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| source// Bungie |
Oh Destiny, why did you betray the loyal fans who bought into the hype? You promised that you were going to be the next great IP from the company responsible for Halo; an RPG with crazy MMO-like mechanics, solid first-person shooter combat and a sure-to-be amazing soundtrack from Martin O’Donnell. While the soundtrack is definitely there alongside a great art style and even perfect combat, there was never anything overwhelmingly positive to write home about.
With The Taken King teasing what Destiny should’ve been on day one, these flaws in the main game are only highlighted further, and still have to be fixed. Whether it’s the increasingly similar look to the guns, the extremely bland character creator or even the boss battles that reuse previously seen bosses, there are plenty of reasons why many players have removed their Guardians from the Tower.
Destiny has SO much potential, but there are ten big issues that plagued – and continue to plague – the Destiny-playing experience, to the point that it has lost a huge portion of its original fanbase. These are the 10 fatal issues that have utterly killed Destiny.
10. A Codex Never Made Accessible In-Game
Many RPG’s like The Witcher, Dragon Age or Mass Effect have a lot of information and backstory to memorise and read about. If the player ever finds themselves lost or in need of a refresher on who a specific character is or what’s going on in the story, they can look at it within the start menu and/or in-game codex. With Destiny, the fact that there STILL isn’t an in-game codex is incomprehensible, especially after how many fans have clamoured for one.
The problem with that is pretty clear: it’s not in the game right now, and won’t be later. With this decision remaining steadfast and unchanging, Bungie appears ignorant of players’ wishes to explore the in-game universe being shown. This seems apparent when you visit the website nowadays, and the process of finding information on lore is no longer as seamless as it used to be. If you want to explore the Grimoire cards you’ve earned, or just look up your profile, you are forced to download the companion app, no matter what. This renders the website useless to players who want to explore those cards they’ve worked so hard to obtain.
The fact that Destiny’s lore continues to be hidden behind these Grimoire cards is a problem. Even if you don’t mind this means of expressing in-game information, it was just one major design concept of many that showed Destiny isn’t your typical RPG, and not in a good way.
9. The Bullet-Sponge Boss Battles
Programming boss-level enemies that are challenging by themselves is rarely done right, as they usually serve as big bullet sponges that deal high levels of damage and have a bunch of normal enemies surrounding them to help in the process of killing you. Destiny, unfortunately, chooses not to make simply challenging boss battles, and elects for this more arduous, drawn out route. This problem has yet to be remedied, and remains a consistent consequence of raising that difficulty before starting a mission.
This occurs far too often throughout many different story missions and raids. What Bungie has continually failed to recognize with this boss design is that a tremendously infallible health bar isn’t what’s supposed to make a boss challenging. It’s all about making a battle strategic, learning patterns of attack and using developed skills to defeat them.
When you remove the fun of boss fights, you remove one of the greatest aspects of other RPG’s, leading to a further disconnect with the enjoyable aspects of your playing experience. Bungie have taken the too easy route of making the higher level boss battles being tests of patience and duration. The player shoots and shoots, until the boss is finally defeated, leaving the player happy that it didn’t last any longer.
8. Planets That Have Shown No Signs Of Life
While the somewhat open-world nature of Destiny’s in-game worlds is appealing and a good concept, why are the majority of these worlds always so seemingly empty? Interesting world design is overshadowed by the overwhelming absence of any life or other allies, with the only exceptions being fellow players and enemies.
Alongside the sneaky, invisible walls and barren stretches of land designed to be passed through quickly on your Sparrow, these planets don’t FEEL like planets, and definitely don’t feel like populated worlds. They just feel like open pathways that only serve as a means to kill time on the way to the mission area. Without any extra life added in, or changing variables on each planet, exploration feels fruitless and limited, as there aren’t many secrets to uncover and life to interact with.
Lifeless planets equate to a hollow universe, leading to all environments failing to reward those guardians who just want to satisfy their inner explorer. With only other guardians to fill each world, it’s all too easy to feel a bit isolated.
7. Ghost’s Inability To Be His Own Character
The character Peter Dinklage attempted to play, and the character not even Nolan North could make his own. Any eccentricities added to Ghost, at least in the Taken King, were through North’s performance only, not in the writing. The biggest problem with Ghost that still hasn’t changed is that he’s still not allowed to be a true, individual character. He’s still shoved into the background, with not much else to do on his own.
Now I understand that he’s bound to each guardian, but he’s simply not given character moments that allow him to stand out and be more than an exposition machine. Without those character-defining moments, he remains the same inconsequential character he was day one, which is NOT what he should be, especially considering he’s the one to jump-start the original plot itself.
He’s voiced by Nathan Drake, he’s the one who brought your guardian back to life, when will he stop just being background decoration and become a three-dimensional personality?
6. The Characters That Aren’t Given A Chance To Stand Out
Quick, name a character from Destiny’s main campaign. Someone BESIDES Ghost.
We’d probably have to wait for a while, as no characters from the main game truly stand out. It’s likely due to the fact that any time these characters speak in one of the game’s extremely rare cutscenes, they’re very likely to give an excuse why they can’t go into much detail on the plot, then leave you with more questions than answers. That’s the case with The Speaker, Exo Stranger and the Queen of the Reef, as well as her jerk Prince brother.
Why don’t we take time to learn about these characters that make up this game? Cayde-6 (voiced by Nathan Fillion) was a huge standout as he brought a unique personality to the table, and was actually given fun lines to deliver throughout TTK’s campaign. Imagine what transformations could develop if other characters, like The Speaker or Exo Stranger, even our main robot Ghost were given their own memorable moments to flourish in? Give them backstories, give them their moments in the spotlight.
Who knows, maybe they’ll actually be allowed to be memorable? No story can have too many memorable characters.
5. The Utter Pointlessness Of Vehicles
Outside of getting you from A to B in a more time-efficient manner, the Sparrow doesn’t really do much else. It has no weaponry attached, it doesn’t really shield you from damage, it’s just faster than walking everywhere. Even when you take control of enemy vehicles, it doesn’t feel empowering enough or feel like it adds much to the main gameplay as a whole.
Your ship serving as a loading screen has been touched on time and time again, yet still hasn’t been altered to fit any purpose within combat or even multiplayer. The fact that the many different ship options, each varied in price, offer no actual non-cosmetic benefits is a clear expression of the phrase “Why even bother?”
At least in Halo where there was the Warthog or the Ghost, there was a sense of both firepower and engine thrust that allowed you to feel empowered, like you had the upper hand on the enemy. With the Warthog especially, there was that sense of camaraderie with other players, as someone was steering while another was on the turret, shooting anything that gets in the way. With Destiny’s one person-only Sparrows, you can take part in races and get to places quickly – but that’s it. It’s hardly the same sense of enjoyment, that’s for sure.
4. The Maddening RNG Loot System
A system that proved to be divisive starting launch day, This system of allowing everyone to have an equal chance at high-quality loot, regardless of their stats, has been seen as both a good and bad concept. The biggest argument against it is that it doesn’t fully reward skilled players like other loot-based games do, and the biggest argument for it is that everyone, not just the masters of the leaderboards, can get good loot if they participate and give their best shot.
All in all, this system maddened enough players just in the way the system doesn’t discriminate in its rewarding system. Many players felt the game wasted their time, as they’d be the best player in any given strike or raid, then have nothing to show for it. Add that in with the decoding of engrams system with the Cryptarch, and so many players left Destiny purely from frustration induced by this system. Now, when it comes to the Cryptarch, you’re obviously not going to get a legendary and exotic with every engram, but it felt perhaps a bit too lottery-like for many players’ liking.
With all the engrams that would lead to a lower class than the engram presented upon decoding, the system seemed almost rigged, leading to player’s mistrust of the decoding system as a whole. Now, this isn’t exactly a ‘broken’ system by any means, just a flawed one that needs to find that healthy balance of being accepting of new players, as well as being rewarding to veteran players.
3. The Repetitive Mission Structure
When you start up a mission, they tend to be made up of very similar beginnings, middles, and ends. You take a long drive over to the waypoint with your Sparrow, kill some enemies at the start point, go deeper into mission area, kill some more enemies, then enter horde mode as Ghost scans a beacon or some artefact. There are also the end areas where you end up in a no-respawn zone, which then proceeds to be a more challenging horde mode.
With the exception of particular strikes, this formula is repeated far too often. In this unique and interesting world, why would you force these basic, generic-feeling missions into every part of the main campaign? These missions end up feeling very similar to one another, and appearing to have only small variations of killing enemies spawning in waves until the waves stop.
The campaign missions need to be more like the strikes that offer at least some variation. They also utilise different locations that aren’t used over and over again, unlike the main missions that reuse the same sections of each planet. Main missions can’t be so similar that they blend together, and this is where the game’s repetitive nature comes into play, as no, just because it’s got MMO aspects, that doesn’t mean it’s SUPPOSED to be repetitive.
Not every mission needs to feel like a wholly original creation, but they need to be better differentiated across the board.
2. The Best Parts Of The Game Being Sold Separately
This, Destiny. This is where you broke our hearts. When the game’s original 2013 released was delayed to 2014, a ‘severe’ amount of rewrites took place to the game’s structure and story, likely making the game’s narrative more open to the eventual paid expansions that were to come. Usually, expansions are a good idea, as it means they are massive add-ons to add more of a continued interest in a particular game. The problem though, was that not only were the ‘expansions’ ripped right out of the main game, but they were hardly expansions at all. The Dark Below added a single raid, raised the light level max to 32, and increased the maximum damage number. House of Wolves added two multiplayers modes, one for PvP and one for PvE.
Then The Taken King came along, impressing many critics with Bungie’s clear responses to fan feedback. The problem was that TTK wasn’t included in the season pass, and fans had to pay at least an extra $40 if they wanted to experience what the original Destiny ‘should’ve been.’ The fact that the best aspects of Destiny seemed to be sold separately put off many former fans who bought the game day one, and thereby felt thoroughly ripped off by the time TTK released.
DLC should never be ripped content from the main game, and Destiny lost a big percentage of its fanbase when Bungie and Activision decided that money was more important than your enjoyment.
1. The Plot Remaining Thin And Incomprehensible
Oh boy, if there’s one thing about Destiny that’s been both talked about and mocked the most, it’s the story. As previously mentioned, Destiny’s narrative was easily the biggest victim of the rewrites and Activision’s DLC plans, as the game had to be made purposely vague so that players would buy the expansions to learn more about what’s going on.
Even with The Taken King being a great step in the right direction and easily comprehensible context and information being shown before a mission starts, not a lot of substance is present within the narrative itself. It makes the information more streamlined, but the depth of the story still doesn’t hit as deep as fans hoped.
The Taken King showed Destiny’s potential in both plot and characters, and it also showed that there are still plenty of flaws at a foundational level that will continue to prevent it being ‘the next great sci-fi franchise’ that it was originally advertised to be. The worlds of Destiny have yet to be properly explored, and it may be a while before Bungie goes fully in-depth on what this universe has to offer, if they do at all.
What DOES Destiny’s universe have to offer you? “I could tell you, but I won’t.”
Are you still playing Destiny? What’s kept you playing? If not, what stopped you? Let us know in the comments!
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