All MMOs end up fighting a constant battle against entropy. The bulk of MMO development takes place after they are released: new content and systems are added, existing systems are streamlined, and some aspects of the game are rendered entirely obsolete. This rapid and constant change inevitably produces more than a few evolutionary dead-ends. Fire up any popular MMO and you’ll instantly be confronted by the signs of a game at war with itself; your journey up the levelling ladder will invariably take you past the corpses of game mechanics that were really, really important for one expansion before being discarded by the designers in favour of the next big thing. The longer an MMO is released, the worse a problem this becomes; World Of Warcraft is the unquestioned barnacle-encrusted nautilus champion of abandoned and now-irrelevant expansion features¹, but even the younger examples such as Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy 14 are starting to groan under the weight of their own history.

The good news is that this entropic decay is usually a gradual, creeping process that takes years to fully manifest. Most MMOs have at least one or two expansion packs’ worth of breathing room before their design and structure starts to become obviously unfocused.  And this makes Destiny 2 a deeply impressive game, in a way, because where it took half a decade or more for entropy to start claiming other MMOs, Destiny 2 has managed to develop itself into a state of almost total incoherence in just two short years.

I played Destiny 2 at launch. It struck me as a perfectly decent game — not quite the same thing as the original Destiny, but that was fine because I didn’t like Destiny all that much. It took much more of its general design thrust from the quick gameplay loops of ARPGs such as Diablo 3 than it did the crushing grind of a full MMO that Destiny was originally modelled on, and I thought it was all the better for it. Interestingly it seemed to be structured so that it had a concrete end point where most players were intended to put down the game for a while until the next expansion pack, which made a lot of sense to me because I think this is how the majority of players play these big online experiences².  I heavily dislike games that effectively present themselves as a full-time job because I already have one of those, thanks very much, and I’m prepared to forgive much of a game that at least seems like it knows when to stop.

So Destiny 2’s plot was utter balls and the strikes seemed a bit rote and the Crucible had been turned into some awful 6-player thing in the name of chasing esports money, but the core shooting experience was about as good as you’ll ever find in an FPS and I could play it for thirty-odd hours (which, in MMO terms, is not long at all) and still feel like I’d achieved some closure on a relatively satisfying game. That was more than the original Destiny managed, and so Destiny 2 felt like an improvement. Unfortunately some stuff then happened:

• The hardcore Destiny playerbase all but rioted. They’d spent thousands of hours grinding up light levels one at a time in Destiny, and they wanted to do the same in Destiny 2. Where was the grind? What was this shit where you just played it for a few dozen hours and then put it down? Bungie bowed to the pressure and the item and quest systems went through several redesign iterations that made them considerably more baroque — and confusing. There are whole gameplay strands that are now based solely around rolling the same item over and over again in order to try and get a perfect combination of stats. The hardcore playerbase is now happy, but this retooling of so much of the game’s fundamental driving force strikes me as a colossal waste of time and development effort for little gain.
• Bungie split from corporate overlords Activision. Given what’s happened to Blizzard in recent years this is almost definitely a smart move in the long term; however it does mean that the game was being driven in one direction by Activision and then suddenly got turned in another by Bungie. It also deprived Bungie of the Activision-owned studios that were supporting Destiny 2’s development.
• Destiny 2 went free-to-play. Again, from a long-term business perspective this is a very smart move, as it already had a comprehensive set of microtransactions built into it at launch and they’ve only added more ways to feed money into the game since then (such as the now ubiquitous Fortnite-style battle pass). Moving to a full F2P model will guarantee the game’s long-term health while maximising revenue and giving Bungie enough time to get whatever they’re working on next out of the door. It also means that Bungie have had to retool the game again in order to try and onboard this vast influx of new players without forcing them to sit through the 12-hour Red War campaign that much of Destiny 2’s content was originally locked behind.

In short, the two years of Destiny 2 post-release development have been nothing but redesigns and major shifts in direction. When you combine that with four named expansion releases it’s really no surprise that it’s such an utterly indescribable mess of a game, especially since, like Firaxis, Bungie strike me as one of those companies that’s now almost totally disinterested in surfacing how their game actually works to first-time players. They’re not designing for that audience any more; they’re designing for their hardcore playerbase who have hundreds or thousands of hours invested in the game and already know it like the back of their hand. (Which is very much at odds with their recent F2P release and their onboarding funnel dropoff must look more like a cliff at points.) They don’t feel the need to explain themselves at any point, and this ethos is reflected in almost every single aspect of Destiny 2.

So what did the retooling for the F2P release actually entail, then? Well, what it was really designed to do was to ensure that people who were just starting the game could play with people who had been playing it for years by immediately unlocking every single piece of non-paid content. Destiny 2 used to have a campaign where the Cabal invaded the boxy Tower that the Guardian player characters call home and separated them from their powers; this set things up so that players could have basic Destiny concepts such as strikes, equipment, light level, subclasses and supers gradually reintroduced to them over the course of the campaign. It wasn’t the most original concept (every single Metroid game ever made starts like this, for example) and the plot itself was pure nonsense, but it at least fulfilled the basic duty every videogame has of teaching its players how to play it. Unfortunately this campaign is no longer the first thing a player experiences when they boot up Destiny 2 for the first time; it’s instead been replaced by the notoriously awful tutorial from Destiny 1 which has inexplicably been ported into the sequel. This does nothing more than teach basic FPS controls, and when it’s over the game immediately fast-forwards to the end of Destiny 2’s original campaign. All of Destiny 1 — the fight against the giant blob in the Black Garden, the business with the Taken King, whatever the fuck happened in Rise Of Iron — and all of Destiny 2’s launch content is assumed to happen during the loading screen that separates the player jumping in their ship at the end of the D1 tutorial and them spawning into the Tower for the first time.

This is an unconventional approach that results in some… unusual consequences. For example, there used to be a conventional RPG levelling system supporting the original campaign, where you’d gradually unlock abilities and subclasses as you levelled up and then eventually transitioned to item light level once you maxed out your regular level towards the end of the campaign and had fully gotten to grips with your character. With the F2P release this levelling system has been thrown straight into the garbage: all new players start with all subclasses and abilities unlocked (good luck making sense of that) and have their starting light level boosted to 750, because that’s where everyone else is after two years of grinding³. I get that Bungie didn’t want a situation where new F2P players bought the Shadowkeep expansion and then couldn’t play it for a dozen hours or more while they ground up their light to an appropriate level, but arguably all this truly achieves is to expose how vacuous Destiny’s light level progression system really is; it’s just a meaningless number that goes up and Bungie can arbitrarily set the scale however and wherever they like.

Another consequence is that new players — or even returning players who haven’t played since launch, as I did — are confronted with an absolutely baffling cornucopia of content after getting out of the tutorial without being given any accompanying context that would help them make sense of it. The only content that’s locked off from non-paying players are the Forsaken raid and campaign and the currently-active Shadowkeep content, and at first glance this is a ridiculously generous package: F2P players get all of the launch content, all of the Warmind and Curse Of Osiris content, the Forsaken strikes and patrol areas, and the first Shadowkeep strike and patrol area, all without paying a penny. The big thing here is that most of this content is almost totally flat and can be tackled in any order. You can instantly jump into any strike in the game, You can go to any patrol area without having to unlock them first. The Crucible and Gambit multiplayer matchmaking is immediately open to you. And this is actually kind of a problem, because Destiny 2 doesn’t breadcrumb a single goddamn thing besides pointing out some key NPCs in the Tower⁴, which is the Destiny 2 equivalent of being told where the toilets are on your first day at work. Otherwise you’re just thrown into a world that now has something like eleven distinct destinations to visit and god knows how many matchmaking queues and left to figure out what the hell you’re supposed to be doing.

To say this has resulted in some confusion amongst new players is putting it lightly. Bungie giving away the Red War campaign along with the Warmind and Curse of Osiris campaigns is generous, to be sure — but it’s also not advertised to the player in any way. I’ve seen multiple people report that they weren’t aware Destiny 2 even had a campaign because the start point for them is so out-of-the-way. Getting to grips with the Tower NPCs takes a few hours at the best of times, but even when you do it turns out the campaign quests aren’t with any of the ones you regularly visit as part of Destiny 2’s daily and weekly bounty/loot loop. No, if you want to find the campaign content you have to walk down a very long corridor to an isolated dead-end hangar with a single ship mechanic NPC in it and nobody else (so you never go down there unless you want to visit her); the ship mechanic sells some crappy ship skins, but also happens to have the Red War + DLC campaigns on her because… I couldn’t actually tell you why, I can’t fathom the design logic that led Bungie to effectively hide all of the free plot content in Destiny 2 in the deepest darkest portion of the Tower that they could find. Hell, I didn’t realise it was down there until I’d been playing it for a couple of dozen hours, and I’m quite good at picking up on stuff like this.

This is hardly an exception, either, since the quest and bounty system in general is a complete car crash of design. You can hold up to 63 quests or bounties at once but you can only actively track three of them in your Ghost overlay, with the rest having to be checked via the quest menu which subscribes to the “giant disorganized pile of stuff” school of UI design. For extra confusion, quest items are also stored in your quest menu and not distinguished from the actual quests in any way. Some of these quest items are actually portals to whole subsystems that were important in previous seasons of content, but which are barely advertised to the player now. Even the wording on the quests is by turns misleading or simply out-of-date. I had a bounty to “Open five chests on the Moon”, except it apparently doesn’t count chests dropped by special enemies, chests obtained by completing public events, chests at the bottom of Lost Sectors or region chests, which together make up probably 90% of the chests you find in an average play session on the Moon. I had a quest that said I should “Complete 3 challenges”, but which didn’t explain what a challenge was. I had another quest that asked me to go into the Triumph menu (Destiny’s ingame achievement system) and click on a specific Triumph, except there are about 1000 Triumphs in the game and the Triumph system is a labyrinthine mess and it doesn’t signpost in which sub-sub-sub-menu you’re supposed to find the target Triumph, and so the only way to find it is to go through and click on all of your recently-unlocked Triumphs. Since I hadn’t been doing this regularly I had about 50 of these to go through before I found the one that the quest wanted.

This brings me to a wider point about Destiny 2’s UI. I namechecked Firaxis earlier and I’m reminded quite uncomfortably of a criticism I made in my Civilization 6 review: Bungie clearly regard keeping the Destiny 2 UI understandable — and by extension, Destiny 2 itself understandable — as a secondary priority. Unlike Civ 6 I can at least understand how Destiny 2 got into the state it’s in; as with so much of the game, the pace of development and the rapid changes in direction must have made presenting all of these new and conflicting systems via a UI that was definitely not originally designed to accommodate them very, very difficult. The thing is, though, I can think of maybe one menu in the game that isn’t a disaster area: it’s the clan menu, and that’s only because Bungie have barely touched clan mechanics since release. The Destinations menu should be a very clean interface because it’s just a collection of pictures of where you can go on an adventure next, but it’s also got these little yellow circles next to specific nodes on its map. What do these mean? Mousing over them is no help, and there’s no key telling you what they are; it turns out they’re the missing challenges that had baffled me so when I encountered them in the quest menu, but I had to figure that out on my own. Bungie have overhauled their clean and simple equipment system to include RPG stats on every piece of armour, and now you get minor bonuses for having these stat totals meet or exceed certain breakpoints — but the inventory screen won’t tell you if putting on a new pair of trousers or slotting a new mod will increase or decrease a stat total past one of these breakpoints and you have to do the maths yourself. That’s the big problem in general: I have to do too much of the work the UI should be doing for me, whether it’s adding some numbers together or working out what major game mechanics mean. It’s a constant source of irritation because the UI is, well, the UI: the means by which I interact with the game. I am using it 100% of the time I am playing it, and if it is shit — and Destiny 2’s UI is utterly, abjectly shit — then I am constantly being confronted with shit. It’s not exactly something calculated to endear a game to me, you know?

That’s why I’m less willing to forgive some of Destiny 2’s more conventional fuckups than I would be otherwise. The loot pool is laughably small; exotic drops are rarer than they were on release and so you end up picking up the same three sets of legendary armour over and over again. That’s probably somewhat intentional since, as I said earlier, much of the loot system is now focused on repeatedly rerolling items until you get a perfect stat combination, but it’s not particularly interesting for me as a casual player. The game still showers loot on you, but after the first ten hours you’ll have seen 95% of all of the drops it has to offer; this means that seeing a purple engram fly out of an enemy’s exploding head fails to spark any joy as you know it’s not even going to boost your light level by more than a fraction. Picking up loot in Destiny 2 is boring, as it just leads to inventory management instead of cool new abilities, and this is a huge problem seeing as the acquisition of new loot is the major predicate of Destiny 2’s core loop. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the battle pass, which hands out the same five pieces of armour over and over again and expects me to treat this as some kind of reward. It also gives you zone resources which you’re supposed to hand in for zone-specific equipment drops — but again, this equipment is all legendary-grade (i.e. trash) with no increase in light level and none of the exotic properties that would make it interesting. The only reason you’d particularly want to go for it is if you liked the look.

And then there’s the netcode issues. Since Bungie introduced cross-save between platforms I could port my PS4 characters across to PC and play the Steam F2P release of Destiny 2, and mostly this has been great. The shooting has been designed to feel fantastic on a controller and it feels doubly so when using mouse and keyboard, it looks and performs far better thanks to the much more powerful hardware I have inside my gaming PC, and the magic of SSDs ensures that the interminably long loading screens have been cut down to a fraction of their original length⁵.  However, at least once per session the game will boot me out of whatever I’m doing with an error message saying I’ve lost my internet connection. This is a lie. I know this is a lie, because the moment it happens I can immediately check the connection on my other monitor and see that everything is fine; if the connection is being lost then it’s happening for a fraction of a second at most, and Destiny 2 thinking otherwise probably has more to do with its netcode being stitched together out of rainbows and hope than the quality of my internet service. To add insult to injury this error doesn’t just boot me out of my session, it crashes Destiny 2 entirely, and — somehow — Steam along with it, which is another indication that all is not well with Destiny 2 networking code on PC.

Destiny 2 post-release development hasn’t all been bad. The additional DLC content, which is mostly being given away for free now, has served to bulk out the game considerably with the addition of five new patrol zones and many new strikes, even if the strikes are all “walk through dungeon shooting baddies and then shoot a boss”. The Gambit PvPvE mode is possibly the single most innovative thing Destiny has ever done: two teams of four compete to shoot enemies for points which they then dump into a central bank while trying to stop the other team from interfering too much. It’s nothing too special, but it still feels oddly daring considering how conventional the rest of the game is. The Menagerie is a series of unfailable raid-lite encounters for anyone bored to death with strikes (and trust me, you’ll get bored of them quite quickly), and there’s a couple of horde modes present which are perfectly serviceable if you just want to shoot things for 10-15 minutes. And, most importantly of all, there’s a five-minute cutscene of the incredibly annoying android Cayde-6 being beaten to death at the start of Forsaken which I very much enjoyed. Bungie are sneaking some good stuff in here despite the prevailing design ethos of building the game for the hardcore obsessives and leaving everyone else to sink or swim. Thanks to that ethos I don’t think Destiny 2 would be an incredible game if the last two years had been more stable for them, but it does at least prove that somebody at that studio still knows what they’re doing.

It’s not remotely enough, though. I’ve spent a fair chunk of time trying to decipher all of Destiny 2’s systems, trying to dig my way through all of the layers of misinformation and obfuscatory bullshit to try and see something that’s worthwhile in the long-term; something beyond shooting an endless procession of robots and aliens in the head, which Destiny 2 admittedly does do rather well. Unfortunately since rolling the same item 20 times in a row doesn’t really appeal to me I’m forced to conclude that there isn’t really a reason to continue with it. Importantly this doesn’t feel like a natural end to my time with the game the way it did when I played it at launch; I’m only halfway through the Forsaken plot and haven’t even started Warmind or Curse of Osiris, so there’s still stuff for me to do that’s not embarking on some preposterously long quest chain of “Kill 1500 enemies with a tuning fork so that you can get a golden version of the tuning fork”, but I just don’t feel like doing it. None of the game’s progression systems mean anything to me any more, and so the only reason I would do any Destiny content now is for its own sake, and when measured on that scale Destiny 2 is laughably inadequate outside of the raids⁶. When I look back on my time with the game this time around, instead of a mild feeling of satisfaction I just feel empty. Not sad, or angry, or annoyed, just… empty. Emptiness is not the emotional reaction I was expecting after spending two full days of my life playing it, but after some thought I’ve decided that it’s an almost perfect reflection of the meaningless pile of goop that is Destiny 2.

The post Thoughts: Destiny 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Destiny is one of the most stupefyingly average games I’ve ever played. But I cannot stop playing it.

(Bear in mind, also, that I am playing the Legendary Edition of Destiny with all of the DLC and the Taken King expansion included in the sticker price. This Destiny 2.0 is widely considered to be a significant improvement on the base version of Destiny, and the only thing I have to say about that is that the base version of Destiny must have been truly dire for the Taken King to be considered a step up.)

Anyway, Destiny is What Bungie Did Next after breaking free of Microsoft’s clutches, and unfortunately bidding the Halo series farewell in the process. Somewhat unsurprisingly it’s a console oriented shooter that’s not a million miles away from Halo in terms of the shooty-shooty bang-bang bits, and if that seems more unoriginal now it’s only because Halo has been an incredible influence on the FPS genre and most of the innovations it introduced have now been adopted as genre standard, for better or worse. Destiny does make a questionable quantum leap over Bungie’s previous efforts, though, and that leap is to splice Halo’s gunplay together with Diablo’s crack cocaine loot mechanic. It’s been done before, of course, most notably by Gearbox’s Borderlands series, but Borderlands didn’t come anywhere near as close to being the gaming phenomenon Destiny is; two years after they launched it’s generally regarded as the single best reason to own a PS4/Xbox One.

Whether that says more about Destiny or about the anaemic lineup of games that’s been pushed out so far during this console generation I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

Destiny jettisons Halo’s structured missions for a series of baddie-filled free-roaming environments more reminiscent of an MMO. The solar system has been overrun by a number of alien factions (all of which are curiously humanoid, even the robot hive mind, because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to headshot them quite so effectively) and your job as one of the generically-titled Guardians of humanity is to clean them out one planet – and one bad guy – at a time. Each planet constitutes a single huge, sprawling level that can be visited by you at any time. If you travel there as part of a quest (and the game does call them quests in spite of its sci-fi nature) then your trip will be somewhat scripted, as you first trudge through this semi-open world to the quest location to pick up a macguffin or smite a beastie or whatever, and when you reach your destination the scripting takes over and you get a bite-size mission experience lasting no longer than 5-10 minutes. If you just go there for funsies then your activities will consist of a series of MMO-esque procedurally-generated filler activities like collecting 10 robot asses or assassinating the terrifying Big Robot, which are precisely as interesting as they sound.

The open worlds of Destiny are a somewhat impressive technical achievement – relatively large and complex, at least to the point where you need a summonable jetbike to easily get around — and especially so since they’re populated with other players doing much the same things you are. Because this is Bungie the game looks very nice, and the goes double for the skyboxes; I have some issues with some of the choices made in level location as three out of the five major worlds are set in a desert (Mars), a barren moonscape (the Moon, obviously), and what looks like the inside of the sewage pipe Andy Dufresne crawled through in the Shawshank Redemption (the Dreadnaught), and these are environments that historically have been difficult for developers to render in an interesting way because they’re so one-note. To their credit Bungie do a reasonably good job on the first two (those skyboxes really do help) and it’s only inside the Dreadnaught where things start to get so visually tedious that I seriously start to question why I’m spending my time on this game. The worlds are at least livened up with another of Bungie’s hallmarks: independent AI factions which will fight each other if they run into each other, which happens often as there are ships constantly warping in to drop off reinforcements to the area. As one of the poster children for the current generation of consoles there’s a considerable amount of effort that’s gone into making running/driving around the worlds of Destiny as entertaining as possible, and while Bungie’s attempts don’t wholly hit the mark I can at least say that a surprisingly small amount of that effort was wasted.

Nevertheless, no matter how pretty you make your environments the above mission structure isn’t a particularly robust skeleton to hang your game on, as many an MMO has found out to its cost; these repetitive activities may provide relatively evergreen content but they’re not particularly fulfilling for the player. This is where the loot drops come in: shooting baddies gives you experience which levels up your character, and sometimes they’ll drop guns and armour that you immediately – immediately – compare to your current gear to see if they’re better. Towards the middle of the game the drops of actual equipment start to dry up and you instead start to pry “engrams” from the remains of your enemies; an engram is effectively an unidentified item that you have to take back to the game’s hub area – the Tower – to be identified. Each engram gives you a roll against the loot table for that item that’s dependent mostly on your Light level – veterans of WoW will recognise this instantly as Item Level, as it’s a composite number that reflects how good your current equipment level is. A blue engram decoded at light level 200 will give a worse item than at light level 250, and so the loot system is made effectively self-perpetuating: as each new item you get will potentially increase your light level (and hence the quality of future items) you mainly get better loot so that you can get *even better* loot in the future.

Oh, and I guess you also use the guns to shoot baddies, but that’s almost an ancillary side effect at this point. You mostly play Destiny to watch that Light level number go up – as it’s used throughout the game as a concrete, quotable measure of what content you’ll be able to do this is, unusually, more than just a primitive tapping-in to the part of our stupid monkey brains that enjoys gambling (although that’s still obviously a large element of Destiny’s appeal, just as it is with Diablo). The endgame economy around weapons becomes increasingly stratified as you start to deal with Exotic-quality weapons and infusing unwanted weapons into other ones that you want to improve the raw stats on because you like their inherent perks/handling qualities, but that’s for people with hundreds of hours to sink into Destiny and I’ve been dabbling in it for a mere thirty.  Right now I’m just content with getting my Light level high enough so that I can do all of the Strikes in the game.

Ah yes, the Strikes. These are Destiny’s analogue of a dungeon run in WoW: you select which Strike you want to do from the navigation menu, wait a minute or two in matchmaking, and are then thrown together with two other players to run yet another bite-size dungeon experience lasting no more than 15-20 minutes. As you’re part of a group, though, and because the Strikes are substantially more goal-oriented than the rest of the game, this is where Destiny becomes slightly more than a mindless loot-fuelled shooting gallery. The Strikes start off like that to ease you in, sure – the first one is just a run through a dungeon with a couple of bullet-sponge boss encounters — but they gradually get more complex with set-piece fights and sub-tasks or even puzzles that need to be completed to gain entry to the next part of the mission. They’ve been the most rewarding parts of Destiny for me so far, and are coincidentally one of the best ways to get engrams as each boss is guaranteed to drop at least a couple.

If you want to go beyond Strikes then Destiny has three raids that require a group of six and multiple hours to complete. These are *proper* raids by the MMO definition, too, with lots of dying and respawning to learn attack patterns and figure out the trick to a particular encounter; however after watching my flatmate slowly lose the will to live while grinding through a six(!) hour raiding session I was kind of turned off of the idea of trying it. There’s also a variety of multiplayer modes called the Crucible if you really, really miss Halo deathmatch – this works surprisingly well despite everyone being allowed to take in whatever overpowered weapons they’ve managed to acquire as the game will adjust the stats so that everyone is roughly the same level. If you want to get invested in the game long-term then there’s quests that take multiple days or even weeks to complete, regular/timed events, reputation you can grind with various factions…

…yeah, what I’m describing here is basically an MMO. You talk to somebody who plays it long-term and they’ll get all defensive and say it totally isn’t an MMO, it’s just an ARPG with guns, to which I would retort that:

1. The long-term time investment is on par with an MMO. People can – and do – sink hundreds or even thousands of hours into Destiny’s quests and raids. ARPGs are no mean time sinks themselves, of course, but I feel like Destiny doesn’t just start to bleed into the “second job” territory that is the hallmark of a good – or a bad – MMO, it’s full on hemorrhaging at this point.
2. I can draw direct comparisons between nearly every single one of Destiny’s core and long-term play mechanics and their analogues in World of Warcraft. That’s not to say that Bungie just ripped it off; they’ve shown a significant amount of creativity in adapting the concept to work for a console FPS and a year after its release the underlying systems are pretty slick in how accessible they make something that’s traditionally had an abnormally high barrier to entry. It would be foolish to pretend it didn’t draw a heavy load of inspiration from the current genre leaders, though.

Anyway, the fact that it’s a quasi-MMO adapted for console is the secret to Destiny’s success, but it’s also its greatest failing: it looks great and the shooting plays pretty well, but it *feels* rather light and characterless to play, not to mention repetitive. This is compounded by three really bizarre design choices that I just cannot figure out for the life of me:

• The plot. There isn’t one, not really; the DLC packs have these small self-contained storylines but as a whole Destiny is woefully bereft of anything approaching the structure a backbone of plot would have given it. The original single player campaign is laughable as you ping-pong from planet to planet for no real reason, shoot a blob in the end bossfight (the reasons for this are never really explained) and then are told that You Won, but also that The Story Will Continue. I was actually a little shocked that this is what the game launched with; if I didn’t also have access to the DLC – which is just as terribly plotted, but whose writing leverages this mystical thing called “humour” as well as making far better use of ubiquitous nerd icon Nathan Fillion in the voiceovers and cutscenes — then I would actually be pretty pissed that the game ended there. As it is I’m just baffled at how nonsensical and inconsequential it all is.

• The above weaknesses with the front story are exacerbated by the backstory. Unlike the frontstory it’s not like this doesn’t exist (it does, and there’s quite a lot of it), and it’s not like it’s terribly written (some of it is actually quite interesting!). No, the problem here is that almost none of this backstory is to be found in Destiny itself; instead, every so often when you’re playing you’ll pick up something called a Grimoire card – a small snippet of backstory – that you have to go to Bungie.net to read. Let me reiterate: if you want to find out more about Destiny’s world you have to stop playing the game and go through the trouble of connecting your Xbox credentials to Bungie’s website, after which it’ll let you look at your cards in a buggy interface that doesn’t really display in Chrome all that well. This is ridiculous, not to mention completely self-defeating considering the amount of effort that’s gone into writing some of this stuff, as you’ve just ensured that only the most committed/bored players will ever read it. Anyway, you can find all of this stuff on the Destiny wiki if you really care that much, so what was the point in bothering with the cards in the first place?

• The main hub area that you return to every so often in order to turn in missions and decode engrams. This is ostensibly part of the last human city on Earth, but the hub area itself is on top of a really tall tower (the city itself is just another skybox) and so essentially constitutes a big, flat, characterless platform around which are scattered a dozen or so NPCs who stand in one place and spout the same three generic lines every time you talk to them. Say what you like about World of Warcraft, but it managed to fucking nail hub areas with Stormwind et al; even Rage’s brown, drab, confusingly laid-out hub town had more character than the City, which feels like nothing so much as a box in which to put the unfortunately-necessary NPC quest-givers and vendors any good MMO needs. It’s boring as hell, and I resent the fact that I have to go back there every hour or two to unload my inventory.

Hurgh. Whether you compare Destiny to an MMO or an ARPG, it’s painfully apparent that while the basic gameplay is polished and the various encounters and game modes are well-designed, there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s a game that’s been somewhat crippled by the inherent weaknesses of the genres it’s tried to iterate on – and it doesn’t even deal with those flaws anywhere near as well as the best MMOs or ARPGs do. To a degree that weakness is a deceptive one, of course; during the latter half of my time with it I’ve kept thinking “This isn’t that good, but…”, which is a solid indicator that there’s actually a hell of a lot of work that’s gone on in the background to make it as well-tuned as possible to keep people coming back. It’s equally true, also, that up until you hit endgame Destiny is as fun a shooter experience as you’re likely to have on a console, and if that sounds like it’s your jam then it might be worth it for that alone. Even then it’s a rather empty experience, however, and when you do get to the endgame the true soullessness of what you’re doing comes to the fore; repeatedly running daily missions to get the items required to slowly grind my light level up to 300 is not really my idea of fun. Perhaps it’s yours. I doubt it, though.

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