game, it has easily grown into a perfect 5/5 game that I personally consider to be the best, most well made game ever. Perhaps only beaten by its next install Destiny 2 which launches on September 6th this year.