Ever since Destiny, Bungie's FPS/RPG/MMO/I DON'T
KNOW, released, everyone has had only one question: Did it live up to the
hype? And instead of dancing around the
answer for an entire article, P&P can simply say: Nope. But before you run outside for the first time
in months and start flinging your feces around, hoping for it to land somewhere
in my general vicinity, you should know this: it doesn't mean the game isn't
fun. It just means Bungie made too many
promises that they couldn't keep. "Well then, Mr. Smartypants, would you like
to explain exactly how Destiny failed to meet the hype?" Sure, but first you must understand that…
DESTINY IS LIKE GREAT SEX:
You're standing in a violently loud club, when
suddenly, your world stands still.
Directly in front of you, twenty feet away, is the most beautiful girl
or handsome fella you've ever laid eyes on.
Surrounded by sweaty drugged-out ravers and numerous ugly friends, this
individual looks like Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, himself
carved them out of the most immaculate piece of marble on earth. So what do you do? You drag them right into your bed without the
mention of dinner or a movie. And you're not disappointed. Their thrusting and gyrating mechanics are
flawless and could go on for hours. You
can't believe who or what you've found, so instead of waiting three days as
required by a silly law, you take them back to your bed the next night too. And again, you have monumental sex that no
one will ever understand.
Lying in the sheets, soak and wet from ecstasy,
you do something unfathomable: you decide to have a conversation, and when your
angel opens their mouth, out falls stories about bubblegum and handbags or
football and beer. You think, "well that was interesting," but
then shrug and reflect on the fantastic sex you've been having. So before the next night's romp session, you
decide to buy multiple mirrors—which is creepy, yet necessary—and decorate the
bedroom. And in the reflections this
Greek god or goddess looks exquisite from every angle. Filled with such fond scenery, you attempt to
converse again, and once more you hear about bubblegum, handbags, football, and
beer. And that's when it finally hits
you: the angel lying next to you doesn't have any stories or adventures. They lack depth. They lack complexity. They lack—*gulp*—a soul.
Now, someone that hasn't had a variety of
different partners might marry a bubblegum/beer talker (not that there's anything wrong with that). But someone with experience might feel that
without some substance to fill the remaining hours of the day, your exquisite
monkey-sex partner is just an empty shell.
A gorgeous, ridiculously talented empty shell, but an empty shell
nonetheless. And when you do finally
find an exquisite person that can make you laugh and tell stories that keep you
enthused for hours, the angelic empty shell will just become a distant memory
of what could have been. And that, my
joystick fondling friends is exactly what Destiny is like—give or take a few
orgasms of course. "So what you're saying is Destiny is like
awesome sex and I should come back often?" You seem to have missed something
important. It was probably the word
s-e-x that confused you. No matter. Let's move on.
THE HYPE:
Bungie promised a universe like Star Wars to
gamers. Worlds where you could travel
and meet other Guardians and unearth fantastical stories that span time and
space. They’d create a game where you'd
have an experience like no other game before it. But what Bungie really delivered is Diablo 3
in a first person shooter perspective (relax). It may not resemble Diablo 3 or dip into
fantasy elements, but the mechanics underneath are exactly the same. You go to an area, kill everything in sight,
collect the loot (or in Destiny's case
the lack thereof) and move on to the next area. When you've killed everything in every area,
you go back to previous areas and kill the same things over and over again,
until you collect the right loot to level up.
Both games thrive on the principle of wanting to get to the next level
and both games can be extremely fun, but only…if you're okay with a grinding
mechanic. The problem is that's not what
Bungie promised when the advertising train started rolling. So the gamers that believed they were getting
a Halo type shooter with the depth of Mass Effect were utterly
disappointed.
THE STORY:
What story?
Did someone say something about a story?
I clearly didn't say anything about a story. You?
It wasn't me. Well okay then,
moving on. (Go anywhere on the web and you'll find numerous articles about how
Bungie bumbled this aspect of the game)
A ROBUST WORLD:
It's funny how all of humanity and every
Guardian left in existence fit perfectly on a rooftop of a tower (pun intended). When you think about games like Mass Effect
or Fallout 3 or even Borderlands 2, you immediately remember all the fun you
had just walking around and talking to the NPC inhabitants. There always seemed to be a story to find and
somewhere interesting to explore. But
not here. Certainly not in Destiny. Even the NPC's in the Tower have absolutely
nothing to say. They just stare at
you. And if you count them up (not counting factions or vendors)
there's probably about five. So why
isn't there unique NPC's in the Tower or on other planets? Umm…don't know. Why are all the other areas (besides the Tower) just filled with
enemies? Why aren't there other outposts
for Guardians? After various shrugs, you'll
quickly realize there are no other outposts, NPC's, or towns anywhere. And sadly, that creates a big empty void
where a remarkable story could have been.
you have anything on the menu NOT made from Dreg?
LAZINESS OR A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO GAME CREATING:
It probably took you about 15 hours to finally
decide to open up your inventory and have a look. And in your pixelated satchel you discovered
all this junk you've collected with absolutely no description of what it is or
what to do with it. "Discover the world in your own way
(paraphrasing)," Bungie reps tell you.
So they've made a game just like life: you spend an outrageous amount of
time wondering what to do, and when you finally figure it out, you die shortly
after. Without the help of the online
community deciphering all this crap, you'd have Guardians just wandering around
the Tower, grinding on each other. Is
this method of game-making profound or just down right lazy? That's for you to decide.
BUT WHAT ABOUT MULTIPLAYER:
Yes, there's that. Multiplayer is fun after obtaining decent
loot and upgrades, and can actually become quite an addictive part of the
game. But then everyone looks at Halo (and how could you not?) and realizes
there's not much here, besides a couple of game modes and terrible
matchmaking. And just like in the Beta,
if your whole team drops out, it leaves you holding your nuts and twiddling
your thumbs. So that's fun.
"Hi there, I was wondering where you got that extremely sweet smelling cappucino?"
"..."
"Yeah, if you could just point me in the right direction, that'd be great..."
"..."
"Hello? Lady? What is with all the mute idiots around here? The hell with this...Ghost, where's the purple ball?"
CONCLUSION:
Destiny, sadly,
didn't come close to living up to the hype Bungie built. The funny thing about all that is if Bungie
just explained what they were delivering (a
grinding first-person shooter) in the first place, there wouldn't have been
any outcry from gamers. But then again,
Bungie wouldn't have sold as many copies as they did. So from a pure marketing standpoint, the hype
worked. Destiny is a beautiful game and
as far as shooters go, has top notch gameplay.
Even though the story, dialogue, and world-building completely missed
the mark, the level design is completed with care, the characters look
gorgeous, and the game can be damn fun at times. Will Bungie fix all these problems with
Destiny 2? Only time and a lot more hype
will tell.
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