What's Wrong With Destiny

A while back I wrote an article about how much I was enjoying Destiny and having a blast with it. Well, rose tinted glasses aside jump to...what 4 months later, and I couldn't hate the game more now...There's several reasons for this, but most of them have to do with how much Destiny has changed and what it's "evolved" into and in some cases what it's refusing to do.

Every so often Bungie will release a new update to the game, something that gets me excited and interested in the game again. Then they'll shit all over it by changing something else that I did like about it. To really understand where I'm at with this game we'll have to look over the history of it briefly.

Destiny has done some things right and some things wrong from the get go. The gun-play has always been good, and the multi-player competitive modes have always been pretty fun too. You could play the game solo, in a group, or do the competitive modes and have a blast and get the gear you needed, though it is arguably slower in multi-player to find the gear you needed. You could even farm a cave of infinitely respawning enemies for gear too. This wasn't just some random gear either, you were going for the legendaries, to have the best stuff available like in any game of this type. It was rewarding and fun, though super grindy but not unexpectedly so. You would also level up your gear by getting items found in the world, and you'd break down other items for those components too. It was simple, and easy and wasn't too ridiculous to do.

Jump to today....and it's a fucking mess. Philosophically speaking, the game gave players a choice initially like I outlined, letting you choose to play with a team or solo doing competitive modes, etc. However, the way that gear is obtained now the best items must be acquired through the Raids, which wasn't the case when the game first came out. This means grinding anything other than the Raids is pointless. Which, isn't a terrible thing, except that this game doesn't have match making. Bungie has stated many times they'll never add match making to the Raids because they feel you have to coordinate too closely with people and doing this with strangers wouldn't be any fun. They are, entirely full of shit however. Who just has 5 other friends lying around with nothing better to do than to romp around some online game for 4 hours on a Tuesday night? Maybe it's because I'm nearly 30 years old and most of my friends have moved to new States, or have kids now that this bugs me. It would be impossible for me to find 5 friends with the same schedule as me to get these raids done. That's why EVERY other game you can think of has match making. And Bungie is either arrogant or entirely stupid to think that people aren't just gathering random ass people on Gamefaqs or their own forums for teams. So instead of providing a sensible service like match making, they're making players do all the work for them. I find this to be either incredibly lazy, or incredibly ignorant, and in both cases it's not amusing to me.

I've been playing Diablo 3 for the past week and, honestly, it has only highlighted even more why Destiny is such a fucking failure. First of all, to find the items I need in Diablo 3 to make my character build work I don't have to have a team at all. I can play all the content Diablo 3 offers solo if I choose to. But it's built as a party game right? Of course it is, just like Destiny is supposed to be, except the major difference is I can join any game I want in Diablo 3 without signing into the Diablo 3 forums and begging to be on someone's team to fucking do it. You know what you have to do in Diablo 3? You click "join," and then you start playing.

Then the fanboys defend Bungie by repeating their rhetoric, "oh, it would be really annoying to play the Raids if a few people in the team suck and can't beat it." You know how Diablo 3 solves that very problem? A vote system to kick the player out. It works EVERY time without fail. If someone isn't pulling their weight, you kick them, it's done, and a new guy joins within seconds.

Why I'm SO incredibly pissed about this is because the game has "evolved" into forcing players to play the Raids if they want the best gear, or even SERVICEABLE gear now, or EVEN to get to the MAX LEVEL mind you. Which is utterly retarded. You know how I get to the max level in ANY game not named Destiny? I kill shit until I'm there. Done. I wouldn't be this incredibly upset if they kept Destiny's philosophy the way they intended. I would have no trouble playing their competitive multi-player and just saying screw off to the Raids and Weekly's. But no, you can't do that now. The competitive multi-player component nets you complete SHIT in terms of gear now. It's incredibly useless outside of just being fun. But for character progression? No, fuck that you have to do the Raids.

Outside of flat out hating the Raids in general for being butt-fuckingly horribly designed and boring, you can only do them ONCE a week anyway. What kind of grinding is this? If I want gear and I'm willing to play for it why am I being forced to pause the game every week? WHY? What kind of grind game is this? Diablo 3 doesn't make me pause the game for a week, I play it whenever I want to like any sensible game.

Defenders of the Raids saying how great they are need to seriously wake the fuck up too. Just because the Raids are different than the dreadfully repetitive shit you've been doing for 200 hours previous, does not automatically make the Raids well designed. Well...they suck, they honestly suck. Take the first Raid as an example. The first part is a mindless section where your team has to hold the area to make a door open. To be fair, this is the least offensive moment the Raid has to offer in terms of being horribly designed. The next section has us fighting off a bunch of singing...robot things...and if they sing too much your team gets cursed and obliterated if you don't walk into a circle of cleansing...that the enemy has provided for you in their home base apparently. This isn't such a bad concept but it goes on...and on...for like an hour. Then you fight a boss where 1 guy has to break his shield with a special weapon that once again the enemies provided for you (nice guys they are). This is a pretty fun fight actually, I have no complaints here. Then the game forces you into a stealth segment...the worst designed stealth segment in gaming history. Forget that this game isn't even designed to have stealth in it, and games that are designed with stealth in mind are usually pretty bad at it too, and you have yourself a shitty slow walk down a few hallways that makes me want to sniff used baby diapers for a half hour than EVER have to do this again. Next we have a large plat forming section which again is embarrassingly badly designed. Destiny is not a Mario game and it shouldn't pretend to try either, it just embarrass itself. Then there's the final boss...which when I played it was so fucking bugged you could push him off the ledge. Or you could have done it the fun way and encountered more lovely bugs like the portals not fucking working and causing your whole team to wipe because everyone got through but you and now you're blind and stuck on the other side....

YEAH...this is what Destiny fans call "fun." I call this a big fucking headache and I want nothing to do with it. Even if I did, I don't have the will power it takes to post on Gamefaqs for a squad to start one of these damn things. This is one of those commitments that would have to be started in a drunken stupor where I forget my own moral code and accidentally click a "join" button in the game....THANKFULLY Destiny doesn't have one of those! Far be it for a "social experience" to have a button labeled "join" right?

I hadn't intended focusing so much of this diatribe on the Raids, but honestly, that's Destiny now. You either Raid or you don't play the game because there's no other reason to play it. I'm just so pissed today because Bungie announced match making for the Weekly, and I got all excited and then they reiterated they're not adding match making for the Nightfall or Raids still. So like, wtf? That's like giving a starving man an apple seed while you walk away with a bag full of fully edible apples. Fuck off Bungie, seriously...

*Social Game Destiny....minus all those terrible social things in games like a decent chat system or match making. Enjoy!*

Opinions Can Be Stupid

I learned something interesting today about the modern gamer, or at the very least one person in particular I had a debate with online. I have always held the belief that all opinions are valid as they are opinions but I'm struggling to find validation in one I heard earlier today. Someone had posted a comment that Sonic has been bad since Sonic Adventure because of the story, strictly because of the story mind you. For anyone who has been a gamer for more than a year of their life I would believe could point out how hilariously ridiculous this opinion is. Sonic has never been about story, he's been about game play and it's pretty clear. Sonic, like Mario became famous on well tuned game play and defined himself by being the faster edgier version of Mario. That's all we knew about Sonic really. He fought a guy who builds robots who...I guess was taking over the world? I dunno, it wasn't very clear but there in lies the entire point. We played those games because they were fun, not to learn some deeper meaning about golden rings or deformed flying foxes.

I don't need to beat this point into submission, it's fairly self evident if you're a gamer. If you aren't I'll set you aside and explain it to you better, lol. But the purpose of this blog is to ascertain whether this opinion is objectively stupid or not. The argument against it is simple enough. He could be a fairly young gamer who started out playing Sonic Adventure which had...some semblance of a plot I guess and he played it strictly for that reason. This is somewhat understandable given how terribly Adventure played (though still better than some of his more recent games), and yet I still can't help but call this opinion completely stupid.

If we just look at gaming in general we can see that it's a medium where the interaction between player and software is paramount. From the get go game play is king regardless of opinion, the very medium itself is about this. Games have indeed become more complex as we've grown and there are some that are more about the story than the game play such as Final Fantasy. But is Sonic one such game? Is the narrative so deep and compelling we can argue that's the reason we should play them? I've never met an individual that would argue this point until today. Frankly, if the story was so compelling why did it take nearly a decade to learn what the lead villain's real name was, Eggman or Robotnick?

Can we still argue that this person really does want to play Sonic for the plot? I mean, that is his opinion after all. But then we have to ask obvious questions. Should I be playing Devil May Cry for the platforming, should I be playing Tetris for its amazing AI, should I be playing Far Cry to improve my map reading skills? I think there can be a "wrong" reason for playing a game, and this would be one of those cases. If I were playing Devil May Cry for its platforming I would be ROUTINELY disappointed, but who's fault would that be? Would it be my fault for expecting great Mario-like platforming, or the game's fault for me not recognizing the game is about slashing demons? I think it's pretty clear, again. But maybe I have my blinders on? Let me know if I'm just crazy on this issue.

*Sonic=Shakespear*