Destiny

Because your admin happens to be a gamer and he likes to jabber on about games he's played.

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IamLEAM1983
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Destiny

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

It's finally happened; my twenty-something cousin hauled his PS4 to my house and presented Destiny to me on a golden platter. The Best FPS Ever of the Moment is finally here, and will be dethroned within six months.

All sarcasm aside, I don't give a shit about Destiny. Why would I, I've ponied up hard cash for Borderlands 2 and all of its DLC! Nevertheless, here's what I saw as well as what I think of what I saw.

First of all, Bungie won't win any favors on the narrative department. With over five hundred million dollars in budget, was there not any room for a decent scriptwriter? Of course not, what am I saying? This is Bungie, otherwise known as House Halo, a dev that hasn't done much more than mash up Larry Niven with Robert Heinlein! Why bother, when you've gotta fine-tune them guns and all the multiplayer maps?

So in the not-too-distant spacefuture, we'll find a big floating orb thingy on Mars. It's called the Traveler and despite the fact that it seems to be an inert object, it'll somehow follow our little astronauts back to Earth. Once there, it'll use its Inert Powers of Do-Nothingness to kick-start a golden age the likes of which Humanity has never seen. Our lifespan supposedly triples under the Traveler's influence, we take to the farthest reaches of the solar system and beyond, and engage in enough wars to forget why they ever occurred in the first place.

Unfortunately, the Traveler was being hounded by the vaguest of all evils, otherwise known as the Darkness. So Jackie Estacado with a spaceship threatens the solar system, we push it back a couple times and then, because pathos is required, the storyline assumes that Humanity is on the brink. The Fallen, agents of the Darkness, managed to conquer every city and every base on the planet, safe for one. The City becomes the last bastion of freedom in the known universe, and the Traveler uses its dying breath to usher in both the Ghosts, little sentient and robotic helpers, as well as the concept of Guardians – chosen warriors, born and bred to stand against the Darkness.

And yes, I'm sarcastic when I'm mentioning Estacado. It's just that the names involved and the way in which they're all invoked are both so crushingly generic it hurts the lore-hound in me. I'm the guy who makes no progress in Skyrim because he stops to read ALL OF THE BOOKS. I'm the guy who has tons of excess experience in Human Revolution because he hacks every computer in order to read ALL OF THE EMAILS. I get involved in games with their lore as an essential point of entry. If all I get is a bar at the bottom of the screen that says “Grats, you killed 300 Fallen! Go and check out your Bungie account for a paragraph of extra lore!”, I'm going to be disappointed. Really, really disappointed.

Again, though, what am I thinking?! This is House Halo! We don't need no stinking reading, reading is for nubs and faggots! WE DESPERATELY NEED THAT CALL OF DUTY MONEY TO RECOUP OUR COSTS, OH GOD.

(I'd love it if that were the case, but Bungie and Activision recouped their costs within the first weekend of the game's release. Pre-orders for the win, I guess)

The story is all kinds of shit, granted, but how about the ways in which it's delivered? Let's see... You have an ineffectual campaign that basically funnels you from place to place with the rarest of pretty bits of eye candy to break up the monotony, but you've also got Strikes – which are co-op missions – random Events, as well as the Bungie-mandated multiplayer maps. You're entirely free to be your Multiplayer Drone self if you wish and flatly ignore the campaign, but you'll be unpleasantly surprised to find that most of the game's arsenal needs to be obtained in said campaign. The game virtually ends around Level 20 – but that's assuming that Bungie won't release a fuckton of DLC content or otherwise approach the game as an MMO in need of constant expansion.

Considering how Destiny wears its MMO trappings on its sleeves, you'd expect random loot drops to be part of the experience. You'd be right, and Twenty-Something Cousin was all “It's just like Borderlands, man!” - but he'd be wrong. Dead wrong.

See, Gearbox Software's flagship franchise mixes up a weapon's traits and statistics at random. No two Maliwan guns will ever be the same, and a Torgue will be drastically different from a Jakobs. Functionally, however, some concessions are made. A sniper behaves as a sniper is expected, a pistol acts like a pistol and an RPG is, well, a friggin' RPG. What adds generous amounts of the Special Sauce to the mix is the way the randomized traits and gun model parts mesh with each manufacturer's signature approach. Torgue guns consistently project mini-rockets in lieu and place of bullets, Maliwan weapons are consistently elemental in nature and Jakobs guns tend to pack a Firefly-esque aesthetic with the ability to fire as fast as you can pull the trigger. That's an incredibly satisfying and addictive system. What's Destiny's answer to the purported nine bajillion guns in the Borderlands franchise?

Predefined guns that drop randomly. I don't know the exact number and I'll assume that future DLC will add more options to the total available arsenal, but that's it. A Khorostov rifle will always be a Khorostov rifle with the same immutable stats, and you might be lucky enough to spot a rare variety or a weapon modificator, somewhere amidst the two million Legendary Engrams you'll pick up. You have to decode them à la Diablo to figure out what you've ended up with, and the loot table isn't consistent with your character's level. Titan, Warlock or Hunter, you've all got the same basic loot and the same supposedly epic Engram can drop on a lowbie Strike for toons that couldn't conceivably put it to good use in the immediate future, or it might almost never drop for a character in its late twenties that seriously has been grinding for that Helm of Badassitude or whatever else for hours on end.

If you need a clue as to how terrible the game's loot table happens to be, there's a Twitter account called, fortuitously enough, Legendary Engram. Therein, that gosh-darned piece of kit of which you'd welcome the arrival like the Second Coming mercilessly taunts you.

So it's a pretty shooting gallery with an awful story and terribad motivating factors. Where's the good? The voice acting, maybe? Nathan Fillion is good friends with some Bungie guys, so you'd assume he'd have thrown in a few in-character sentences on the cheap. The problem is, he doesn't sound especially convincing, and the storyline itself is as opaque as I've previously discussed. Let's put him aside, then.

But wait, there's Peter Lannister – I mean Tyrion Dinklage – I mean Cable TV's Most Badass Motherfucker Ever! Can anyone actually believe this guy was the antagonist in Underdog, of all things?! You know, that crappy CGI movie they made out of the equally shitty Hanna-Barbera cartoon? That was Dinklage with a bald cap on and a silly facial hair 'do! The mind boggles. A little more and he would've replaced Warwick Davis as the Leprechaun. Thank God, that never happened.

Nah, we got Hornswoggle, instead. Thanks for nothing, WCW Entertainment...

So yeah. The real brains of House Lannister ends up being a lifeless plot device in a multimillion vidjagaem franchise! AWESOME.

No, not really. Your Ghost basically sounds like a less annoying Ben Stein – or Dinklage channeling Ben Stein – who's basically around to go “Oh, look! Guardian! Over here! Here's the McGuffin of the Moment that we happen to need! I'll just stand here and do nothing for three minutes, while you defend me from wave after wave after fucking wave of Fallen!”

You're presented as the last hope of the Universe as we know it, but there's millions of players out there being fed the same exact rhetoric. You're told you're super important, but you just sit there and cover your Ghost. You're supposed to be the absolute best, a figure of hope in times of darkness, and you basically just shoot things. All the time. It's all you do.

Because it's an FPS. Of course.

So fuck Dead Dinklage, the multiplayer types say, fuck Boring Faceless Maybe-Cyborg Fillion and fuck soloing content! MULTIPLAYER FOR THE WIN, YOU SCRUBLORDS!

Yeah, until you realize you've been playing the same goddamned thing since Halo the first in name. The guns are functionally similar, the vehicles are similar, the jumping physics are similar – everything is in the Halo-but-not-quite-because-we-don't-own-Halo's-trademark-anymore ballpark.

Honestly, what's left? The game has a great soundtrack going for it, its visuals are absolutely jaw-dropping on the PS4 and kinda meh on last-gen hardware, and nothing else is really worth any sort of praise or favorable mention.

My recommendation? Go buy Borderlands 2's complete edition if you haven't already. It's funny, the loot system is ridiculously rewarding, the systems at play end up creating an awesome murder-sandbox – it's a better Destiny than Destiny itself.
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IamLEAM1983
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I finally caved in...

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

So. Standard edition's been ordered off Amazon, my Bungie account is set - now I have to wait until the 17th for my cast to come off. I'm typing this with one hand, which takes forever.

What won me over was the art design, and the persistent claims that the lore gets better, now that patches and a few cold showers of media criticism have calmed Bungie's pretentious and limited take on world-building. The rise of lore interpreters on YouTube, along the lines of VaatiVidya, also helps some. It's now actually possible to bypass House Halo's amateurish attempts at breadcrumb-based story delivery, with people being willing to provide others with a synthesis of the plot's more crucial aspects.

Visually speaking, Destiny's always been one of those games I watched Let's Plays of for the purposes of gawking at the purdy colors. Gameplay-wise, I have to admit it's a competent shooter. Not every game I play has a huge narrative value, so stepping on my inflated ego wasn't too hard. Going last-gen is easier on the wallet, too - and Bungie isn't one of those that put up convincing arguments for games being considered as a service. I'll spit out the cash for PlayStation Plus once something unequivocally FORCES me to go next-gen on consoles.

So yeah. More when I'll have two hands, no fibreglass constricting my hand, and at least one Guardian to my name.
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DLCs and The Taken King

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

The game's been polished into the kind of state I'd hoped it had been in on Day One. The narrative has been re-ordered, lines have been re-recorded, mechanics have been buffed to be the best they can possibly be - and the end result is a cohesive package that feels conherent and that's actually intensely rewarding. The game finally has its end boss, its Diablo of sorts, and facing it feels like you've reached the end of a long climb. There's a lot of organic and emergent stuff left to tinker with once you've tackled the story's natural progression. Destiny's moved from being a mishmash of ideas to being an actual game.

Unfortunately, that comes at a 50$ price tag on top of the 30$ I initially shelled out. There's a lot to like, but I hate feeling like Year One was the game's Alpha or a prolonged Beta run - or just Bungie cribbing something together for the sake of releasing something on time - anything at all. If I'd known, I would've waited a year or two more, long enough for the full package to be featured in a double-disc jewel case at the standard retail price.

What's there is engaging, though, which is more than I can say of the game's Vanilla state. Questgivers finally pop out a bit, with characters like Cayde-6, Variks the Loyal or Petra Venj giving some humor and zest to the game's otherwise self-serious tone. The Dark Below's Eris Morn acts like the gothy and doom-stricken foil that Nathan Fillion's Cayde-6 needs - or is it the opposite? She broods and glooms and warns us of the urgent need to defeat Crota for the -nth time, and he snarks at her in response. The addition of a sense of humor does wonders to the overall feel of the plot, seeing as going for Epic Seriousness kind of falls flat when you're the ten thousandth game to go for this kind of attitude. It's not Space Opera Saints Row, of course, but it seems like the game has discovered it has a tongue and has decided to lodge it firmly inside one of its cheeks.
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