Destiny: A Successful Failure

I’m really enjoying my time in Destiny. Really enjoying it. Enjoying it so much that I spend a lot of my day trying to figure out how I’m going to watch that days new TV shows later, because I don’t have a DVR and want to play Destiny instead. I’m not alone, Destiny has sold $325M worth of game its first 5 days on the market. For a game that cost Bungie and Activision a reported $500M to produce and market, that’s not a bad start. However, the reviews have been fairly middling, with the game scoring a solid “C” rating of 77% from review aggregation site Metacritic. While 77% may not seem that bad (it was pretty close to what I normally received on tests in High School), it is a far cry from the “Game of the Year” potential that they hype-train had caused a lot of gamers to expect.

So what’s wrong? If I could distill it down to one word, it would be: laziness. For a game that has been in various forms of development since 2009 and brainstormed since 2002, it has no story. How is it possible, that a game that has been “cooking” for about 12 years has little to no story present in the final product? Sure, every time you reach a story beat in Destiny, the game produces a pop-up and tries to send you to the ever-loading bungie.net, so that you can read the grimoire and learn more about a particular race, weapon, planet, backstory, person, character, or location. But that’s laziness. Even Mass Effect, which was a game with a huge amount of backstory and lore, and had an in-game Codex that could be read for additional information. But without the Codex, you still knew everything that was happening through great storytelling and cut-scenes.

Destiny does neither of these particularly well. Cut-scenes appear disjointed, and there’s no story-telling to speak of throughout the actual game. Bungie tried to introduce an actual character in your Ghost, a floating side-kick. Unfortunately that side-kick does little to remind you about why you’re being sent to where you are, instead making quips about imminent doom. If Bungie had reiterated mission objectives and repercussions throughout the missions that it sent you on via the Ghost, the game would at least have had a little bit of soul to it. Instead, it feels like you’re being sent to the middle of nowhere to either kill a specific monster, or survive waves of other monsters, with very few exceptions to those two outcomes in a given mission. For a studio that wove together a massive and cohesive universe in Halo, this is horribly disappointing.

So why am I still playing it? Well, Destiny is fun to play. Really fun to play. Which makes the lack of story even more disappointing, because it feels like you are playing with no particular goal, or end in sight. Playing Destiny with my friends, or even farming loot by myself just feels fun. My only complaint with the game mechanics, is that there is a lot of different currency, and unlike other MMOs, there is no way to purchase items that are needed to better your characters gear. Outside of that, the game feels great. Firing weapons feels incredibly satisfying, and different depending on which one you choose. The game-world feels thought-out and the universe they created feels expansive, albeit a little repetitive since there are currently only 4 real locations to travel to.

Bungie is doing a good job of supporting Destiny so far. There are weekly mini-raids, daily strikes, and loads of PVP fun to be had. But it still feels like a shadow of what the game could have been. Having played both the Alpha and Beta, and now a week of the final game, the one thing that still stands out, is the lack of story and an in-game story telling system. For a game that counts on users coming back day in and day out, building a cohesive, relevant, and expanding narrative is paramount. Otherwise, once folks get tired of PVP, they’ll start to wander in the waiting arms of Call of Duty, or whatever game comes and takes its place. I sincerely hope that the Destiny expansions will add more game worlds, and start bringing in more characters. 

I realize that crafting a game story that’s centered around “many” heroes, instead of the typical “one” is difficult to write-around, but I’m hoping that they figure out a way to make every individual player feel important to the story, while moving the universe forward. If they can add story-hooks to keep me engaged outside of PVP and playing with friends, Destiny will hopefully be able to stand the test of time and become a gaming “platform”, instead of just a one-off game. I’m going to keep playing it on my PS4, and I hope you join me, but I sincerely hope that Bungie takes a long, hard look at the reviews and starts shifting the Destiny universe to be more narrative-driven. Elsewise, it’s a lot of beauty (and the game is beautiful), but not enough soul.

Foursquare Announces Swarm

I couldn’t be more confused this morning. Foursquare just announced a new check-in app called Swarm. Swarm allows you to see who is nearby, similar to Facebook’s Nearby Friends feature but limited to the people you add on Foursquare, which is kind of nice for the privacy conscious. I already use Foursquare to check-in to places and keep a map of all the locations I’ve been to, plus it syncs with my Facebook Map so I can easily go back and find all the places I’ve eaten during my recent trips to Europe when my friends ask for a recommendation in Paris. It’s great and works like a champ. About a year ago or so ago Foursquare even started recommending dishes and telling me about nearby places when it sensed I was in a neighborhood nearby. It was awesome functionality, and I’ve used it as a “recommender” on a lot of different occasions. Certainly a lot more than I use Yelp. Which is why I’m surprised that they are seemingly trying to kill it off.

 

Foursquare sees Yelp as the enemy, and is pivoting Foursquare to square off (see what I did there?) directly against it. They’re taking check-ins out, and putting more context and location-focused suggestions in. The check-ins are apparently migrating to the Swarm app, which will allow your friends to see your “general” location, and also allow you to check in to specific places if you so desire (the basic functionality of Foursquare). In the video above, David Crowley, Foursquare's CEO says,  “People always think, ‘Oh, Foursquare, that’s the check-in app. Oh, Foursquare, that’s the thing where you check in and get badges’, and I think if that’s your perception of what we’re doing, you’re missing like 90% of the vision, and 90% of what the company is here to do”. The problem is, that’s what Foursquare was great at doing.

Foursquare showed hints in the last year that it wanted to go head-to-head with Yelp, by sending push-notifications when you were near restaurants that it had menus and recommendations for. This worked pretty well and though often it sent me those notifications after I’d already ordered, it would cause me to look at the app and see if anyone had any recommendations on dessert. It was still a “functional win”, in that I was opening the app, looking at the restaurant, and using that information for my current or future visit.

What puzzles me about the split is that it sounds like Foursquare will no longer allow you to check in to places, only Swarm will allow you to do that. It seems a bit odd that a company that’s collected data from over 5 Billion check-ins would abandon them in hopes of becoming the world’s best menu app. Foursquare has recently had trouble with new adoption, possibly because security-conscious individuals didn’t want their friends seeing where they were, so it’s strange to know that they are launching a new app, which they hope will be adopted more swiftly and collect the check-ins from there. I'm hopeful that the two “apps” will share data so that Foursquare can continue building its giant databases, but what if Swarm fails to take off? Will Foursquare roll check-ins back in? And what does this mean for the apps that tie-in to Foursquare for check-ins? I use Aviate on my phone and it ties in to Foursquare beautifully, so does Moves. Do those now have to re-integrate with Swarm? And who came up with the name Swarm? Every retailed business probably wants to get swarmed by people, but think of the bees. They have swarms, and they’re out to get you.

If 90% of what Foursquare is trying to do like Crowley says, is give you advice and show you what’s around you, why spin-off the 10% that has given the app its popularity and users? Why not instead redesign the app to focus on the hints, menus, and notifications, but still allow you to check-in? Granted, Foursquare is planning a re-design to go along with the Swarm launch, but if that re-design gets rid of check-ins, the thing that made Foursquare “a thing”, might start falling by the wayside.

I hope Foursquare knows what they are doing by spinning this off. I’ll try Swarm when it comes out, but if it fails to speak to my current Foursquare app and share the maps of places that I’ve checked in at, I may have to go back to checking in on Facebook. And nobody wants to do that.