Destiny

Review of Destiny for the Playstation 4, after 33 hours of gameplay.

This game is filled with so many baffling and terrible design decisions that it has killed most of my enthusiasm for "next-gen" video games. Is it a terrible game? No. There are certain aspects that are well done, but are buried under a repetitive grind, non-existent story, and teases at future content that will likely be paid DLC.

Positives:

- The gunplay feels great. It is very finely tuned and reminiscent of Halo. Weapons have excellent auditory and visual feedback when you fire, and enemies react well to being hit.

- The art and visual design is fantastic. Everything in the universe, from the clothing and armour to the planets themselves is very unique and well thought out.

- Vertical gameplay that stands out from Halo. The heavy use of vertical environments and player mobility through double jumps/jet packs is great.

- Multiplayer is very fun, and is the only reason I still play this game.

Negatives

- A non-existent story. Defenders of the game will tell me that the lore is very expansive and well-developed, but none of that is apparent through the game itself. All of the lore is locked away on Bungie's website. External lore should be used to enhance an existing story, not used to tell the entirety of the story. That's just sloppy design.

Almost everything in the story relies on people telling you "I could tell you this cool thing that happened in our past, but I won't. There isn't enough time". There's no build-up to the final arc of the story, and the conclusion is extremely unsatisfying.

- Extremely repetitive combat encounters. If I had lived under a rock for the duration of Destiny's development and played it without knowing that it was developed by Bungie, I wouldn't have believed people if they told me that this was the same developer behind Halo. Halo had an excellent variety of combat encounters. I would decide to play a specific level over another because of the difference in their encounters. That isn't even remotely true in Destiny. Combat feels extremely repetitive throughout the whole game and consists nearly entirely of "Go here, plug Peter Dinklage into this computer, and defend him from three waves of enemies."

- Poor class design. Destiny is wrapped in a number of MMO trappings, but includes none of the elements that make MMOs fun. Classes don't interact with each other in any meaningful way. When playing through missions with a team, it barely matters what classes each player is using. The only things making each class different are their grenade, melee attack, and a single super move. Where's our healer? Where's our tank (the Titan is a very poor excuse for this)? Having MMO-style class dynamics would make the combat significantly more interesting.

- Terrible netcode. The amount of kill-trades and rubberbanding in this game is astounding. It's somehow even worse than Battlefield 4 at launch. Literally 25% of multiplayer combat involves killing an enemy, then dying to his attack a whole second afterwards, or vice-versa. It is extremely frustrating.

- No weapon variety. There are nine weapons in Destiny. None of them break out of conventional shooter weapon tropes (Assault rifle, DMR, burst rifle, shotgun, etc.) in any meaningful way. It's one thing to rely on these tropes in an eight-hour game. It's another one entirely to rely on them for a game that you expect people to be playing for TEN YEARS (Also, that shit is insane, Bungie. I won't even play this game for ten weeks.)

- Random loot. I know this is an element in most online RPGs. It's part of the experience. However, the extent to how random loot can be in this game is absolutely infuriating. Items rarely drop, and when they do, it's even rarer that they are actually usable to me. In the last 15 hours of gameplay, I have gotten exactly TWO items that were improvements over items that I already had. This wouldn't be so much of a problem if level progression past Level 20 wasn't based entirely on your items.

- Worst boss design I have ever seen in a shooter outside of Halo 3 (Hey, what a coincidence). Bosses are uninteresting bullet sponges who just walk between two points and hammer off one of two attacks. Higher difficulties against these abominations of game design don't change the dynamic of the encounter. They simply give the bosses more health. There's nothing interesting about sitting behind a box, popping out to fire at a barely-moving target, then moving back behind the box to reload, and then repeating for over ten minutes.

- Endgame content is nothing but the same content you have already played, but at higher difficulties. Higher difficulties just mean more health on enemies, with no other meaningful changes. Bungie really dropped the ball on this, and flat-out lied about how the game would completely open up past Level 20. Nope. It's the same goddamn game.

Final Summary: This game fails on its repetitive combat, mission structure, and overall lack of variety. I didn't expect anything ground-breaking or revolutionary here. I was expecting an MMO with Halo's strengths, such as interesting combat and a minimal, but still servicable, story. What we got was absolutely none of that. What we did get was promises of future content that may fix this game's deficiencies, but I sincerely doubt it. I can't help but feel like Activision's involvement had something to do with this.

tl/dr: Don't buy this game. It's repetitive, uninteresting, and extremely disappointing considering the developer behind it.

4/10, Bungie. Thanks for ruining the 7th console cycle.