Player3Podcast

By: Larry Hunt

 

For the past thirteen years, no game franchise has consumed more of my time than the Halo series. I have always considered the multiplayer the best all around multiplayer experience available and the campaigns contain one of the greatest stories ever told in gaming. My love for these games extended into love for their creators, Bungie. They were so involved with their community, listening to feedback and adjusting to what people said about their games. This was a great company producing great games.

 

So, when Bungie announced Destiny, I was excited beyond words. They painted this picture of an epic story about humanity’s struggle to survive in a galaxy that sounded like it possessed a backstory comparable in depth to Halo. This story was going to be so grand that it would take a decade to tell it. They showed us gigantic environments and told us that we could go to any place we could see on the screen. And the icing on the cake of this amazing vision was that beating the campaign was only scratching the surface of the game. There would be so much more to do! Add in the fact that this was a new type of game, a “social shooter,” that would combine RPG, MMO, and Shooter elements, and I was sold.

 

I never doubted a word they said. This was Bungie. They had delivered the best of gaming for over a decade. They had always lived up to the hype. I jumped in on the beta and enjoyed the taste I got of the game. I waited in line at midnight, and brought it home for an all nighter. The trouble began there.

 

The first four hours of gameplay consisted entirely of the beta experience. So, I had to grind away doing the exact same thing I had spent time doing just weeks before. I had planned to spend an entire night diving into a new world and found myself working through boring repetition. But, I had leveled up enough to be allowed into player-versus-player, and so I began that experience.

 

To Destiny’s credit, the PVP multiplayer is one of the best gaming mechanics I’ve experienced. I thoroughly enjoyed fighting other people. For me, though, the PVP wasn’t good enough to support the entire game. I had a lot of fun with it, but I loved the stories that Bungie had woven in the past, and I really wanted to see where this story was going. They had hyped this game almost entirely on going through this story with your friends, and that is what I wanted to do.

 

I bought the game with a great deal of anticipation for the story that Bungie had spent so many months building up. That anticipation quickly died. It turns out, replaying hours worth of beta wasn’t the only repetition the game had to offer. Ever story mission followed nearly the exact format. Fight lesser enemies, hold a position for three waves, fight slightly higher enemies, hold a position for three waves, fight slightly higher enemies, fight a boss or a squad of very high level enemies. Again and again with almost no cut scenes, just your robot pal reading the story to you with almost no emotion.

 

It took weeks for me to work through the story, not because Bungie had produced a huge story, but because the story was so dull and repetitious that I had to force myself to keep playing it. I could not get into the story at all, and even when I completed it I thought, “That’s it?” Underneath the poor storytelling, was a story lacking in greatness regardless of how it was told. It was boring and straightforward. I was not invested in it, and I have no idea what I really accomplished, besides killing people that need to be killed because of reasons that no one ever makes clear. The story could be expanded on as you unlocked grimoire cards. But, you had to go online to read those. You had to completely eradicate whatever immersion you had in the game in order to learn more about what was happening in the game.

 

I tried to maintain my optimism. After all, Bungie had told me that I would only scratch the surface by beating the campaign. So, I went looking for the rest of this epic experience. It didn’t exist. Apparently, the deeper part of the game consists in special missions that are actually just the same missions over and over on varying difficulties. These are the same missions that already felt repetitious because they followed the same format. The increased difficulty at least made the missions as challenging as I would have liked them to be the first time, but they added nothing to the story and ultimately very little to the game.

 

But, I love Bungie. This was a great story that was going to take ten years to tell. And I tried my best to love this game. I really did. I held out for the raid. After hours of grinding through the same stuff again and again, I finally attained a high enough level to play the raid. It was the first great experience in the PVE side of the game! It was incredibly difficult, but also very fun.

 

Since the raid reset every week, my friends and I attempted it for four weeks. In between attempts, I had to play the same missions again and again in an attempt to find better armor to up my level in order to be more effective in the raid. In the meantime, rumors flew that Bungie had butchered the story so they could sell DLC with minimum effort. I doubted it, because Bungie would never do that. But, the evidence piled up and it looks pretty damning.

 

The fans cried out, and this company that had always done so well at interacting with fans responded by telling us that we should buy the expansion, because it would add much more to the story. I was already fed up, but I wanted to give Bungie a chance to prove themselves. Then, they announced what their “Expansion” contained:  Three story missions, a strike (or two, if you’re on PS4), and a raid. Maybe 2 or 3 weeks of gameplay for a casual gamer. That’s not an expansion, it’s overpriced DLC, and I don’t see how it can add much to such a lacking story.

 

It became clear that this game would not improve. Destiny brought new meaning to the word “overhyped.” I tried to make myself love this game, but I couldn’t. I played it because I felt compelled to hit the top level, regardless of how many hours of pointless grinding it required, and because I felt obligated to play with my friends because they love it. For me, this game was more like work than fun. That is not what gaming should be like. So, I finally sold the game this week.

I hear they’re already making a sequel. That’s a shame. I wish they would have finished the first game before they moved on to the second one.