Destiny: Or how i learned to stop worrying and love the Nova Bomb

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Ever since its announcement, Destiny has had alot of expectations to live up to. As the newest game, Bungie, the people responsible for creating the hyper successful Halo franchise and the Marathon franchise before that, the very mention of Bungie creating a whole new series already gave birth to a level of anticipation only exceeded by the massive hype machine that projects its potential as a gaming powerhouse. Contrary to popular belief, Destiny is not as revolutionary as that hype led some to believe. In reality, the game is missing several features that feel like missteps or problems. Some problems that desperately need to be fixed. But that doesn’t change the fact that this isn’t a fun game.

The setting of the game presents the player with a rich story with loads of potential, potential that was unfortunately wasted enormously. Sometime in the near-future, a mysterious alien intelligence known as the Traveler arrives on Earth to gift humanity with its wisdom, and leads us into an unprecedented period of expansion and advancement in a majestic Golden Age. This Golden Age doesn’t last however, as the Travellers enemies find humanity and almost push humanity on the brink of extinction. The Traveler sacrificed itself to keep humanity alive, where it now hangs above the last city on earth where humanity has remained ever since. A couple hundreds of years later, you stand as a guardian of humanity, finally ready to push back against the endless tide of darkness. The lore of Destiny itself has been seeded in the roots of an excellently imagined universe, characterized by visions of mankind’s heroism and potential with fantastic elements of fantasy sci-fi. This universe is supported by absolutely gorgeous artwork and details and contains one of the best game soundtracks in years.

Unfortunately, the storymode set within that backdrop is absolutely awful. The story contains little to no character development, a boring plot thread about alien attackers, and an uneven narrative pacing. I think that it seems that many of the fundamental concepts of storytelling have been abandoned in the name of continuous action and standalone missions. Whatever the game doesn’t teach you while playing offers the story and lore to you through the Grimoire entries that unlock with a modicum of additional story explanation and act as an encyclopedia. The strange reason to include those only on the game’s website or Companion app means few will ever see these tidbits.

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Luckly, the story missions themselves are a blast. These missions offer you a mix of different activities for solo, cooperative, and competitive play. The game does an excellent job at providing activities for different moods and moments, from simple and short planetary patrols to the absolutely brutal three-person dungeons. Some areas of the game world are generally very interesting places, especially the Hellmouth on the Moon, but it’s too bad that so many of these missions start in the same places. A sense of repetition extends to mission objectives, which often falls back on a siege setup such as your AI companion needing time to hack something while you fight off attackers. However, the stage layouts and enemies help the battles feel distinct and generally fun.

Destiny’s design and emphasis is on team-play. While Solo play is an ideal choice for players looking for a challenge, this game just screams multiplayer to you and it’s given modes are more fun (and easier) with a friend or two at your side. The stylistic flow between missions is halted by the regular need to return home to a central social hub, known as The Tower, to receive mission rewards and to gear up with your latest weaponry, armour or the desire toe simply go shopping and receive bounties. This isn’t so bad, except the fact that Destiny suffers from some quite lengthy load times that stunt the momentum of a session. Bungie also needs to find more solutions to let players of differing levels play together through some sort of level match system. As it is, my experiences often resulted in a mismatched team and is doomed to either be too easy for one or too hard for another.

With Intense high-octane battles being Bungie’s forte, Destiny maintains the reputation for excellent combat mechanics. Each of several gun types feels balanced and rewarding, and the special powers, grenades, and melee attacks that are unique to each class are exciting to acquire and a joy to perfect. For me, the Nova Bomb finisher for my Warlock got me absolutely pumped when it was charged up. Our enemies often rely on numbers and damage potential over the complex A.I. routines. I mean, it’s always fun to mow through dozens of foes like an unstoppable badass that you are supposed to be in this universe, but our enemies rarely provide a strategic battle of intelligence and wit that can truly make a fight memorable. The characters are extremely mobile thanks to the inclusion of class-specific movement modes, such has lift or glide that propels your character to jump high into the air and can be very important during battles. In between combat, your trusty steed is a floating speeder bike that is way more fun to ride then what it should be. Although it doesn’t have weaponry to shoot baddies with, hearing the sounds of the speeder bike zoom past the battlefield is pure bliss and even riding alongside your friends is just pure magic. Come to think of it, I’d buy anything that has a speeder bike in it, riding across the wild wastelands in the coolest form of transport since Return of the Jedi.

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Although there are fewer customization options than some shooters, Destiny easily makes up for it during the fierce PvP battles. The Crucible, the PVP multiplayer mode of Destiny, is excellent. Double jumps and other forms of movement is important for the modes in the Crucible that provide depth to the well-thought maps that adds tension and actual tactical depth. Weapon skill and sharp shooting undoubtedly win the day, but the addition of supers moves makes sure that even new players to the game get brief moments of victory on the battlefield. I don’t really see any of these first batch of maps stand out, but they all include opportunities for strategies and mayhem. From interesting sniping spots to hidden alcoves from which to ambush unsuspecting foes. The only gripe is that matchmaking is very slow, but my matches always have offered mostly well-balanced teams even in the early days after launch. Unlike in the cooperative game, characters of vastly different levels will be able to play well together, but guardians who have not yet unlocked at least their core powers are at an extreme disadvantage against Level 25+ players that have access to ridiculously OP weaponry and armour, with a skill-tree to match. Fortunately, the Iron Banner acts as the “Hard Mode” for multiplayer where all of the extremely high levelled players fight, and this satisfies the bloodlust for the experienced players with the reward system being rarer loot drops than on the Crucible.

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That being said, I have one major problem with Destiny. The infamous loot drops. Needless to say, the loot system is unbelievably broken even for a game of this calibre. Every game has a way to reward its players. For example, you could spend five hours in a raid, and surely someone will receive something worth mentioning. Destiny fails to do that. You won’t earn items based on your skill, deaths counter, etc. Everything is on random. Completing any activity, like an online match, raid, or strike doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be receiving a good item. A player whose K/D ratio is beyond negative can receive a legendary engram, while someone who really contributed to the game can leave empty-handed. If you even manage to get anything at all, that alone is a slice of hell.

There’s also a situation in which after a five hour raid, nobody receives anything.

That’s fun, right?

Right?​

On another note, character progression is shared across competitive or solo/cooperative play, lending a sense of ownership and pride over your guardian. This sense of investment is increased through the opportunity to level multiple subclasses and improve weapons with their use. Loot certainly isn’t plentiful, but it almost has a meaningful important, so you’re making interesting choices about which gun to equip rather that suits your playstyle instead of mindlessly removing dozens of different weapons because they look boring or are generally weaker than the others. The three classes you can select from are more similar than they are supposed to be different, but each and every one of them does have a few exciting ways to stand out. From the Hunter’s unbearably badass bladedancer attacks to the Warlock’s glass cannon supermove, Nova Bomb. Your guardian’s options only become more flexible the higher your level is, leading to some nice opportunities to tweak a build to your specifications and playstyle.

Hitting level cap and completing the story is more of a mid-game marker instead of a colossal achievement. Farming reputation, using gear to level beyond the cap, and completing buils for each of your subclasses can be a lot of fun, but it won’t appeal to gamers who hate grinding. For those that do enjoy the process, it’s exciting to uncover higher level versions of old missions and learn some tricks along the way, such as the ability to repower teammates’ super abilities through careful timing of your deployments. From experience in the Crucible, this is a massive match-changer.

Although Destiny draws inspiration from MMO’s, I find it difficult to properly categorize and think about what the game is or will be. Even with its fantastic launch, Bungie already has plans in the works to expand the game with additional story content, raids, and new variations on competitive play. You can’t judge a game because of what for what it might be in the future. I just believe that even with its stumbles, the initial release of Destiny is a colossal achievement that intelligently collected several genre and video game elements and created something that resembled a unified whole. Of course, MMO’s are always growing with each new improvement. Maybe one day, the Loot system and some of the other problems that the game stumbles upon could be fixed. While this game is still learning how to grow and properly develop into a noisy teenager, this is the best game to currently come out on Next-Gen consoles. This is worth your attention.

This game has received Eight out of Ten Lionhearts​