Destiny: A Broken Game with Broken Promises 11Comments byDemetrius WilsonSeptember 2, 2017Editorials The Announcement
I remember when Destiny was first announced. I was attending Finger Lakes Community College at the time, gleefully throwing my life away partying and failing (but attempting) to meet women instead of doing lame things like homework. Xbox One and PS4 had been out for about a year, but I had neither one because I was not sold on the value of either system. It was my opinion that they were very expensive ways to buy the exact same games you could play on PS3 and Xbox 360 with some graphical upgrades. I was waiting for either console to have that “killer app” that would convince me to actually buy one of the two. Around that time, rumors of Bungie’s next game started to swirl all through the internet, eventually leading to the big reveal. My older brother and I were huge Halo fans, so we were naturally excited.
But for some reason, I was somewhat wary of this mysterious new IP. Bungie’s promises of a “ten-year experience” in a “shared, open world” sounded fantastic, but that’s the thing: it sounded like fantasy. There was a disturbing trend at the time (that hasn’t entirely gone away) of developers making large, sweeping promises that their games would be in some way spectacular, and then the game would come out and be… alright. I was worried that Destiny would fall into that same trap, or rather, I would. Unfortunately, I was more right than I ever could have guessed.
The Release and Reception
Destiny launched to a lukewarm reception. To date, the PS4 (read: best) version averages a 76 on Metacritic and a 76.83% on GameRankings. I can’t speak for anyone’s specific opinions on whether or not they liked the game, but that is not a good score for something that is supposedly a killer app. It is certainly a good score in general, and Destiny is a “good” game, but that must be disappointing if you are the developers. The idea was for this game to be THE game.
A “ten-year experience” is a bold proclamation, a basic requirement of such a goal is that the game is great enough to stand on its own merits for that long. And, well… it wasn’t. At least, it wasn’t received that way. I don’t want to tell anybody what opinion they should have. If you loved Destiny at launch, great! I’m glad you enjoyed yourself. But there were numerous things within the game that critics had issues with. I could spend all day talking about what other people saw, but I advise taking a look at the links provided for some launch perceptions.
The Destiny Game Itself
My own perception of the game, however, found quite a few issues. First off, to be fair, the core “gameplay” is “fun.” The shooting mechanics work exactly as intended, hit detection is great, the graphics are pretty and online play rarely outright failed unless I was just on a bad connection. All of that is fine, but the problem is you need all of these things in a First-Person Shooter to be considered not terrible. I’ve played outright bad shooters with all of these mechanics in place. Once we start judging Destiny on anything more complicated than basic, fundamental mechanics, things get muddied.
I don’t want this to become a full on review, so I’ll try to list these issues in brief. One of the practically undebatable issues is that the campaign is alarmingly short. I think I put maybe 4 hours into the main story, including deaths. Once you include all the content of Destiny vanilla, including Strikes and Raids, you get approximately 10 hours of content in a single playthrough.
“But wait,” you say. “There isn’t really a ‘single playthrough’ of Destiny at all!” That would be correct, but that’s another issue: Destiny is a very grindy experience. 95% of all loot, exotic or otherwise is given to the player on a random basis, and even the gear itself has randomized stats. The few weapons in the game that have true “unlock conditions” have ridiculously hard requirements. In addition, in the vanilla release, reaching the maximum level was always a process that required getting an extremely specific piece of gear typically from the games hardest challenges: raids, nightfall strikes. Each of these is problematic in their own right, but locking the best gear in the game behind a mode that might be impossible to access for the majority of players is a little unfair.
The Destiny Problem
What I’ve listed so far are comparatively minor issues in light of what comes next. The game is fundamentally unbalanced, and it’s apparent in the design itself. I played the Titan class the whole way through. Of the three classes, Titan, Hunter, and Warlock, Bungie posts that they built Titan first, and it shows. Hunters and Warlocks have two different aerial movement options each. Both have a teleport (itself a fundamentally broken ability in an FPS). Hunters also have a triple jump, Warlocks have a glide. Titans literally have lift (essentially glide with different midair physics) and lift only.
The Destiny Problem Cont.
But it doesn’t stop there! In vanilla Destiny, Bladedancer (the Hunter Arc subclass) was basically unstoppable. These guys could cut through entire teams single-handedly when their supers were active and there was little one could do to slow them down. But their normal abilities were no slouch either, boasting one of the only one-hit kill melee attacks in the game, and the only one that requires no setup. On the flipside, the Titan Defender subclass which activated a large dome shield (that you couldn’t even fire out of!) was completely useless in practicality because every other super in the game could ignore it in some capacity, whether it be destroying it or just being a powerup so therefore waltzing right in and killing everyone inside.
But it doesn’t stop there! Exotic gear was by far the most important commodity in the game, and there were a few weapons that just weren’t fair. The greatest offender was Thorn, the only poison weapon in the game. This gun was supposed to be a hand cannon, a class of weapons that were high damage, but balanced by short range. But Thorn had a poison effect and hilariously low damage falloff, so even if you were across the map, Thorn was no greater than a three shot kill. Honestly, I could write an editorial on Thorn alone. I could write a dissertation on every balance problem in Destiny, but I’m gonna leave it here.
But seriously: Screw These Guys
The Destiny Problem, Cont. Cont.
Of course, the severe lack of balance was STILL not even the biggest problem in Destiny. The biggest problem, in this writer’s humble opinion, was the fact that the game launched lacking in content, but possessing a season pass. This is an industry wide problem to be sure, and Activision is especially known for it, but it does not excuse it. It is quite clear: everything that was on Destiny’s season pass should have been in the main game. It would have felt more complete.
I mean the story was not only short but bare bones and virtually incomprehensible, and that didn’t change with either The Dark Below or The House of Wolves DLC, but at least these things added new maps and game modes. Destiny felt like a complete, and fun game with these packs, even in spite of all the issues listed above. There was just one problem: You had to pay $100 to get there.
The Destiny Problem Cont. Cont. Cont.
This is ignoring the fact that the DLC is literally required to continue playing the game, forcing the players who genuinely enjoy the game to pay up. This practice continued with the next two DLC packs, staggered with a year in between each. The Taken King felt like a complete Xbox Live Arcade Game, and Rise of Iron felt like they reused assets from Vanilla Destiny in a fun way.
Taken King added the third subclass (which if you’re following, is locking content behind a paywall behind another paywall in a game you paid $60, to begin with). Which rebalanced the game and added new abilities to play with. No new movement ability for Titans though. Both of these releases changed the meta, for sure, and made the game almost balanced. Both were also required.
Destiny Has Problems. Did you know that?
If you’re following along, that’s FIVE pieces of content that REQUIRE money out of the user base. That’s $60 for Destiny, $20 each (or a $35 bundle) for Dark Below and House of Wolves, $40 for Taken King and $40 for Rise of Iron. That’s an absolute minimum of $175 for ONE GAME, all of which is ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED to play (unless of course, you bought these after launch… which gets into a whole other discussion about the problems of trying to “get into Destiny” late in its life). By the way, I never even mentioned how the game requires an internet connection to play, even when you’re playing single-player.
Pictured: Activision’s Financial Department
Are You Sensing a Theme?
For people who don’t have a good, reliable internet, the game literally can’t be played. And I’ll be open and say that I’ve gone months on end with no internet connection because I grew up in a working class home with two little brothers and one parent. The reality of the situation is: There are people in the world who literally can’t afford all this. You might only be able to afford one game a year, and you choose this one, only to find out that not only is the grind very difficult to overcome, not only do are you required to buy the DLC packs, but you literally can’t turn the game on because you don’t have an internet connection.
I Could Do This All Day
Here’s an obligatory mention of the microtransactions in the game, which, while not necessarily “pay-to-win” do exist. And just to put the cherry on top, despite everything listed above, despite the fact that due to what can only be described as the gaming equivalent of Stockholm syndrome Destiny STILL has a loyal user base that stuck around, none of your gear transfers over to Destiny 2. It’s like the developers are testing what kind of BS they can get away with and gamers are just eating it all up.
The Destiny 2 Problem
Speaking of Destiny 2: I’ll be reviewing that game! I’ve had some hands on experience during the Beta, so I can give some preliminary impressions. So far: I’m not impressed. They changed a few things that do fundamentally change the metagame (although I hear tell some of these things have been changed again so take the following specific details with a grain of salt). There was clearly a focus on gun based combat, and guns no longer have randomized stats. They also majorly nerfed abilities but to an absurd degree. The cooldowns are horrendously slow. I averaged two or three respawns before being able to throw a hilariously nonlethal grenade. You pretty much get one super per match, so if you waste it oh well.
The Destiny 2 Problem, Cont.
The rework of heavy ammo into Power Ammo means players get access to powerful weapons. This comes at the cost of only one person at a time being able to get it. The player cap is now 8 instead of twelve, given matches a much tighter, more competitive feel, but less… epic, I suppose. Because the matches were far less ability focused I tended to dominate. This is because quite frankly I out-shot most people in D1 but they always had some kind of OHKO in their bag. Also, the Defender subclass, now called Sentinel, is not useless. PvP feels more like the well-balanced affair of Bungie’s Halo days. PvE however… ugh.
This is cool but… is it enough?
Destiny 2’s Biggest Gameplay Issue
The same balance changes that govern PvP govern PvE. This means that you will spend a significant portion of a campaign mission or strike with no ability available whatsoever. When you finally get them back, they are borderline useless and fail to kill even cannon fodder. The game is also stingier than Joel Osteen in a hurricane when it comes to Power Ammo drops. The end result is that every enemy feels like a bullet sponge. And you feel under equipped for the given situation since you can’t quickly dispatch basically anything.
Destiny 2’s Biggest Issue
Also: there are three subclasses again. The Supers have been changed moderately but the abilities are largely the same. You also still have to unlock the third subclass, though this time not with money. Titans still don’t have a new movement ability. 60 FPS is a possible technology, but D2 runs at 30 FPS. And there is, of course, a season pass. The game doesn’t feel… new. Yeah, you expect a sequel to be similar to the game before it. The game could be very different than my impressions. After all, I’ve only played the beta. They’ve since rebalanced a few things. But it feels like this game was made more in an effort to get people to pay $60 again than actually being a full-fledged sequel.
Here’s Hoping
I’ve already seen a few reused environments. The graphics have not greatly improved. The enemies are largely the same with a few new types. Am I supposed to feel like having an actual possibly engaging story makes this a game? I don’t personally feel that way. I will withhold judgment, as I haven’t played the full game and it’s quite possible it could blow me away. It just might. But one of the biggest mentalities I’ve seen in defense of this game is the old adage. If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. There’s just one problem.
Destiny is broken.
I talked a bit about pricing and value in this essay. How about a bit more in depth look at pricing in video games? I think it’s a discussion worth having. For more editorials and news keep it locked here on Culture of Gaming. Also, watch out for our Destiny 2 Review!
