Where is the Destiny Franchise Going...Part I
Let's talk about Destiny. If you've missed the bus ads, the train ads, the GameStop ads pushing "exclusive content", the live action clips plastered over Youtube's promoted videos page or the conversation that has been bustling and growing for the last year, Destiny is a fresh take on the FPS (First-Person Shooter) genre. Plagued with clone releases of Call of Duty (Battlefield Hardline adapted the stealth element well so they get a pass this article), the AAA FPS games, which little kids bug their parents to use their ID to get and more recently charge to credit cards on online marketplaces, had spent the last four years melding into one another becoming one big conglomerate experience, kind of like Royal Dutch Shell or The Trump Organization.
Enter Destiny, September 2014. The hype was real. I had stopped attending high school in May to start full time work to save up for a new PS3 and Limited Edition copy of Destiny. By August I had the new console and paid off my balance to my local GameStop (which will also earn it's own article, one day). Come September 9th, I stopped at the store at 5PM to see if I could finesse a copy on the low but that wasn't happening. I did get a ticket to be in "Group 2" though. This meant I could skip the chumps who weren't as obsessed as I was, lucky me. Prior to the release I spent hours trawling through the “Destinythegame” subreddit overanalyzing every clip of footage I could get my hands on and contributing to any thread I could when there was a dissemination of misinformation. By the time I had actually had the game I knew exactly what minute I could play it, how long the day one patch would take to download, what the damage algorithms were to kill enemies and how to get to level 20 as fast as possible.
Fast forward one year. There has been a lot of controversy and criticism surrounding the Destiny franchise. A lot of supporters and bandwagoners spent a lot of time complaining and crying about the supposed bias of the reward-distributing Random Number Generator (this RNG is so vital to the longtime success of end-game players that they so aptly dubbed it “RNGesus”), but I want to take this chance to clear the air about what Destiny really is. Destiny is an experience entirely its own. The cinematic sequences are breathtaking, the music is some of the best ever composed for a video game and the lore & story is rich and plentiful (seriously, the lore is tentative but Destiny introduces a unique way for players to unlock it piece-by-piece through in-game achievements, counted as “Grimoire” points. Granted, what players unlock can be shared with the Internet and almost always is, it is still a refreshing incentive to delve deeper into the world). People’s primary complaints about Destiny is simple: The story is too short. To me, when I hear this, all I hear is: “I choose to remain ignorant to information that is available at my fingertips and I think it’s easier to criticize the hard work of the folks over at Bungie than take a minute to learn what is actually going on”. The next part of the article will closely analyze exactly where Destiny is going, drawing from the information made available to us.
Be on the look out for part II of this article coming soon!