I’ve spent more hours playing the Destiny beta than I have playing Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4, and as someone who had previously assumed that the whopping $500 million Bungie had invested into its latest franchise would amount to little more than reviews indicating unrealized potential and wasted opportunities, I couldn’t be more surprised with just how much I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent with it so far, and how swiftly my opinion on it has changed.
Everything I had seen of Destiny up until I played the beta indicated that its appeal would be lost upon me. The last time I truly found myself becoming engrossed by an FPS was with Halo 2, which in my opinion remains the pinnacle of online multiplayer experiences. In spite of its big-budget nature, Halo 2‘s multiplayer had a simplistic charm to it that no popular modern FPS since then has managed to replicate. Before the series was sullied with loadouts and other derivative mechanics intended to bring it into a post-Modern Warfare world, each match was a race to obtain the best weapons and position yourself in the best vantage points, and this is what made maps such as the famous Lockout, with its small sniper tower and cramped runways, so exhilarating to play. Every multiplayer FPS I have played since Halo 2 has failed to compete with it, so perhaps I should have had some faith in Bungie to best its own magnum opus.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether or not Bungie will actually manage to achieve that huge feat, but the early impressions I have of Destiny are overwhelmingly positive. The reasoning behind my disinterest in Destiny prior to getting my hands on it was because it seemed like the antithesis of everything I had enjoyed about Bungie’s previous output. Now I’m not one to condone a developer resting on its laurels and simply reproducing its old material over and over again ad infinitum, but there was a silliness to Halo 2 that has been all but lost in modern FPS games.
It was Unreal Tournament with a side-order of Hollywood pomp, with its big-budget presentation sitting easily alongside its grizzled commentator bellowing “OVERKILL!” at you whenever you achieved a multi-kill and a humorous, guttural “AAARGH!” soundbite echoing down your headset if one of your teammates was killed whilst talking. In comparison, Destiny seemed like it was headed down a path I wouldn’t be fond of, one which would see the word “epic” emblazoned on the back of its box, a noun which has been hijacked by the gaming industry to mean “something which has had an incomprehensible amount of money thrown at it.”
Its gameplay looked like Borderlands stripped of its comedy, its budget so huge that it couldn’t possibly live up to its expectations and its narrative sounded mundane and unspectacular. After being besieged by underwhelming military FPSs for so long, my pessimism meter has gone through the roof, so much so that even a new Bungie game failed to excite me. Though Wolfenstein: The New Order was a surprising example of how games can make shooting fun again, I regarded it as an exception and resigned in the belief that it wouldn’t be long before we were back to fussing over our K/D ratios.
Destiny, though, could be the beacon of light that the genre needs. Here’s a game that aims to come jam-packed with content, from its co-op story through to its PvP modes, giving players more reasons to keep playing than the frivolous pursuit of a higher Prestige level. While it’s lost the humor of the Halo series (unless you count Peter Dinklage’s laughable voiceover work) it’s replaced it with an abundance of new, fun social features which, as a pioneer of Xbox Live’s success, Bungie has a great deal of experience with.
Playing alongside four other friends, Destiny made me feel more like a part of a team than any clan tag could. We initially split off into a team of two and three in order to complete the co-op missions, before joining forces to take on the gruelling end-of-world strike mission that requires a few extra pairs of hands in order to complete efficiently. After that we hopped into the Crucible, the game’s PvP mode, where we spent the majority of the next couple of evenings, earning XP and Glimmer (Destiny‘s in-game currency) to upgrade our classes’ abilities and improve our armor and weaponry.
For me, the biggest draw of Destiny is that it feels like a diluted MMO. I know that doesn’t sound like much of a positive, but hear me out. What Bungie has done here is has taken the formula of the genre, watered it down somewhat and made it accessible to both people who wish to keep progressing and improving the abilities and equipment of their player-character, and for people who just want to shoot stuff every now and again.
The beta indicated that Bungie is on track to do an exemplary job of catering to two audiences who don’t typically make for great bedfellows, and while it’s debatable whether the three classes on offer will appease those who are seeking a more in-depth endgame, it’s certainly enough to keep those who aren’t as familiarized with MMOs ticking along. Those people are likely console gamers first and foremost, so Bungie has essentially taken the aspects of MMOs that would be most appealing to those who wouldn’t dream of sinking 90+ hours into WildStar, and applied them to a game that can be enjoyed in short bursts. It’s a formula that hasn’t really been employed in a console game before, and judging from the beta Bungie has implemented them successfully, albeit with a few niggles that will inevitably crop up in a beta such as overpowered vehicles and an overpowered character class in the form of the Hunter.
As someone who enjoys MMOs but who never finds the time to get the most out of them, this formula appealed to me immensely and I imagine it will for many others. While I will reserve my judgement until I have my hands on the final game, the beta has managed to quell many of the doubts I had about it, and I found myself sincerely having more fun with it than any other FPS since Halo 2 blew me away back in 2004. I nearly resigned myself in the knowledge that I’d never play an FPS I’d enjoy as much as Halo 2, but with Destiny, Bungie might prove me wrong. Here’s hoping.
