Nobody has got half a day to grind for materials to level up weapons-that's just a complete waste of time." I remember in vanilla you had to spend hours mining materials, but that grind has been taken away. There's much less grinding you have to do. "There are quite a few more PvE activities you can do, and the reward system is far better now. " Destiny has changed for the better," explains Qaasim (aka Qaa51mB), another top-one-percent player, who leads the competitive clan Last Rites. Others still would indulge Destiny's monotonous grind, replaying raids over and over just to gain enough resources to level up a freshly acquired piece of loot-the only way players could do so at the time.Īs video game success stories go, Destiny's is one of the oddest. Others would vent on forums about the game's numerous faults at a furious pace, and then swiftly hop online to take on another strike. Many would play on despite admitting the game wasn't very good. "One thing's for sure: Bungie has never officially called Destiny an 'MMO,' and that's probably because it's not 'massive' enough."ĭestiny's rocky development-as highlighted by Kotaku's revelation that its story had been rewritten from scratch just six months before launch-wasn't enough to stop millions of players from signing into the game daily. "The eight hours I needed to start replaying the game's content gave me enough time to get annoyed at the AI, at the plot, at the way experience points can break the challenge of a first-person shooter, at the lack of a legitimate item-trading system within the game," reads the Ars review. "It is role-playing grind in shooter form-an empty house built on a firm foundation." "A lavishly produced but troubled game that excels in the basics but lacks creativity and heart," reads GameSpot's 6/10 review, written by my former colleague Kevin Van Ord. Advertisementįurther Reading Destiny: It’s a small world after all Instead, there were a mere eight hours of PvE story missions, a nonsensical plot littered with corny dialogue and a phoned-in performance by one Peter Dinklage, and a set of MMO mechanics that showed just how inexperienced Bungie was with the loot collecting and complex levelling systems typical of the genre. When it finally emerged on September 9, 2014, Destiny didn't quite live up to the epic, universe-spanning adventure hinted at in the original E3 trailer. As it turned out, Destiny wouldn't be an Xbox One exclusive-thanks in part to Microsoft's famous fumbles with the Xbox One-and it wouldn't be released until 2014. It even asked that Destiny be a timed Xbox exclusive before seeing release on the PS3, or its then-unnamed successor. It wasn't until Bungie's surprise 10-year deal with Activision, and court revelations in the ongoing legal battle between Infinity Ward's Jason West and Vincent Zampella, that the scale of the project became clear.Įnlarge / Destiny first appeared as an Easter egg in Halo 3: ODST.Īctivision's 27-page contract with Bungie was surprisingly detailed, with the publisher asking for four "sci-fantasy" action shooter games to be released every other year starting in 2013, along with four DLC packs codenamed "Comet" in the alternating years. Back then, the game was in its early stages-nothing but concept art and a few story beats-and its developer Bungie still had one more Halo game in the works, 2010's Halo Reach. Fail fast, fail oftenĭestiny made its first appearance in 2009, as an Easter egg in Halo 3: ODST. According to Activision, on average each of these has ploughed an astonishing 100 hours into Destiny.Īnd yet, when it launched, Destiny was far from a sure-fire hit. He has an intimidating kill/death ratio of 2.57.Ĭhris is just one of the 30 million dedicated players that log into the first-person shooter-cum-MMO Destiny every day to complete cooperative PvE (player versus environment) missions, and compete in frantic PvP (player versus player) matches. There's nothing else quite like it."Īt the time of writing, Chris ranks in the top one percent of PlayStation players on the third-party Destiny Tracker website, which monitors the performance of Destiny players across multiple platforms. I might play Call of Duty if I get bored, but for me it's all about Destiny. "I played Halo," Chris tells me, "but since Halo 4 the series started to get kinda shit. He has played it nearly every day for the past two years, squeezing in a few hours after school, while dedicating whole weekends to the game. Despite waiting three weeks after launch to buy the game-and only then after significant peer pressure from his friends-Chris has made Destiny a part of his daily routine. Every day after school, Chris, who goes by the handle iChrissy-HD- on PlayStation Network, walks up to his bedroom and sits down in front of the TV to play Destiny.
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