The biggest problem Destiny has is that describing exactly
what it is becomes a matter of subtraction very quickly. It’s Mass
Effect without the character focus and careful exposition, it’s Halo without variety and that intangible
scrappy factor that built a franchise, Call
of Duty without carefully constructed combat sequences and balanced
multiplayer, World of Warcraft without
exciting loot and deep skill trees.
But most succinctly, it’s an ambitious video game without
the bravado to capitalize on what it does well.
Desti-nearly put me
to sleep
Inasmuch as Destiny tries to tell a story, it’s about a
humanity on the brink of extinction an indeterminate incredibly long period of
time into the future. Some alien
moon/sphere thing called the traveler
showed up on Mars, and that somehow lead the human race to a golden age in
which they expanded to fill out our solar system.
Following this advantageous development, the darkness, a vaguely defined “enemy
of the traveler” pursued it to our
system. A war ensued, and the human race
has been pushed back to the bounds of one city, conveniently referred to as
simply the city, with the tower serving as the hub for the guardians (of which the player is a
resurrected member) who go out and fight the
fallen, the hive, the vex, and the cabal, receiving occasional assistance from the queen, the queen’s brother, and the
speaker.
As a writer myself, I know that it’s hard to name things in
sci-fi without making them sound silly.
All the same, I’m genuinely forced to wonder how this will be localized
in Russia and other places where the language lacks a definite article and this
unique refusal to name things becomes evident.
It feels like a Mad Gab where [Guardians], [Queen], and [Queen’s
Brother] will fight [Darkness] with [Noun] to save [Traveler] and [City] from
[Adjective] [Poorly Imagined Antagonists].
This simply serves to add to the frustrating ambiguity of
Destiny as a narrative experience. I
paid careful attention through the game’s 15 or so hour long “story” missions,
and I’m genuinely not sure what I accomplished.
The role and function of “The Traveler” and the threat that “The
Darkness” poses to it are left so intentionally ambiguous (no doubt in an
attempt to draw some kind of passé parallel to Lovecraft) that the player is
left flitting about from planet to planet with no real driving motivation
behind whatever one is doing from mission to mission.
Frankly, I’m not even sure if the enemies I was fighting are
themselves “The Darkness”, or if they’re just correlated to it, or opposed to
it… I don’t know, it’s all unclear.
This is the biggest central problem with Destiny as a story –
at every opportunity it has to provide even the smallest bit of meaningful
exposition or explanation it runs away and shuts the door like an impatient child. At one point which could be an excellent
opportunity for finally getting to the bottom of what the hell is happening in
this game, a character called the stranger literally
says “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.”
All of this could be closer to forgivable if there was some
other mechanism for exposition within the game, something akin to the Codex in Mass Effect or the hundreds of books
lying around in every game of the Elder
Scrolls series. Destiny has a “grimoire”, but it isn’t even
accessible in-game, requiring you to create a Bungie account, log into
Bungie.net just to access it. Even then,
after you’ve given Bungie your email, they refuse to give you even the most
basic information. What did the traveler
do that helped humans achieve so much?
What are guardians? What is “The
Darkness”? The game hoards all of this
information to itself, wrapping ambiguity in misinformation and vague hints until
it feels less and less like you’re playing through a game and more and more
like you’re playing through the diagramed skeleton of a game that someone plans
on making.
All of this could be forgivable provided a solid, deep,
gameplay foundation…
Desti-knee deep
Make no mistake, the nuts and bolts of a great shooter are
here, but it feels like they’re all tossed across the floor like the legos of
yesteryear’s playtime.
The movement in Destiny is solid, and so is the
gunplay. The feedback on most weapons is
excellent, and the sensation of power-jumping, gliding, and teleporting across
co-op and multiplayer arenas is fantastic.
The vertical element games like Titanfall
brought to the FPS genre is here, and it makes the basic moving and shooting
mechanics fantastic.
However, these great mechanics are wasted on a single player
campaign that’s more drab and repetitive than anything I can remember playing
in the last ten years. Literally every
mission takes the format of “Go to place, fight bad guys in that place.” And where the Halo series introduced variety with creative sets, constant new
weapons, vehicles, and set-piece battles, Destiny presents the same slog
through room after room where enemies either wait in place ala Dark Souls or literally spawn out of
thin air, directly in front of the players.
These enemies, which always spawn en masse, have
unimaginative AI, boring presentation, repetitive designs and predictable
roles. Every faction has enemies that
all fill more or less the same roles: cannon fodder, harder cannon fodder, so
on and so forth. And while challenge is
essential to enemy design in a good video game, most of the enemy types in
Destiny are simply annoying to
fight. Some enemies are invisible and
deal massive melee damage, some fly around and shoot at you like an ungodly
robotic hybrid of gnats and termites.
And then there are the bullet sponges.
Taking what may be literally the worst part of RPGs into
itself, almost every combat encounter in Destiny includes at least one enemy
with impractically large amounts of health and frustratingly powerful
attacks. These enemies roam around the
battlefield, often able to teleport themselves long distance, and no matter
what faction they come from they share similar capabilities for massive damage
at all ranges. Fighting them is not
challenging, so much as it’s a chore.
These enemies extend themselves into a handful of boss
characters which uniformly follow the pattern of “a normal enemy, but bigger.” These boss characters make up the worst parts
of the game, especially since they tend to spawn lesser enemies during their
already impractically long fights. This
practice annoys me in every video game in which I see it, but here it’s simply,
unambiguously terrible.
There are simply no words to describe how annoying it is to
spend fifteen minutes with two people you’ve never met dodging constant, heavy,
area-of-effect fire from five directions while trying to accurately shoot a
hulking behemoth that is effectively impervious to all individual effort.
These experiences ruin the single-player “campaign”, but
thankfully the competitive multiplayer is better. It’s close to excellent, but the basic
problem with it boils down to the fact that “the crucible” is about as well-balanced as a discussion of
West-bank settlements on Fox News.
First and foremost, each player can start a multiplayer
match with a sniper rifle, shotgun, or “fusion rifle”, with about a clip and a
half. Each of these weapons are
horrifically unbalanced, especially considering that everyone starts with one of them.
The shotguns and sniper rifles fill their traditional roles as one-hit
kills at close and long range respectively, and the fusion rifles seem to be
designed to fill the same purpose at mid-range.
They require a brief charge period, but between these three weapons
that, again I emphasize, everyone starts
every match with, it’s often 'easy to become frustrated with the whole endeavor.
Tack onto this the “super” abilities available to each
player, which function like killstreak rewards that don’t require a killstreak,
and dying in Destiny’s multiplayer rarely feels like one was meaningfully
beaten. I can’t even count the number of
times I was one-shot-killed by weapons or powers that simply feel cheap, like
half-invincible melee upgrades, enemy-seeking super bombs and attacks that at
once kill everything in a large radius and render the user briefly invincible. Almost every class has these game-breaking
abilities, but the fact that everyone has them all the time, and that they’re
nearly instantaneous and effectively unpreventable, only further contribute to
a sense of futility.
Add to this an incredibly lacking selection of maps, and the
fact that players cannot influence the map they play on, and that there’s not
allotted time to configure one’s loadout to the map, and the experience becomes
all the more frustrating.
In Conclusion
Destiny is not a bad game, it’s far from it.
All the same, it’s even more well-distanced from good.
At every turn, it promises depth and substance where there’s
not really any to be found. The opening
minutes are exhilarating, and even through the first full mission it’s
engaging, but things fall apart very quickly after that when the routine sets
in and the plot grows more esoteric while simultaneously providing less context
and information to inform the action.
The gunplay is solid, but the single-player campaign is
burdened with annoying enemies, repetitive tasking and a shocking lack of
variety. The multiplayer is engaging,
but its failure to balance several core mechanics makes even the best moments
simply feel like luck of the draw.
All in all, Destiny is simply disappointing as a game, and
more importantly as a picture of an industry that seems ignorant to what makes
its successes successful, as it does to what makes its failures fail.
No comments:
Post a Comment