I never thought that I would find myself, facing you good people of Giant Bomb dot com, admitting to the fact that I’ve played more Destiny in the last week than I’ve played any other game, including Dragon Age: Inquisition (which I actually spent all of yesterday playing, so this isn’t quite accurate anymore, but still). The thing is, when I get home from work at night and work out, I generally have time for one or two games, and that’s about it. This is also assuming that I don’t want to spend time watching television—or more accurately, watching Quick Looks or whatever. So for me to say that every work night last week (a three-day work week for me, but still) was spent sitting in a strike playlist or running the daily heroic story, is saying a lot (and over this long holiday weekend, I’ve spent at least two out of the three nights still playing Destiny, and there’s a nonzero chance that tonight I’ll play some more). There were a few moments during last week where I found myself openly wondering how it all came to this.

Me, several weeks ago

The answer, as I've come to understand, is twofold: socialization on one hand, and on the other (and perhaps more importantly), stability.

I live a solid fifty miles outside of Chicago city proper, something I did by choice because I like the city but I also like seeing stars at night—and more importantly I am not huge on going out often. My brother, with whom I am close (we’re twins! ISN’T THAT INTERESTING?), lives just outside of New York City. We like to hang out, but geography being what it is we tend to hang out online. We also grew up playing Halo co-op, so our predisposition toward another sci-fi co-op shooter from Bungie was basically a done deal. Like so many others, however, Destiny fell flat for me—we got through the main story quickly, scrabbling in the dust for something resembling a narrative (if ever a game needed more cutscenes, it’s this one), for something that would motivate us to keep playing. We failed to find it, of course. There’s really not much of a narrative, and once the strike playlist started to send us to the Summoning Pits multiple times in a row—the record is three, by the way—we both decided we’d had enough and pinned our hopes on the upcoming Master Chief Collection for our co-op needs. Until then, we’d pop in and out of Titanfall, which isn’t quite the co-op we wanted but at least wasn’t as awful as Destiny’s Crucible mode (which has never clicked for me, although it might now since Bungie have been patching the hell out of their game to fix balancing issues on basically everything since day one).

Until the release of the Master Chief Collection, my brother and I either just talked over Live while playing single player games—which isn’t as fun as playing co-op, obviously—or fired up the ol’ 360 to run around in Halo 4 or Lord of the Rings: War in the North, or Diablo III even though we’ve been through Diablo III a lot. Then, finally, the Master Chief collection dropped and it looked like our wait was over—except it wasn’t, because the Master Chief collection is a broken pile of garbage right now (we’ve gotten it to work a few times, and it’s been wonderful, but I’m comfortable saying that three out of every four times we’ve made an attempt, it’s ended in swearing and giving up after a solid 20-30 minutes). Suddenly I couldn’t bring myself to go back to Titanfall, both because there’s no co-op in Titanfall and, more importantly, because I’d played some single player Halo and there’s no shooter like a Bungie shooter…except, of course, Destiny. So one night, after another frustrating attempt to get back to our Halo 2 campaign (we’re literally stuck on the first Arbiter level—we haven’t been able to get the fucking thing to work since then), I grudgingly suggested we just play Destiny instead, because at least Destiny would fucking work.

I should add that in the interim, a few of my friends picked up Destiny (but not on the Xbox One, because that would have been convenient for me—no, they’re all on PS4s) and have gotten into it in a massive way. Like, running Vault of Glass weekly massive. It’s madness. I confess that part of me saw that and wondered if perhaps I’d not been willing to meet Destiny on its own terms (I wasn’t, and I still don’t quite know if I am), but I found myself thinking about whether or not I could get at least one other person to regularly run strikes with—being able to pick up a third player is easy, and most strikes don’t require much in the way of coordination or talking, but it does boil down to a crap shoot now and again (plus there’s no matchmaking on the weekly heroic strikes, where the real good shit is). So of course I tried to convince the one other person I knew to come back, but he only wants to run the Vault of Glass, so there’s no chance there (I was not anywhere near the right level, and the thought of running strike after strike to gear up was not, at the time, appealing).

It was my brother’s idea to give a copy of the game to our friend as a wedding present when he got married a few weeks ago. We started running as a proper fireteam of three, and the difference has been night and day. Nothing against running with strangers—if our third is not around, my brother and I will let matchmaking do its thing—but having a regular crew to run with means you learn about the way everyone plays and things run like a well-oiled machine. So that additional social aspect is now the thing that’s sunk its hooks into me—in essence, I started treating Destiny like the MMO it always has been, and my enjoyment has skyrocketed. It helps that the adjusted engram rates have meant I got several legendary items (purples are legendary, right? Shit, I don’t know. LEET PURPS, as we’d say in the old days of WoW); I got enough rep with the Vanguards to actually buy a nice-ass piece of chest armor and some gloves, which means I actually could in theory run Vault of Glass now…I think. It’s pretty great.

Last night I even discovered I had enough motes of light to buy an exotic engram off of the creepy dude who shows up on weekends (I’ve already forgotten his name).

It wound up being Titan armor. I play a Warlock.

Fuck this game.

AN: Yeah I know, there wasn’t anything up last week—somehow, talking about games just didn’t seem as important compared to some of the other shit that went down, so I funneled my efforts into other activities. Playing games last week was downright necessary for my mental health—a way to forget about everything for a few hours here and there before wading back into the messy work of trying to figure out a way to make the world less-shitty. Writing letters rather than blog posts, you dig? Yeah, you dig.

After spending so many hours with Destiny I must conclude that the grindy nature of Destiny is comforting or a lower level of work. It's like work but more fun. But like work the people you spend time can make all the difference in the world.

I was just fucking watching Young Frankenstein and I thought of this game during that scene...

It was the thing that jumped immediately to mind as soon as I decided I was going to write about going back to Destiny.

Yeah I think that's a huge part of it. If it were just me soloing all the time, doing nothing but PUGs for Strikes and shit? I'd be burned out already. Shit, just running around on Patrols trying to get enough crafting materials to do any kind of armor upgrading is something I can only bring myself to do for like 20-30 minutes at a time, and that's with podcasts and shit going on to distract me.

Last month I had several friends I could play with, but they've all flamed out during the end game between levels 25 and 29. I can't think of the last time I saw someone I actually know log in, and most of the people I've added from this site and another have mostly moved on to Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, GTA V or Dragon Age. I've run a couple weekly nightfalls but not anything like the rate I could when I first got strong enough, so I started other classes and that's been a real fun excuse to learn different weapons and playstyles. It was also pretty gratifying when my Hunter hit level 20 and I already had gear stored away from my level 29 Titan that boosted the Hunter to 25 immediately. I have a similar bounty awaiting by Warlock.

I truly do wish they'd add matchmaking to the weeklies, though. I don't understand why they have matchmaking for every strike, basic meat and potatoes or Vanguard playlist, except the ones that actually yield useful rewards.

Yeah the lack of matchmaking for weeklies is basically unconscionable if you ask me. If I can only manage to find one other dude I know I should be able to just pull a random dude in! I wouldn't mind the addition of matchmaking to the raids either--I'd have to actually turn on Fireteam chat for a change, but I'd be willing to do it. As much as I love being able to run stuff with people I actually know (which will always be, for me at least, the more enjoyable way to play), the matchmaking's been good enough that I will totally accept running around with people I don't.

Honestly I'd flamed out on the game too, but I wound up coming back eventually. I would be surprised if I'm not the only one to do so as the DLC release draws nigh.

I "play" Destiny every day with a group of friends. I put play in quotations there because it really is like a job I need to get out of the way after coming home. I have a level 30 Hunter thanks to many hours of grinding various progress bar to their respective endpoints. I'm the only one in my group that only has 1 character, with most others having at least 2 characters at level 29+ and some that have 3 different classes all at level 30 with fully leveled up exotics. Honestly I don't know where they find the time. That said I enjoy hanging out with the group and doing events. Last night I did the hard mode raid for about 2 hours despite having done it the day prior, meaning I wouldn't get any rewards from it - I did it to help the other guys complete it on their other characters.

Each day I log in, do the daily mission in hope of getting 2 shards. I then go to a planet and mine a single resource until I have enough for the next few levels of a corresponding item. If I'm lucky I'll hit a public even and maybe get a shard for golding it. After that I take out easy crucible bounties and go into PVP so that I can use the bounty XP to level up my exotics. When Tuesday rolls around and everything resets I do the weekly strike for 9 coins so I can buy exotics from Xur on friday; the Nightfall strike so I have double XP for the entire week to level up exotics faster; and the raid for shards or raid gear which at this point I'll probably break down into shards as well.

The game has turned into a tight knit schedule of fulfilling progress bars. Also because I play with people way more active than me, I need to stay on my toes to keep up with their progress. I've just recently started a second character so that I can do the raid twice a week and get twice as many coins/shards/etc. Since my other character has reached max level and his gear is completely maxed out all there is to do is farm for shards so that when new gear rolls around I'll be ready.

At this point Destiny has completely taken up all my free time. I have Dragon Age but no time to play it because I'm constantly grinding for stuff in Destiny. I don't want to lose touch with my group of newfound friends but it seems like any free time I have instantly gets sunk into Destiny. Now everyone is talking about the DLC and I naturally want to keep going with them but at the same time I'm thinking maybe it's time to cut myself off.

It's truly a strange predicament.

I truly hope the MCC gets fixed soon to save you from this agony. When it works, it just reinforces how damn fun the Halo games are and why Destiny can't stand up to their legacy.

Been having great success with matchmaking last week, but haven't tried online co-op. I think they'll get it done soon as it's been steadily improving (and I'm just outside of Chicago, too).

@humanity: I would have kept going on that path but for some reason the game was really laggy on Black Friday and my brother bought me WoW to force me to play it; been more fun than Destiny's been in a while.

@ford_dent: Use the raidtracker for weeklies/raids; works fine; obviously amusing that a third party is more useful than the actual game interface.

What's the raidtracker?

Funny, yesterday I was discussing with another user how these games have weird hooks that keep the players coming. Destiny is very mediocre, but I can't help but admit that I had, to some degree at least, fun during my play-through. The game is unfair, disrespectful to fans, badly designed, cheap, and at every turns tries to squeeze money and time out of you, yet for some odd reason it sold fantastically and had me, someone who's been criticizing the game for a very long time now, endlessly grinding for more and more loot along with many other players. It did so well, that as of now they are developing a sequel, meaning that most of the new content in their 10 year plan! will probably half assed. But I'm sure people will still buy it regardless of the quality just because it has pretty visuals and great gameplay.

Anyways, I've managed to unhook myself from the game for a while when I bought the Evil Within, Sunset Overdrive and MCC. But now...considering that I promised my cousin that we'd complete the Halo campaigns on X-mas and the fact that I've finished both The Evil Within(twice) and Sunset Overdrive, I've really got nothing else to spend time with, so I feel the urge coming back.

@nodima: This site. At most it takes 10 minutes to find a group or so, usually a lot quicker.

Best part is they just released a new patch today and exotic gear no longer requires shards to upgrade. I had just spent days farming shards to get my exotic armor maxxed out so I can be level 30 - and now the new DLC is coming so they just got rid of that requirement. Like a huge fuck you to people that had to grind away for those rare materials.

I felt like they could have released this patch at any time and they waited till now so people would have something (anything!) to do while waiting for the expansion.

But now they barely have to do anything. You no longer need to do the events that would give you these materials. Now you need some new arbitrary material that is even more scarce to upgrade those items.

Got to level 30, it was OK, don't plan on coming back. It was an OK but very flawed game. The patch about not needing shards is hilarious, though. At some point I did everything but get all the exotics and the chore of playing that game really wore off...idk there was just nothing there anymore. Just felt lifeless after getting to 30 and all that.

Well I personally think the patch is awesome but as I said elsewhere I just got into the three-character game so I have a Hunter and a Warlock with plenty of leveling to do. The fact that now all I have to do is farm sapphire wire from engram drops to fully level these legendary boots I had everything unlocked for but nowhere near enough spin metal or ascendant shards to anticipate happening anytime in the next month, maybe even two or three months...now suddenly I have 90 spin metal on my Hunter thanks to the 10 marks / 20 materials exchange rate and the shards are, for now, not a concern of mine at all. I'm pretty damn pleased. And now my level 29 Titan's weapons are all fully upgraded since that character existed during the loot cave and has way too large a surplus of parts and materials.

Yeah as much as it smarts to have done a particularly long grind to get the materials I needed for some upgrades, I'm glad that I won't have to do that anymore. Being able to throw Vanguard marks at the problem is basically fantastic, especially since I don't need any further armor from my trainer.

@ford_dent - Great post. I'm sensing a sort of shame / defiance at your love of Destiny, well here is my version:

When Destiny was first announced and shown, I fell into the very large group of gamers who thought: it's Bungie, of course I'm going to get it. I played the beta, and while I enjoyed it, I wasn't exactly blown away. Still, it's Bungie, amirite?

However, when Destiny was actually released, I happened to be in the hospital with my wife awaiting the birth of our second child...so I didn't really get a chance to join in on the release zeitgeist. After a while, I thought I had actually dodged a bullet - a lot of the response to the game was that this was an empty shell of an MMO meets Diablo with excessive grinding. So, when I finally had time to play a little bit while up late with the baby I ended up just running through Diablo 3 again (had not played the expansion) and getting my Monk to level 70 / Paragon level a bajillion. That should have cured my loot cravings.

Leading up to the MCC release, I was in a Bungie haze and started getting an itch to play Destiny again, but I held strong...in just a few days I would be consumed by the only game I would ever need! ALL TEH HALLOZ! Unfortunately, UPS left the MCC on our doorsteps inside a lit brown paper bag and suddenly I needed to play that shooter again. Even as I'm so, so deep into AC:U, I just was thinking about Destiny. I downloaded the free trial and by Black Friday was searching furiously for a Destiny deal (so that I wouldn't feel bad about giving in). Amazon let me down, but the MS Store had it for $35 for the XBone. It will arrive on Wednesday and then I will go in deep.

So what caused me to break? Was it really some mythical goodness that only Bungie has? I doubt it. Did I just really, really need a shooter campaign? Possibly, but I'd say I'm much more looking forward to getting to Far Cry 4 on that front. Is it the MMOness of it? I've never actually played an MMO and am not much on co-op games, so I doubt it. Well?

As I am playing through AC:U, I found myself spending a whole night of my precious and very limited gaming time (remember, father of two very young kids), just running around collecting chests and gathering some of the 500 or so (I counted) collectibles in AC:U. By any measure, this is an excessive number, relatively meaningless, and still a grind - the very thing I find tedious in JRPGs and thought was the evil within Destiny. But I've always enjoyed doing it in AC games, the reason being because the traversal, running around, getting into random fights with guards is fun to me, while being the point of contention for a lot of reviewers. The same way that the shooting mechanics in Destiny are fun and surpass the grind (and might just give you some loot). The lesson here I think is, don't let other people tell you what you think is fun(?) (someday I'll tell you about how 'wrong' I played the L4D games).

It's pronounced eye-gor

PS - I'm also terrified as I have no idea what the weekly strikes are, how I could ever even bother attempting the vault of glass with only one or two other friends I know who play Destiny, and why some dude only shows up on weekends.

One day while farming for Relic Iron so I could finally get to level 29 I just thought to myself, "What the fuck are doing?". I haven't touched the game since. I might pick it up again once the second expansion drops but for now I am free to waste my time on other games.

Destiny is such a crazy game to me. I love it -- I have two level 29 characters and have spent over 200 hours playing.

The craziest thing to me about the game? The way people think they need to justify themselves about why they are enjoying it. It's OK to like Destiny.

@humanity: I know what you mean. I finally have an abundance of ascendant shards/energy after all this time, and while they can still be used on other legendary gear, it's still dumb that they are useless on exotic gear. They should have allowed us to trade in like 10 or 12 ascendant shards/energy for an exotic shard, since you only have to use one exotic shard per exotic now. That would have taken the edge off, since a lot of people probably have a lot of ascendant shards saved up by now. It's weird that they added the new trading system for trading marks for standard upgrade materials (which was a great addition by the way), but they didn't think that it was going to irritate people when they have all those shards saved up and now they have to get some other material, like there weren't enough already.

I discovered something wonderful about Destiny, when I still played it, trying to level my character up from 26 to 27 over the course of several weeks: it's just a game, and you can simply stop playing it.

My friend has been playing it pretty much non stop since release day. I think it's a colossal waste of time.

What I think they should have done is given everyone one of those new shard things for every fully leveled up exotic they have. I have several fully loaded exotic weapons and pieces of armor - the latter of which I spent an entire weekend leveling in order to get to level 30 for when my group raided on hard.

It's really a love/hate relationship. I was having a lot of fun with the Thorn bounty yesterday and then I got to the crucible part and my spirit was completely crushed. I'm actually pretty good at the crucible - I consistently come in first place place or the top three. Yet getting Void damage kills seemed impossible for me. All of a sudden I can't get a single kill, everyone is killing me left and right. Not to mention that I have a fully leveled up Atheons Epilogue, a raid reward gun that is meant to be a big deal, and I was consistently getting outgunned by this level 23 with some no-name rifle you pick up off the ground. Destiny can really go from "fuck yah!" to "fuck you" in an instant.

That is sort of the point with the Crucible though, the weapons are balanced. If you want your guns and level to matter, jump in next time the Iron Banner comes around. It was great last time. That said, I feel your pain on the Thorn bounty. That thing was a pain, then again I was a hunter (no void damage abilities), using only a rare void fusion rifle. I'm tempted to say you have it easy ;)

@anund: I am a hunter as well my friend. I think what I might do is buy really low level gear so that I'm barely above level 20, buy some cheap void damage shotgun and hope matchmaking puts me up against low level newcomers that don't know how to play the game too well.

The crucible is almost too balanced. I understand they need to make a level playing field, but it's a little ridiculous that a level 22 auto rifle is destroying me when I'm level 30 with some of the best armor in the game - while at the same time my super rare fully leveled auto rifle is plinking away at this low level dood. I actually noticed this when I took my level 10 character into the crucible. Plenty of times I came out as the top scoring player among 29's and 30's because the game scales damage in such a way that my starter gun was doing more damage than their exotics. Balance is important, but if a level 10 gets into a crucible match with level 30's he shouldn't be able to completely destroy them.

I played the Iron Banner at level 28-29 and honestly the guns all felt meaningless at that point. Nevermind that everyone was using fusion rifles constantly, but the damage was so high that everyone died almost instantly regardless of what weapon you were using.

The latest patch is going to make things even worse! ( BETTER! )

I stay the hell away from the Crucible. It just doesn't feel like it works--super powers always feel overpowered, and fusion rifles seem to be all anyone uses, and I'm not that great at multiplayer that isn't Halo 1 to begin with. I have debated the merits of hopping in again just to check it out, but I just don't want to add another grind to the grind I'm already doing (i.e. the Vanguard gear grind--or more accurately, the Vanguard crafting material grind now).