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.