{"id":16475,"date":"2014-10-06T15:32:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-06T05:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=16475"},"modified":"2014-10-06T15:34:22","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T05:34:22","slug":"destiny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=16475","title":{"rendered":"Destiny"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"destiny\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Platform:\u00a0 <\/strong>Playstation 4
\nDeveloper:\u00a0 <\/strong>Bungie Studios
\nPublisher:\u00a0 <\/strong>Activision<\/p>\n

D<\/em><\/span>estiny<\/em> has been a long time coming.\u00a0 Over four years in the making, it is the successor to Bungie Studio’s enourmously successful Halo<\/em> franchise which single-handedly gave Microsoft a foothold in the video game console space when it launched in 2001.\u00a0 Thirteen years later and now a multi-platform release, the wait is over and the game is finally upon us.<\/p>\n

Destiny<\/em> has been one of the most eagerly anticipated games that I can recall and with good reason.\u00a0 It is Bungie’s first crack at a new franchise in over a decade and their first release on the current generation of game systems.\u00a0 They were pioneers in the console space with the Halo <\/em>games, leading the way forward on how to do multiplayer gaming (Halo: Combat Evolved<\/em>), online multiplayer gaming (Halo 2<\/em>) and game customization and online media integration (Halo 3<\/em>).\u00a0 They managed to capture lightning in a bottle not once but three<\/em> times with each Halo <\/em>game bringing something radically new and innovative to the Xbox and Xbox 360.<\/p>\n

When you look at the timing for the launch of Destiny<\/em>, the stage is perfectly set for Bungie.\u00a0 The Xbox One and the Playstation 4 have both been out for slightly under a year but none of the launch titles have really succeeded in capturing the imagination of the mass market.\u00a0 Watch_Dogs<\/em> and TitanFall<\/em> were both billed as the ones to watch but they ultimately underwhelmed.<\/p>\n

Personally, I had stayed relatively removed from the build up to Destiny<\/em>‘s launch.\u00a0 I didn’t play the public beta.\u00a0 I didn’t really read up too much on it.\u00a0 I broadly understood the game to be a first person shooter\/MMO hybrid that Bungie planned to support for ten years.\u00a0 I felt comfortable with Bungie’s track record and preferred to come in knowing as little as possible.<\/p>\n

I can safely say that what I got wasn’t what I expected.\u00a0 Inexplicably, unexpectedly and unbelievably…Bungie seemed to drop the ball.<\/p>\n

\"destiny002\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The game starts with a whimper.\u00a0 After creating a customized avatar – where you choose your species and character class – you are dropped into a world where a floating rubiks cube shaped robot voiced by Peter Dinklage tells you that you’ve woken from a decade long slumber.\u00a0 You pick up a gun, starting shooting some aliens and that is quite literally as nuanced as the story ever gets.\u00a0 Dinklage’s character Ghost (or ‘DinkBot’ as he is affectionately referred to online), is the only companion you encounter in the entire game’s universe.\u00a0 Everyone else is an alien to be shot or a merchant to shop from.\u00a0 Dinklage has been panned for his disinterested and flat voice acting but I don’t know what else he could do.\u00a0 His dialogue is 90% exposition and he is literally describing the same action over and over again – “please shoot some bad guys while I connect to some computer and extract some stuff off a hard drive”.\u00a0 He’s not exactly being given the quick-witted and colourful prose that George RR Martin wrote for Tyrion Lannister here.\u00a0 His character is basically C3PO with less personality<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The character you play is known as a Guardian, one of many (ahem) Guardians of the Galaxy.\u00a0 Bungie have opted to give your character a voice but not a personality.\u00a0 You have lines of dialogue but none of them are used to wonder what happened in the years that you were asleep.\u00a0 Where are your friends and family?\u00a0 When Ghost tells you that Earth has been conquered by a race of intergalactic aliens and there is a desperate last stand at The City which is protected by a giant hovering planet sized entity known as The Traveller, your character has literally no questions on the matter.<\/p>\n

The story and lore behind Bungie’s Destiny<\/em> is at once needlessly complicated and disappointingly reductive.\u00a0 It’s complicated because every mission is preceeded by a wall of text that Ghost rattles off where he talks about different alien races, long lost civilizations, ancient mystical cities and arcane weapon technology.\u00a0 None of this stuff is actually contextualized or explained in a way that makes a lick of sense.\u00a0 To understand what Ghost is talking about, you have to stop playing the game<\/em> and go onto Bungie’s website, create an account for Destiny<\/em> and read a series of online cards called Grimoires that are sorted by category, kind of like bubble gum baseball cards.\u00a0 Nestled in these cards are some cliffnotes that explain what is going on.\u00a0 Unbelievable.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, do you really need to know any of this stuff?\u00a0 Literally every level involves traveling a couple of hundred yards, shooting aliens, letting Ghost link up to a computer to download I don’t know what and then defending him by shooting more aliens.\u00a0 You do this twenty odd times and thats your lot.\u00a0 I literally did not realize when I had reached the last mission of the story mode.\u00a0 I just unexpectedly got a celebratory\u00a0 cut scene and that was it.\u00a0 I doubled checked online with a walk through guide to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.\u00a0 I hadn’t.<\/p>\n

\"destiny\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When you consider the campaign mode of the original Halo <\/em>game, this is a massive, disheartening step backwards.\u00a0 <\/em>Halo<\/em> had a cast of iconic characters like Master Chief, Cortana, Captain Keyes and memorable villains in The Covenant.\u00a0 This game by comparison has a whopping two characters – Ghost and The Queen – and neither have a shred of personality.\u00a0 The Halo<\/em> games had some memorable set pieces involving the Scorpion vehicles, the Flood and the defence of Reach.\u00a0 For some reason, all that spectacle is completely gone from Destiny<\/em>.\u00a0 I honestly have no clue why.<\/p>\n

The game requires a dedicated online connection to play and even in the campaign mode, you will occasionally have two other online players pop up.\u00a0 That’s right, two.\u00a0 The game has incredibly rudimentary mechanics for interacting with them and often they seem to wander off and do their own thing.\u00a0 I just assume we’re on the same planet but perhaps chasing different objectives.\u00a0 It seems completely pointless.\u00a0 When I heard that Bungie was doing an online MMO that seamlessly integrates other players into your experience, having PooSlinger75 and Hairy_Beef_Strips pop up in my campaign for five minutes where they run around in circles before jetting off was not what I had in mind.<\/p>\n

I also seem to have had my expectations grossly overstated when it came to size the worlds and what you can do in them.\u00a0 I was picturing something along the lines of the Mass Effect<\/em> games where you traverse planets – big and small – and could pass time doing side quests in the furthest reaches of space.\u00a0 It was not to be.\u00a0 The game has a whole four planets to explore – Earth, Mars, Venus and the Moon.\u00a0 “Earth” is actually just “derelict city in Russia”.\u00a0 And those last three all have pretty barren landscapes where the sand is a different colour in each.\u00a0 Beyond shooting stuff there is nothing remotely interactive or interesting in these locales.<\/p>\n

Fair to say that when it came to the window dressing – the story, the characters, the mission objectives and the level design – Bungie spectacularly dropped the ball.<\/p>\n

Where the game manages to restore a shred of good will and credibility is with its PVP and Strike modes.\u00a0 For an old Halo<\/em> fan like myself, Destiny<\/em>‘s online multiplayer modes are a blast to play.\u00a0 There are four different variants of match making modes but primarily, I enjoyed playing Control – a 6 vs 6 team based contest where you earn points for commandeering waypoints and of course, defeating the other team.\u00a0 The Strike mode is also a lot of fun.\u00a0 It’s sort of along the lines of what I thought would be integrated into the campaign mode.\u00a0 In essence, you pair up with a couple of players and take down a giant enemy.\u00a0 Usually they will have an inordinate amount of health, maybe some goons that help them or an especially powerful attack so to get through these challenges you need to use a lot of team work and strategy.<\/p>\n

One of the things that Destiny <\/em>has going for it is an MMO-influenced loot gathering and leveling mechanic where you garner experience points and gear for whatever mode you play.\u00a0 It’s whats there to keep you playing after the risible campaign mode is finished.\u00a0 Not unlike Square fanatics defending Final Fantasy XIII <\/em>which ‘gets good after 20 hours’, Bungie have said that the game ‘doesn’t really start until Level 20’ at which point players can only level up further by getting rare armour and weapons forged from ‘engrams’ which can be bought at The Tower or earned in combat.\u00a0 Originally, the game was way too stingy with its doling out of these rewards.\u00a0 It was possible for Legendary engrams to turn out to be common items or for another character class altogether which made it a crapshoot with terrible odds.\u00a0 Fortunately, a recent patch has made the reward mechanic much more generous and reasonable.\u00a0 Character classes, levels and loot are not new concepts by any means but they are a welcome addition to the Bungie shooter and good incentive for me to keep playing.<\/p>\n

And thats where I’m at.\u00a0 I finished the story mode and was disappointed by it.\u00a0 On the other hand I love the multiplayer.\u00a0 I’m at Level 23 and still playing the odd strike or multiplayer map here and there.\u00a0 I wanted to like this game a lot more than I did.\u00a0 It’s quite possible that Bungie will eventually get there.\u00a0 If they continue to patch and update and iterate based on user feedback, they might get there eventually.\u00a0 Sadly, it wasn’t the home run straight out of the ball park that I and many others had hoped for.\u00a0 I do believe the framework is there for someone to make an absolutely cracking online sci-fi MMO shooter.\u00a0 With persistent worlds.\u00a0 With engaging interaction with other players – both friends and strangers online.\u00a0 With colourful characters and memorable spectacles that play like an interactive Star Wars<\/em>.\u00a0 It might come from Destiny 2<\/em>.\u00a0 Or Mass Effect 4<\/em>.\u00a0 Or something entirely new and different.\u00a0 Sadly though, it’s not going to come from Destiny<\/em>.\u00a0 It just wasn’t to be and it falls disappointingly short.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bungie’s long awaited successor to Halo is disappointing and falls well short of expectation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":16512,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[412,2101,505],"class_list":["post-16475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gaming","tag-bungie","tag-destiny","tag-halo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16475"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16515,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16475\/revisions\/16515"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}