Bungie
“So, what… is this game?” my wife asked. She has played about a million more hours of Halo than me, I should point out. And she knows what Destiny is. (It’s the upcoming game from Bungie, Halo‘s original creator, which is coming out for PlayStation 4, PS3, Xbox 360 and Xbox One on September 9.)
What we were trying to figure out, as I played an alpha-test version on PS4 over the weekend, was: what type of game is Destiny? How does one describe it? She watched me create a character, customizing the hair and eye color and such. Then the game dropped me immediately into a distinctly Haloesque scenario, although set in a rust-red desert the likes of which I’d never seen in Bungie’s previous series.
“So you create that whole character, and then it’s a first person shooter?” she asked. It was true. I couldn’t see my character that I’d spent so much time on. I started running towards what appeared to be my objective, taking out a few minor enemies. We saw friendlies run by with what seemed to be PlayStation gamer handles above their heads.
“Are those real people?”
“I… I think so?”
After the shooting was over, Destiny automatically teleported me back up to my spaceship, which was orbiting around Earth. I jumped to the Tower, the last city of humans, located on a satellite above the ruined planet I’d been exploring. On the Tower, things were in third-person, and I could see my character running around.
“So, it’s an MMO and a shooter,” she said.
“I… I guess?” Safe in the Tower, I experimented with the game’s controls. I remembered there were buttons that would make my character emote. I pressed one and she started dancing, all alone, to no music.
“It’s an MMO,” my wife said, in a tone that conveyed finality. “If your character can dance, it’s an MMO.”
Bungie
After playing the alpha (which turned out to be more of a vertical slice, a cordoned-off, rather finely polished section of the game) for the weekend, I can say almost certainly that Destiny is probably a shooter combined with a massively multiplayer online game. These seemingly disparate genres are mashed together rather elegantly. You begin in your personal spaceship, hovering over the earth.
If you choose to jump to the Tower, that’s a safe space, and you play in third person and can see your character. Here you can do all your housekeeping: Buy new items, examine items you’ve found on the battlefield, upgrade your ship, et cetera.
If you choose to go to Earth, there are actually three different types (in the alpha, anyway) of experiences. You can choose a “Story” level: This will drop you down into one of Destiny‘s big open maps, but with a very specific purpose. A voice in your ear will advance the plot of the game and direct you to your objective, and there will be a carefully crafted challenging path for you to follow. Once the big fight at the end of it is over, the mission will end and you’ll be automatically jumped back to your ship.
I had chosen, of my three options, the “Warlock” class which promised me the ability to bend time and space to my will. Warlocks also carry giant, giant guns like everybody else. In lieu of actual grenades, I had a special area-of-effect attack that refilled over time. (In practice, it was a grenade.) Once I’d leveled up a little more I got a super attack. By pressing the left and right shoulder buttons together, I could launch an even bigger purple ball of stuff that, aimed properly, could instantly take out a whole squadron of grunts. (The camera pulls back dramatically into the third person to show me launching this.)
Only Teenage Wasteland
The “free-roaming” level option is where things diverge from the usual point-alpha-to-point-bravo shooter. Choose one of these options — like the Story levels, they have a suggested level that you be at before attempting any of them — and you’re dropped down into a certain part of Destiny‘s vast open world. From here you can go anywhere and do anything you like. This did not work out so well for me. I discovered a tunnel that snaked down from a nondescript building, leading down and down into the sewers where I found a high-level enemy that killed me immediately.
Another time, I followed a series of narrow rooms that led away from the rust-red desert, a series of dimly-lit, dilapidated interior corridors that eventually guided me into another open outdoor area, this one looking like a former highway piled with blown-out old cars. But there wasn’t anything to do in this new playground. The only missions that were available turned out to be all the way back through that hallway and in the area I was dropped initially. And I hadn’t found anything at all in my explorations, besides a single loot crate that was close to the entrance of that first tunnel I decided to poke around in.
So that’s how I learned that the Destiny alpha just wants me to do the damn missions.
Following the beacon to a mission reveals, always, a stick in the ground with a glowing green light on the top. Touching this starts the mission. The Destiny alpha’s missions fell into four general categories:
- Kill guys
- Kill guys then pick up the stuff they drop
- Go somewhere, then kill any guys who are there
- Kill guys (I may have already mentioned this one).
This can be a little disappointing when you finish off one mission, head to the next beacon and get literally the exact same mission. There are “special events” that occur randomly when you’re just bumming around or even when you’re mid-mission. In the alpha, these often took the form of a giant “walker” enemy, like a huge robot spider, getting dumped into the battlefield, and you have a set amount of time to kill it. In the case of these dudes, you could shoot at their legs — you’d know this was doing more than normal damage because the little hit point numbers that popped out were gold instead of yellow — until one of them broke off, and this would cause the bug to fall to the ground so you could attack its weak point for massive damage.
You don’t have to do this alone. In fact, you probably couldn’t. But of course, there are in fact other people running around there to help you. Bungie says that the other players you see while you roam around Destiny‘s world do not represent the sum total of other players on your server. The people you’re playing with are actually matched to your level. So you’re always running around with players of roughly your own skill level, which means you can be put into scenarios like the walker drop where everyone is on even footing.
Speaking of having to deal with other people, it seems like certain parts of the game’s campaign will require you to team up with others. Once I was done with the “Story” and “Free Roaming” options, just one remained — a “Strike” mission, in which I had to go defeat some big bad, but had to team up with two other players to do it. (This also means, for PlayStation 4, that the PlayStation Plus online service is required, which is helpfully noted within the menu.) This was easier said than done, since there weren’t very many people playing the alpha. But eventually I found two other people and off we went.
The mission, in contrast to the relatively short “Story” one, was lengthy and multi-faceted. It again took place in a bracketed-off area of the Free Roaming portion that I’d seen before. We started off killing guys, but then we went into one of those aforementioned interior tunnels. We made our way down to a machine that we had to hack in order to clear our path. This turned out to be one of those “fight waves of enemies for several minutes while you wait for a progress bar to be filled” type missions. This was where we really encountered a challenge, as the game threw much tougher enemies at the three of us than it had in the solo parts.
Once we got through, and had been playing for quite a while, it still wasn’t over. We had to face another spider-robot. This one really started wailing on us and we’d die often. If you die, you either have to wait a very long time to respawn or have someone come over and revive you. If everyone dies (and we did!) you go back to a checkpoint, which in this case turned out to be right before the encounter with the walker.
Bungie
We were so close. We had it down to a tiny sliver of life. A couple more bullets and — it stopped moving. Everything stopped moving. We’d lost connection to the Destiny servers and were unceremoniously dumped out to the menu. Ouch. I guess that’s as good a reminder as any that we’re just alpha testers.
There’s one more option, when you’re up there in outer space: the Crucible. This is not an interactive dramatic re-enactment of the Arthur Miller play that I so desperately wished it was, but the competitive multiplayer. You bring in the armor and weapons you’ve acquired in the main game, and you’re again matched up with players more on your level. Although there will be several different gameplay types in the final version of Destiny, for the alpha it’s just a six-versus-six control-points match in which you and your team attempt to reach and hold points on the map for longer than your opponents do.
This is not my thing. Remember that I did play a lot of Titanfall and found to my surprise that the tweaks that Respawn had made to the formula caused this very same type of match to hold my interest. But whereas the Titanfall beta took the control-points match and elevated it, the Destiny alpha takes the same base materials and doesn’t seem to do much new with it.
With Crucible not being my cup of tea and the Strike mission off the table, I had nothing else to do but jump back into Free Roaming and do missions. The world of the Destiny alpha feels like a graveyard, and not one of those wacky fun graveyards you hear about. Everything’s dead, and nobody’s hanging around to witness it. The fact that missions come not from eclectic side characters but from glow sticks, that exploring just finds more outdoorsy areas and uninhabited nondescript passageways, makes wandering and exploring less exciting than it could be. This could turn out not to matter when the Death Star is fully operational, but that was what was running through my head as I played.
It’s really quite a fun combination of genres, though. The loop — fight, gather, return to town, equip, repeat — makes sense. It’s fun to keep going. It’s rewarding to finish a firefight, because you’ve done more than just survive to see the next firefight. You can take breaks, you can explore… to an extent.
I racked up a few more missions, running and jumping across the remnants of a transport ship that had broken cleanly in half, melee attacking low-level enemies to clear the mission’s requirements (kill guys). I leveled up, and the game helpfully informed me that I had reached the level cap for the Destiny alpha. I had nothing more to do. No one was there to celebrate my accomplishment. I stood alone on a broken-down hunk of rusting metal.
I danced alone, to no music.
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