Activision
Bungie’s Destiny is a wild, enticing new frontier, but it is no country for old men.
Released earlier this week amidst what is arguably the most buildup and fanfare to ever accompany a videogame release, Destiny is the next step from the creators of Halo. Whereas Bungie’s previous games (and indeed, most console shooters) were neatly partitioned into segments you played offline and online, Destiny is always online. As you pursue the game’s story missions, you’re playing in a world populated with others, and you’ll see other players running around and killing the same enemies you are.
Given Bungie’s history, you will not be surprised to hear Destiny‘s shooting mechanics are exceptionally well-polished. This is about as much fun as shooting a fake gun gets. The graphics can be beautiful, especially when Destiny‘s pathways lead you to some breathtaking vista on the moon that looks like something George Lucas would have dropped into a special edition of Star Wars. The music, by ousted Halo composer Marty O’Donnell, is gorgeous, and it’s used in an exacting way to heighten the tension.
All these things are great. Yet I don’t know how much more Destiny I can play.
As I discussed in my thoughts on Destiny‘s alpha test version, even though it has wide-open plains that beg to be wandered and explored, Destiny doesn’t seem to want me to Go Explorin’; there’s not much to find out there besides death. No, if you’re not on a linear story mission you’re supposed to be finding a mini-mission, a small number of clearly marked points on the map in close proximity to you. There also are “bounties,” which are not bad guys you must track down and arrest, but challenges that span hours of gameplay: Kill 100 enemies with headshots, for instance, or earn 9,000 experience points without dying.
There are first-person shooters and there are first-person shooters. That is to say: There are games in which you see through the eyes of a character and your primary input is firing a weapon, but within those games you might be tasked with all sorts of different activities (BioShock, for instance). And there are shooters that are pure, stripped-down exercises in target shooting, an unbroken series of increasingly taxing iterations exploring the art and craft of putting bullets into heads.
Halo and Destiny fall squarely into that category. Shooting is the game. Oh, there are missions that seem at first to require a more nuanced take on the art of interplanetary warfare, but these are (in my experience) of two types: “Run to a place and press the square button once” and “Run to a place and don’t press anything.”
Still, the role-playing aspects grafted on to the base gameplay give it an addictive appeal that the shooting itself might not. Shoot, kill, take loot, upgrade your gear, level up, repeat. Bungie has nailed that perfect Skinner box where the rewards come just enough to keep you on the hook for the next one.
You can choose to play Destiny‘s story missions with a small group of friends—and indeed there are some missions that require cooperation—but I decided to go it alone. Although I could see other players running around as I completed missions, I wasn’t really sure why it was so important that we all be in the same place instead of alone on our own game discs. We didn’t really interact. Sometimes someone would kill an enemy I was killing. Such moments are nice. But what does it matter, to me, that it was a human and not a friendly line of code?
Still, the fact all games of Destiny took place on a persistent online server has had one dramatic consequence: You cannot pause. Ever. How could you? And if you’re like me you may not realize how much you miss this feature until you realize you don’t have it.
Activision
All of this added up, the other night, to what was perhaps an inevitable conclusion.
I’d plowed through a story scenario that had lasted maybe half an hour. There was one final room. I knew this was the end because so far almost every mission had ended the same way: You find whatever MacGuffin you’d been tracking down, go up to it and press Square, and then your “Ghost,” a floating orb played by Peter Dinklage, tells you it’s going to take some time to do whatever a floating orb played by Peter Dinklage does, so while you’re waiting could you please fight off several more waves of increasingly powerful enemies while trapped in this room?
The difficulty level on Destiny had definitely been ratcheting up considerably as I played; even though I was a full two dings ahead of the recommended level for this scenario I was still eating it regularly. I died twice in rapid succession, respawning outside the room, the enemies alive again. But Destiny didn’t give me back any ammo when I respawned. So now I was at even more of a disadvantage because I had used up my rocket launcher and sniper rifle and had to kill everything with my weaker, primary weapon.
The third time around, even with less ammo in my pocket, I was really making a run at it. I’d somehow narrowly avoided death a couple of times.
The doorbell rang. Dinner.
Now I am yelling for my wife, who is in the other room in a meeting with a headset on. My yelling is becoming increasingly loud and frantic. I am shooting and yelling. I do not want the food man to leave. My wife hears me and gets the door. I again barely make it through this last, intense wave of unceasing foes. Suddenly a giant boss monster rears his purple glowing head. I cannot pause and clear my mind, catch my breath. I am doing a fairly decent job of avoiding his blasts and hitting his weak spot. But I’m too agitated, he’s too fast, the damage is too swift: He catches me out and I die.
And I respawn: Not at one of the many, many possible checkpoints in between the opening of the door and the final confrontation, but all the way back at the damned door, with no freaking ammo.
I stand, throwing my arms in the air. “Who is this for? Whose life does this fit into?” I ask. I am, at this moment, incredulous. We are about to have a baby; I cannot even answer the door. The combination of this blink-and-you’re-vaporized difficulty and an inability to pause the action, it seems to me, restricts Destiny‘s audience to people who can afford to shut off the world for vast stretches at a time. This is not a game that wants to fill the odd hours in my life, it demands all of it.
“The game is always afoot,” a representative for Bungie said. “Can’t pause Destiny. Can’t pause Twitter. Can’t pause life.”
Yeah, see, there’s the problem. What if Destiny is successful to the point that this is what big triple-A console games become? Does that just cut me out entirely? You can’t pause life, but this ain’t life. There’s a reason we call this place Game|Life, with the big line down the middle. Destiny, for all its appeal, crept over that line a little too far for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment