One Life Left: Destiny

On Sept. 9, 2014, one of the most highly anticipated games of the year was released. The game was called Destiny. I’m sure you saw and/or are seeing ads for it everywhere. The game was advertised on TV, billboards, trucks – the whole nine yards. They even had it up on the screens in Times Square at one point. Destiny was announced by videogame developer Bungie back in 2012 through a contract that was published in the LA Times with the big name publishing company Activision. Since then, FPS gamers had been eagerly awaiting its release and eating up any information about the game Bungie would share with them.

Destiny is a first person shooter MMO. The term MMO means massively multiplayer online and means that while you are playing, you can see and interact with other people playing the game. Destiny is the first game to bring this to the first person shooter genre. This adds a very social component to the game, a concept which Bungie built the entire game around.

Destiny is a team-based game; all activities can be done with a team, and many cannot be done without one. Most activities are built around a three person “fireteam” with the exception of the competitive multiplayer, “the Crucible,” and the ultra-hard 6-person raids. A raid requires you and five of your friends to team up and go up against the toughest challenges the developers could come up with. They require a lot of teamwork and coordination. Raids can only be done with people on your friends list, which can be inconvenient due to the difficulty of finding five other people who not only have the game on the same console as you but are also all available to play at the same time. For this reason, Bungie created “clans” which are an easy way to find friends to play with. Clans are just groups of people with similar interests and levels of commitment to the game. There is one clan called Dads of Destiny that is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of dudes with kids that like to play videogames.

My favorite aspect of Destiny is the competitive multiplayer, or the Crucible. The game matches you up with other players and splits everyone up into two teams. Each playlist has different objectives which include controlling zones, capturing objectives or just killing each other. What I really enjoy about it is that the developers work to make the game as equal as possible by making no single type of player dominant. The player who sits back with a sniper is supposed to be just as effective as the player running in auto rifle blazing. About every other week they update the game to adjust the damage and range of the different guns to make it so that people are not all pulling out the same gun when heading into the arena. I am looking forward to when the developers add new playlists to the game with the classic objectives like king of the hill or oddball, which is essentially a game of keepaway.

My least favorite aspect of the game is the storyline. The game gives you almost no background on what is happening when you start and you finish with more questions than answers. The missions are loosely tied together at best and I am left wondering what I just accomplished after finishing a mission. Bungie tried to make up for this with what they call Grimoire Cards. These are cards with snippets of information on them that you earn while playing. The cards are supposed to fill in the gaps in the story. Unfortunately, they do not do a very good job. I have hope that as the game expands, they will patch up the story and make it worth playing.

The game also has a lot of bug issues. Often times I get kicked out of an activity, cannot access my friends list or, worst of all, get on to find that some of the items in my inventory have disappeared. Bungie is working to fix all of these errors, but it will be a while before the game is completely error free. It is understandable to a point because the developers are in uncharted territory with a game like this, but I will be a lot happier once everything is sorted out.

Although I want to score it higher, Destiny earns a 7 out of 10 in my book. The absence of a story and continued issues with a lot of in-games bugs leaves it a little off the mark. I have a lot of hope for the game and in a year I believe that it will be one of the best games out there, but, as of right now, it leaves a bit to be desired.