User Review : Destiny

A different take for different players

Not many games come to mind when you think of Bungie that isn’t Halo, and no one would blame you, since it has been a while since they’ve made a game that wasn’t Halo. After taking some time off from Halo, they seem to still have some interesting game ideas floating around, so they didn’t sit on their hands this whole time. This time around, they decided to team up with publisher Activision to deliver a new experience known as Destiny, a hybrid shooter to put its own spin on well-established genres of gaming. Did Bungie make it to space with this hybrid game, or did they not even break the atmosphere?
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Before getting into the game, let’s talk about the plot. We Earthlings are jumping across Mars, when we discover a mysterious alien technology known to us as the Traveler. It’s implied that this Giant Orb in the sky allowed us Earthlings to travel space, building colonies on other planets in the Solar System. Everything’s peachy, until centuries later when its nemesis known only as the Darkness came and screwed things up. Mass-destruction occurs, which puts Earth and the rest of the Solar System itself on the brink of extinction. Centuries pass after the great battles between the Traveler’s Light and the Darkness, ultimately rendering the Traveler inoperable and near dead. The player controls an unnamed character referred to only as a Guardian, a supposedly reanimated corpse thanks to the Ghosts, the Traveler’s creation right before it ceased to function. After kicking ass for a little bit, a man known as the Speaker for the Traveler informs us that the Darkness isn’t done yet, and when round 2 comes, we all die. Your job is to stop that from happening. The story is very fairy tale like with its own ambiguity and questions that are unanswered. Unfortunately, the many questions that the game raises are never answered throughout the main campaign. The over-arching narrative is split with very few cutscenes throughout your adventure, leaving most of what you want to know dangling in favor of long dialogue sequences with your Ghost, in which it’s pretty much only your Ghost talking. Despite that, the game’s refusal of answering major questions can actually be seen as a strength in some aspects. The entire game is a mystery, your enemies are hardly established, a hooded ally appears later in the game, only to tell you bare minimum information, and the game hardly mentions the race the Exos, which is a race you can select your character to be. But all of it leaves a sense of wonder. It is space and really big, and to have a single game where all the questions of the universe were answered would feel a little forced. And since Destiny is planned to be expanded upon for 10 years, we can expect some extra things to come to light later. However, it cannot be ignored that for the regular player, the story can be rather sporadic in when it wants to tell you things, if anything at all, and while the universe seems well established to be expanded upon, there isn’t much in the story to begin with to get extremely invested.
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The Final Frontier is a large place, but you don’t get to explore all of it in this game, as you only get to see 3 planets and a moon. The places you get to visit are Earth, also known as the Cosmodrome, the Moon, Venus, and Mars in that order. Each planet has its own distinct feel and are very large to explore, despite all of them having themes of destroyed civilizations and colonies. Getting any of the large open areas confused for another planet’s is downright impossible. Despite each planet being unimaginably huge and barren, each of the planets has its own set of enemies, the Fallen and the Hive for the Cosmodrome and Moon, the Vex for Venus, and the Cabal for Mars, and its own set of missions, some of them being story based and others just being there for the sake of getting experience. You aren’t forced to complete all of the missions to move on to the next planet, but it’s highly suggested, as the game ramps up its difficulty whether you’re ready or not. It’s even suggested to revisit a few missions just to be sure you’re ready, because even though there are unlimited respawns, the game has a section called the Darkness Zone at the tail end of each mission. If you and your comrades die in these sections, you’re booted back to the beginning of the zone with all enemies back where they were. It adds an extra level of difficulty that is a welcome change to keep players from ramming headfirst into a hoard, and you can even call in a friend to help you out if you’re having a problem. The game even includes missions called strikes, which are the hardest missions in the game which the game itself won’t even let you tackle without a buddy for backup. If you’re feeling some hostility for other players, you can take them on in the Crucible missions, which is this game’s version of competitive multiplayer. It contains 4 different modes, which are basically different types of multiplayer modes you know under a different name, for example Team Deathmatch is known as Clash in this game. There isn’t much different here from what you’ve seen in other games, but it is a nice addition, and if you play it long enough, you get more crucible experience, which can you get some exclusive weaponry. But the place you’re likely to see most is the social hub known as the Tower, which is the resting place for the Traveler. You can accept bounties for higher experience, purchase weapons, meet people you may wanna form a team with, and is generally a big place to comfortably explore in your down time. Beyond that, the massive areas also contain community challenges which happen randomly, and miniature missions which are delivered to you in the field on a pod, and can earn you some extra vanguard experience. The layout for Destiny is very simple and provides co-op experience that actually feels like co-op and not being stuck with inexperienced 9-year-olds. However, the competitive multiplayer does feel a little flat, with only 4 modes that are basically the same as you’ve seen in other games with not much change.
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The gameplay for Destiny is bizarre to say the least. When you first hear the name Bungie, you think of one of the major players of the huge First Person Shooter genre, pretty much being one of the very benchmarks for the genre. Destiny is very different, however, and can be seen as a breath of fresh air. Destiny is shaped like an MMORPG, or a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game for the layman. For those that already know MMO’s, it entails a lot of customization and strategy. Destiny takes the genre and puts the flavor of FPS into it, making it an MMORPGFPS, just to confuse more people who don’t understand acronyms. It still has all the FPS gameplay you love, like quick reaction and weapon management, and some of it is even reminiscent of Halo in how the buttons are laid out and the special abilities you can customize. However, the game gets very in depth when you take into account the literal hundreds of different armor sets and weapons with different statistics and strengths, along with two sets of powers to choose from for each class. The classes you can choose from are the Titan, the Hunter, and the Warlock, and each of them have their own strengths depending on how you want to play. The weapon’s types range from all types of players ranging from loud to silent weapons, all of them having a suitable situation to use in, and that’s not even including status effects to take in. If you want to progress at all in this game, you have to be smart in what weapons you’re good at and which powers you want. One of the biggest improvements to the genre that Destiny provides is switching guns and powers on the fly. For sacrificing the ability to pause the game, if you either picked up a sweet gun or have a weapon you aren’t liking too much, you can switch it out for whatever else you have on hand, eliminating the frustrating notion of being forced to complete or quit a mission if you happen to have an inadequate weapon or power. This game takes its full customization very seriously and wants you to build your Guardian your own way. But in a sense, understanding the customization is tantamount for being comfortable to complete hard missions in this game. As said before, Destiny’s gameplay is bizarre in that once the player’s customization is good to go, it feels almost exactly like a traditional FPS, which can be confusing for players who just wanna jump in for shooting fun. The game encourages the player to choose carefully when it comes to weapons, armor, and powers so they can have fun completing these missions. For those who have the patience to carefully consider strategy, this game’s structure is golden. But it’s very easy for any person to get lost in the numbers, and be defeated over and over again for something they can’t completely understand, which can be a turn off for many people. This is a strategist’s game, but in it being that, it alienates the ability for anyone to just pop in and play. While this is a common occurrence for most RPG’s, Destiny succumbs to this problem because it acts as a hybrid between FPS and RPG. All in all, the gameplay can be confusing for people who just want to play the game and ignore the statistics, but for the people who enjoy the strategic and statistical element along with FPS quick action, the gameplay is very suitable.
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Next-gen has many advantages, and Destiny sure wants to illustrate them. The presentation for this game is through the roof with all the cool improvements, such as lighting, focus effects, and environmental flare. Despite the somewhat disadvantage of having to be always online, the connection to the Destiny servers is near perfect, and past the initial load time for the mission, there isn’t a single load time in between, despite the land masses of the planets being so huge and beautiful. One other thing this game gets right, despite so many other games ignoring, is the sense of scale. Even though the story for this game is very conservative when it comes to actual information, it does an excellent job of showing the player breathtaking ruin designs, deep dungeons, and gigantic landmarks that are simply amazing. It invokes the idea of a story being behind the ruins, what a large broken machine actually is, and the environment is filled to the brim with buildings and landscapes that leave the player with a sort of mystery that many games don’t. Most of all, these sights are memorable. Large landscapes are a dime a dozen in modern video games, but Destiny plants the player at a moderate to high altitude to take in the breathtaking scenery, my personal favorites being the Black Garden on Venus and half of the landmarks on Mars. The game wants you to experience the importance of everything, and to take a second to take in the downright beautiful sights. Not only the sights, but the sounds of Destiny are also on the level of cinema. It’s unfortunate that Martin O’ Donnell, the composer for both this game and the Halo series, has left Bungie, as this soundtrack is indescribable. The soundtrack contains many variations of instruments and moods, and the final boss of the game is made so much more epic with the great sights and music backing it up. It would be criminal to not release this soundtrack. With the sights and sounds that impress, Destiny is definitely the game to show you what next-gen can do, and it can do a lot.
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I won’t pretend that Destiny is the perfect end-all-be-all game to play, because for many people it simply isn't the game for them. It’s its own sort of style, mixing in statistics and strategy to a genre that is based in reaction and quick-thinking, and for a lot of people, it didn’t work for them, and even the story hogs all the vital information that the player wants. But in that sense, Destiny seems less of a broken concept and more of a building block. This game is meant to be expanded upon, and for what it is, the story being ambiguous can work, as it invokes a mystery for the great beyond. The layout for the game is dynamic, allowing for the player to share the fun of moving through the planets. The gameplay itself is strategic and a lot of the time depends on real teamwork and the near-death situations makes the victory that much more satisfying. The presentation is amazing, and makes the player tiny in comparison to the gigantic and breathtaking sights, landmarks, and potential stories. While Destiny isn’t for everyone with its interesting take on RPGs and FPSs, for those who like a little change with some intense action in the beautiful great beyond, set up your spaceships, because this game is fantastic for the right person.