I jokingly throw around the words ‘junkie’ and ‘addiction’ when talking about certain games with Pavlovian qualities, but Destiny has them beat. Not only is the gameplay inherently enjoyable and hard to put down, Destiny also simulates building up a tolerance against achieving the high, by requiring the player to work harder for smaller rewards!
But let’s back up for a moment and talk about the story. Peter Dinklage’s voice work got a lot of flak for his “That Wizard Came from the Moon!” line, during the alpha testing of Destiny, but I enjoy his quips as my companion, and feel he adds a touch of humanity to the proceedings, even if some of his lines are ridiculous. The same goes for the various characters from the Tower who not only sell wares, but also offer beacon missions while on patrol. There is a certain suspension of disbelief that you have to buy into since the story assumes you are the lone guardian who solves the mystery and eventually vanquishes the final enemies, so that the Traveler (and humanity) can live to fight another day. But of course, your character is a special and unique snowflake, just like every other player who is doing exactly the same thing. Once you add cutscenes…it all falls apart. The dialogue and brief characterizations of the mysterious female ‘Guardian’ and the laughable awoken royalty from the Outer Reef barely add up to archetypes. Honestly, the game would be better off without any cutscenes, considering how little story there is.
The naming of enemies is equally absurd. I was able to get on board with our side naming the various creatures after mythology, because well…you have to name things something. But once you encounter high-level Boss monsters with names like Telthor the Unborn, we’ve crossed the streams and are in Ghostbusters territory of a possessed Rick Moranis naming the various forms of Gozer the Gozerian. (I wonder what a giant Sloar actually looks like, anyway?)
That said… the graphics, world building and sense of place are excellent. The sound design (particularly the enemy animal-like grunts and chatter) is the best I’ve heard in a game. The gameplay is rock solid and innately fun, there are a variety of things to do and the risk/reward feedback loop is just about perfect.
But once you reach level 20, the game no longer holds your hand.
Experience points no longer level up your character. Better gear is needed to progress any further. Blue-level gear is relatively easy to come by, but Purple-level gear is hard work – involving multiple currencies, turning in bounties and improving reputations with various vendors. (I have yet to earn any of the even better Yellow gear, which is for the most part available only on weekends from a mysterious dude, named Xur.) Higher level strike missions drop better gear, but you need to form your own teams to play them. Of course, once you acquire high level gear you then need to upgrade it, with various hard to find materials. It’s best to look up strategies online to find out the smartest ways to earn these various items. Even then, you end up replaying content over and over to diminishing returns. Rewards are often random. On top of that, the game is still being revised and tweaked. Often it seems an update will fix one aspect of the game from being too much of a monotonous grind, but will then change another part for the worse. The goal posts could very well move after you’ve put in the time. Sometimes the quickest path to better gear is difficult to the point of no longer being any fun.
Yet, I am still playing almost daily, and I have stopped playing nearly anything else. I have never binge-watched a show on Netflix, but I am certainly binging on Destiny. I say to myself that after going ‘steady’ for awhile, it may be time for me to ‘date’ other games, but who am I kidding? I’m looking forward to chipping away at it – little by little – the next chance I get.
Send help!
Ben
Addendum: If you are trying to figure out what to do after level 20 check out destinypublicevents.com, destinylfg.com and Polygon’s guide on “getting the best gear in the least time”.