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Destiny 2
PC (Steam)
Neo-Platonism for the ‘Halo’ Crowd
4/5 stars
When you mention the name “Bungie,” most people will think of the second-party developer that helped Microsoft cement the OG Xbox into the hearts and minds of a generation of idiots during the opening decade of the 21st Century. Few seem to acknowledge that Bungie actually existed for a decade prior to that, starting in 1990, and releasing a decade of horrible, unmemorable crap on non-gaming platforms like Mac OS, the Bandai Pippin, and pre-modern PC. No, when most people think of Bungie, they think of ‘Halo’ and that series’ green-clad Gary Stu protagonist, Master Chief. Yet, shockingly, as the 20-Oughts moved inexorably into the 20-Teens, Microsoft, in its role as Publisher, took that green-clad baby away from Bungie and shopped it around to a number of other uninspiring development studios.
Adrift without the anchor of ‘Halo’ to tie them down, Bungie set out to create a new IP all their own. Of course, having worked exclusively on FPSes for the better part of two decades meant that this new IP would undoubtedly be a FPS. But not just a FPS, but an always-online, MMO-inspired thing that would later become known as a “Live Service.” This game was 2014’s “Destiny,” and while it got off to a bumpy start, Bungie eventually made enough changes that naysayers turned into promoters, and this new IP proved quite profitable for them and their new publishing overlord, Activision-Blizzard.
Unfortunately, with “Destiny,” Bungie continued the mistakes it has made since its founding, launching on only a handful of platforms, and excluding the one best suited for a Live Service. Thus “Destiny” was available on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, and XBONE, but NOT, inexplicably, on PC.
However, because Activision-Blizzard is one of the Triumvirate of Evil, Bungie didn’t have to wait long to rectify this oversight, as a mere two months after the release of “Destiny,” Activision mouthpieces were already harping on the idea of a sequel. Three years later, “Destiny 2” was released on the PlayStation 4 (with timed exclusive content), the XBONE, and Windows. Two years and three expansion packs after that, the MeltedJoystick Crew got our hands on it when the base game was given away for free and the cumulative expansion pack, ‘Forsaken,’ was discounted to $30 on the Humble Store.
Having only played a scant amount of ‘Halo’ in my time and finding it to be lacking in redeeming qualities, I found myself wondering if Bungie was capable of making a competent FPS, while simultaneously contemplating whether ‘Halo’ would be more enjoyable with a Razer Hydra in-hand. However, having thoroughly enjoyed an older shooting-based, open-ish-world Live Service in SyFy Channel’s “Defiance,” I held out hope for the best. And in the end, my experience with “Destiny 2” was surprising in a lot of ways, both good and bad.
Presentation
“Destiny 2” is built in a proprietary 3D engine and looks absolutely phenomenal. There are no shades of Unreal or Unity corner-cutting in this game. Instead, “Destiny 2” features a cast of some of the most realistic human (mostly) characters in the 8th Generation, as well as a diverse array of breathtaking interplanetary locations. I was so impressed by the environments early on, that I simply had to stop mid-mission to take in the vistas – they’re that impressive! This isn’t a game that suffers from Brown and Gray Syndrome, but instead isn’t afraid to break out wild colors for its alien environs.
Audiowise, “Destiny 2” is clearly a ‘blockbuster’ “AAA” type of thing, with plenty of big-name Hollywood A-listers – like Nathan Fillion and Lance Reddick – stirred into a mix of B-listers, long-term videogame voice actors, anime dubbers, and even more obscure folk. Across the board, these vocal performances are admirably done, with no one standing out as uncharacteristically bad or cheesey. The soundtrack in “Destiny 2” is likewise a well-done endeavor that would feel right at home accompanying a Hollywood sci-fi epic. The soundtrack revolves, more or less, around a couple of strong themes, and gracefully mixes classical music concepts with more modern aesthetics. Between the scoring and the implementation, this is one of the strongest soundtracks in a “AAA” game in a long time.
Despite the glowing praise “Destiny 2” deserves for its visuals and sound, I can’t, in good conscience, give it a perfect presentation score, simply because the game is a Live Service, which means it has monetization issues and a built-in expiration date. Sure, it’s technically rock solid, with a minimal number of glitches and crashes, and includes native Xinput support out of the box. However, the ‘base’ “Destiny 2” game launched at $60, before being slashed to the low, low cost of ‘free,’ in an effort to garner more players. The first two add-ons (‘Curse of Osiris’ and ‘Warmind’), which comprise the original $35 season pass, cost $20 each if purchased individually, while the third expansion (‘Forsaken’) weighed in at $40. Unfortunately, buying all of these add-ons still doesn’t provide the player with the complete “Destiny 2” experience, as there is another add-on, dubbed the ‘Annual Pass’ for another $35 that unlocks a handful of new features that really should have been bundled with ‘Forsaken’ or just given away for free. That means it would have cost a devoted “Destiny 2” player $170 to play the game if they didn’t take advantage of price cuts or limited-time sales, which is outrageous. Microtransaction haters could take further umbrage with “Destiny 2’s” monetization due to the fact that it does, indeed, feature a cosmetic-centric microtransation shop where random loot boxes can be purchased for Silver, a premium currency only obtainable by spending real money. Personally, I didn’t find the “Destiny 2” loot box shop particularly egregious, as it’s possible to buy most of the cosmetics directly (when they randomly appear on the weekly bill of sale) for Bright Dust, an in-game currency obtainable by dismantling premium cosmetics or opening premium engrams, which can be earned in-game by leveling-up when already at the level cap of 50. Ultimately, aside from the licentious cash outlay dedicated players need to make to ‘keep up’ with all the new content, the worst thing about “Destiny 2” is that it simply doesn’t work without a connection to Bungie’s servers, meaning that there will be a time in the not-too-distant future where “Destiny 2” simply doesn’t exist anymore. Imagine, all that money disappearing in a puff of smoke.
Story
Historically, I’ve reveled in giving guff to the FPS genre and what it has, historically, attempted to pass off as ‘story.’ From “DOOM” to “Quake” to “Halo,” the genre has typically revolved around ‘shoot teh aleinz cuz dey bad,’ or something similar with a less sci-fi focused enemy than aliens. And, on its surface, “Destiny 2” appears to be little different.
Our heroes are the Guardians, an elite organization of people who protect Earth and Earth interests from alien threats from outside the solar system. The Guardians are empowered by a mysterious force known as the Light, which is granted to them by a gigantic spheroid alien construct that appeared in the Sol solar system in the early 21st Century. This sphere, dubbed the Traveler, proceeded to use unknown technology to terraform a significant number of planets in the solar system, before stopping off at Earth itself and sharing advanced technologies with humanity, ushering in the Golden Age.
The Golden Age was not meant to last, however, as an ancient enemy of the Traveler, known only as the Darkness and taking the form of an acutely-angled polygon, appeared in the Sol system along with its alien henchmen and orchestrated an event called the Collapse, fragmenting humanity across the solar system and leaving one Last City on Earth, directly beneath the Traveler’s shadow. The scattering of humanity resulted in the rise of three distinct subtypes of people: Humans, who remained on Earth; Awoken, who were lost in a parallel dimension and changed as a result; and Exos, human minds transferred into mechanical bodies for a long-forgotten military application.
In a last ditch effort to protect itself and the three races of humanity, the Traveler expelled a rain of dandruff-like fragments of itself, which turned out to be tiny sentient machines known as Ghosts, who are each capable of bonding with a specific person and channeling the Light into that person to transform them into an immortal Guardian (sometime even going so far as to resurrect long-dead people as new Guardians).
All of this story material was covered in the original “Destiny,” with only a cursory glance for the sequel, which is rather unfortunate, as the background lore of the ‘Destiny’ universe is actually interesting. Where “Destiny 2” picks up, the Guardians have defeated an existential threat by the Hive – a race of humanoid aliens in symbiosis/parasitism with a race of alien worms with a deep connection to the Darkness, who follow an ethical system known as ‘Sword Logic,’ in which killing proves your right to exist – only to find themselves under assault from a new, even more terrifying threat from the Cabal Empire, led by one Dominus Ghaul.
The Cabal are a large, burly race of humanoid aliens whose society very closely resembles the Roman Empire, with Ghaul, a one-time orphan with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove, serving as something of a Julius Caesar. Ghaul wants the Traveler’s light for the Cabal and immortality for himself, and thus launches a full-scale assault on the Sol system, ensnaring the dormant Traveler in an enormous cage-like device, by which he means to siphon out its Light and channel it into himself. As a side effect of the Traveler’s capture, the Guardians are cut-off from the Light, rendered weak and mortal once again. A few lucky Guardians (the thousands of players in the game) manage to reacquire their Light from a broken-off shard of the Traveler that the Cabal didn’t notice, and thus form a resistance to push back against Cabal domination. Unfortunately for humanity, the Cabal have further plans to destroy the Sun once they’re done with the Traveler, leaving the solar system a cold, dead ruin.
While the activities of the Cabal make up the narrative for the base game, the expansion packs tend to deal with the other alien races in the ‘Destiny’ universe. The ‘Curse of Osiris’ expansion revolves around a race of sentient software known as the Vex who are attempting to create a foothold in the solar system by transforming Mercury into one huge software simulation. A mysterious Warlock by the name of Osiris disappeared in the Vex network while trying to stop them, and the Guardians must find him and work with him to figure out how to hold back the Vex assimilation.
The second expansion, ‘Warmind,’ takes place on Mars, in a former Golden Age research facility that has since been taken over by the AI that was developed there, a military tactical system (dubbed a ‘warmind’) that calls itself Rasputin (and speaks inverted Russian). With the help of one of Rasputin’s creators (who is surprisingly young and spry thanks to being a Guardian infused with Light, despite being thousands of years old), the player must hold back a Hive invasion, led by a heretical member of the Hive’s own pantheon of Worm Gods.
Finally, in the ‘Forsaken’ expansion, in a jailbreak gone awry, a rogue Awoken with a gang of corrupted, seemingly undead fellow inmates kills one of the most beloved NPCs that players interacted with on a regular basis, while simultaneously implementing a plan to merge two planes of existence into one, while having visions of his dead sister (who happens to be the late Queen of the Awoken). Thus, the Awoken recruit the Guardians to help stop this mad scheme, while our heroes carry with them a plan for revenge.
Individually, none of the individual “Destiny 2” stories is particularly long, with the base game clocking in at around 30 hours, the first two expansions clocking in at around 8 hours each, and the ‘Forsaken’ expansion clocking in at around 20 hours. That’s a fairly decent amount of game as it is, but with the MMO-inspired Live Service nature of “Destiny 2,” players are encouraged to play a little (or a LOT) every day, exploring each of the planets, hunting for secrets, and doing dailies in exchange for rewards and loot. Personally, I spent hundreds of hours doing side activities, and enjoyed every minute of it.
While the core narrative in “Destiny 2” is competent, it’s not terribly original. However, as a classicist, after being slapped upside the head with the Cabal = Romans metaphor, I started noticing similarities to other ancient civilizations and belief systems EVERYWHERE in the game. The Cabal are like the Romans because they’re not particularly intelligent or creative, but they’re good at war and dress in very Romanesque armor. The Vex, on the other hand, are like the Ptolemaic Greeks, as is evident from the architecture they’ve built on Mercury, as well as by the fact that the Vex, like the Greeks, are highly intelligent and tend to forcibly convert everything they touch to their own mode of being (Hellenization). The Fallen (a.k.a., Eliksni) are a race of semi-humanoid, semi-insectoid aliens who are clearly inspired by the Germanic tribes, as they have titles such as ‘vandal,’ and are trying to reacquire, by pillaging, what they perceive as rightfully theirs after the Traveler abandoned their civilization in the ancient past. Then you have the Taken (who played a much larger role in the first “Destiny”), a faction that exists in the Ascendant realm (where the Darkness, the Traveler, Hive Worm Gods, and all manner of other weird ‘paracausal’ things come from in the ‘Destiny’ universe) and are obsessed with forcing everyone else to join them there. The Taken are clearly inspired by the Christians, as they are patchwork faction made of converts from all manner of different races and species, and have become semi-mindless and fanatical in their pursuit of a form of transcendent immortality. However, the classical analogies start to fall apart when it comes to the Hive. The kind of ‘Might Makes Right’ mentality of the Hive’s Sword Logic is a little like an un-nuanced misappropriation of Nietzsche’s Master Morality combined with Randian Objectivism run amok, but doesn’t quite ‘click’ with any classical civilizations, philosophies, or mindsets. The fact that the Hive essentially created the Taken is another bit of weirdness that doesn’t quite fit within the model, unless someone who dislikes the Church Fathers even more than I do managed to get a writing position at Bungie. Saul of Tarsus = Oryx, the Taken King, maybe?
Beyond the fact that the various factions in “Destiny 2” are reminiscent of the classics, the very essence of the core conflict between the Traveler and the Darkness is ripped straight from the pages of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism. At the core of Neo-Platonism is the superstitious belief in a transcendent entity called The One. Because Platonism also contained Greek numerology and an odd fixation on geometric shapes, it’s clear that if The One took a non-transcendent body and deigned to exit the abstract realm of Forms, it would take the shape of a sphere, the most perfect shape – according to Plato – with only one side. Naturally, in a Gnostic-inspired Dualist system, in which Good and Evil both definitively exist and have divine, transcendent exemplars, The One’s enemy would, naturally, be a many-sided polygon. I’d even go so far as to laud “Destiny 2” as an educational experience, as the cursory glosses of history and philosophy bundled-up as a videogame might encourage the younger folks who play it to do some further reading on the subjects the game broaches (at least, it encouraged me to do some classical reading and philosophical research).
Unfortunately, despite its deep, interesting, and classically-inspired backstory and lore, “Destiny 2” feels somewhat incomplete. Each story expansion essentially does its own thing, not closely tied to any other narrative events from the other expansions. The ominous presence of the Darkness is never really addressed in any meaningful way, leaving the MAIN conflict in the ‘Destiny’ universe hanging, with no real engagement and definitely no proper resolution. I guess we’ll have to wait for “Destiny 3,” eh?
Gameplay
Going into “Destiny 2,” I wasn’t expecting much. From the hour-or-so I spent on one of the ‘Halo’ games, I expected lots of running backwards while pumping ammo into bullet sponges, falling off ledges while running backwards, and hitting baddies with melee weapons that inexplicably run out of bullets. And “Destiny 2” does have all of those problems, in – for the most part – manageable doses. However, the lion’s share of “Destiny 2” consists of tight, elegant shooting, well-designed missions, and densely-packed open world areas with plenty of things to see and do and kill.
“Destiny 2,” seemingly in another nod to Platonism and Greek numerology, revolves heavily around the number 3. Each character has three weapon slots in their loadout, there are three elements in the world (Solar, Arc, and Void), there are three character classes (Titan, Warlock, and Hunter), each with three subclasses tied to the three elements. Unfortunately, the number 3 is also the limit to party size, with only three players able to team-up for non-raid content (Raids, ironically, require 6 people.). With 4 members in the MeltedJoystick Crew, we thus found ourselves on the horns of a dilemma: Do we not play “Destiny 2” or do we split into 2 two-man teams? We opted for the latter, with one Titan and one Warlock per team.
Each of the three classes has something that it is allegedly good at. Titans are supposed to tank damage, shrugging off blows that would kill other characters. Warlocks are supposed to recover damage, healing themselves and other members of their fireteam. Lastly, Hunters are supposed to avoid damage, being a more-or-less selfish character that works well alone. Each character also brings a unique jumping style to the game, as each character has the ability to ‘double-jump’ do various degrees, along with a unique stable of grenades, melee perks, and super abilities, all of which operate on a cooldown basis. Of course, I say these classes are allegedly good at these things because, for the most part, I found all of them to be a bit lacking. Titans die just as quickly as everyone else. Warlocks can’t pump enough healing fast enough to accomplish anything, and dodging with a Hunter is all but useless unless using one specific subclass. The attributes that govern these traits, Resilience, Recovery, and Mobility, can be manipulated by the player and the armor they choose to equip, so no one class is inherently tougher, healthier, or speedier than another.
While I initially started as a Warlock, I quickly grew tired of my inability to output as much healing as the team required, and of my character’s choice of an annoying floaty jump or a difficult-to-control teleport. So I started a different character and tried the Hunter, and ultimately fell in love with one particular branch on the Void subclass tree that included the ability to go invisible while dodging. Not only was the Hunter more fun for my solo Live Service grinding sessions every day of the week between official ‘advance the story’ meetings with the Crew, the Hunter’s ability to go invisible nearly at will proved invaluable for reviving dead teammates who wouldn’t be helped by Warlock healing.
Shooting in “Destiny 2” is rock solid, no matter what class the player chooses. Each character can equip one kinetic weapon (that is, a gun that deals neutral damage), one energy weapon (a gun that deals Solar, Arc, or Void damage, which works well against enemy energy shields), and a power weapon (another energy weapon that deals massive damage, but consumes rare heavy ammo). Kinetic and energy weapons run the gamut from handguns to rifles to shotguns to bows (the latter of which ended up being a personal favorite), while power weapons take the form of rockets, grenades, swords (that run out of bullets!), and heavy variants of sniper rifles and shotguns. While most kinetic and energy slot weapons consume primary ammo (which is white in color), certain classes of gun – specifically sniper rifles, shotguns, and fusion rifles – consume special (green) ammo, which is significantly harder to come by in the midst of a mission. While I typically love sniper rifles in FPSes, I can’t stand the ones in “Destiny 2,” as their scope movement is so floaty, which, combined with special ammo being hard to come by and sniper ammo reserves being hilariously small, means every missed shot is a catastrophe. Shotguns are essentially the same way, except that their major flaw is that their range is literally point blank. Attempting to be a shotgun sniper in “Destiny 2” just won’t work, and you’ll run out of ammo in less than a minute while trying. Power weapons and their heavy ammo suffer from the same problem as special ammo guns, and I ultimately ended up treating my grenade launcher (the only power weapon I liked at all) as a special boss-killing treat to save for a rainy day, rather than a regular part of my loadout.
To go along with the shooting, “Destiny 2” also includes a few ‘puzzles’ as well as certain activities with gimmicky ‘mechanics’ that require the user to trial-and-error their way to success (or follow a guide written by people who already did that). While the mechanics are mostly restricted to raids (which we couldn’t do without a full team and without matchmaking), they sometimes appear elsewhere in the form of ridiculously obscure secrets, which are annoying to say the least. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the ‘puzzles,’ which are invariably banal activities involving grabbing a ball of some sort and either stuffing it into a hole of some sort or chucking it at an enemy. This ball-in-hole ‘puzzle’ is used so often, it’s almost a self-deprecating joke, making “Destiny 2” feel, at times, like a balls-in-holes simulator.
While “Destiny 2” is structured as a linear story, with one mission coming after another, and taking place within a confined space for each individual fireteam, no Live Service or other MMO-inspired game worth its salt wouldn’t try to include open world and PvP elements. While playing “Destiny 2” both on my own and with my fireteam, I found a lot to like. The core missions are great, the side adventures (which take place within the open world) are great, Public Events in which randos all band together are great, Lost Sectors (shooting galleries hidden in the open world with a loot crate at the end) are tons of fun to find and clear (even on the umpteenth repetition), and Vangard Strikes – which are essentially mini-raids that can be done with 3 people – provide gobs of things to do and loot to hoard. Many of the optional, repeatable activities employ ‘matchmaking,’ in that, if a player goes in without a full fireteam, the server will match them with other random players to create a full team. Unfortunately, none of the really challenging endgame activities that absolutely require a full team have matchmaking, leaving players to either struggle without a full team, beg for help, or give up.
“Destiny 2” also has a rather unfortunate obsession with PvP activities. In the last MMO Shooter I played, “Defiance,” there was PvP as well, but I never played a single match of it because I didn’t have to in order to experience the whole game and find all of the most fun weapons. In “Destiny 2,” however, an unfortunate number of desirable guns are gated behind PvP participation… and not just participation, but success. This bait tempted me into some of “Destiny 2’s” PvP modes, specifically the fragfest known as Crucible and the time-wasting simulator of teams competing to kill Taken enemies the fastest, known as Gambit. While I found Gambit to be tiresome, repetitive, and a complete waste of time if I didn’t get matchmade onto a competent team (and let me tell you, the MJ Crew does NOT count as a competent team), that mode doesn’t hold a candle to the amount of fury, rage, and hate I feel for the Crucible’s pure team PvP. I toughed out a week of Gambit matches for a mediocre gun I barely ended up using, but with my typical 0.4 K/D ratio in Crucible, I decided it wasn’t worth giving myself an ulcer and simply wrote off ever acquiring a number of fun weapons.
Aside from some semi-mandatory PvP participation, the loot system in “Destiny 2” is quite novel, but has been changed for the worse by Bungie in an attempt to placate some of the players who least need to be placated. When “Destiny 2” launched, all weapons had fixed stats and perk rolls – that is, special properties that typically come two-per gun, along with a few barrel, sight, and magazine mods. This was a really great system, as every legendary weapon would perform the same and players wouldn’t have to grind content over and over hoping for a weapon to drop with good perks randomly rolled on it. Even better, all weapons and armor a player finds are added to their Collection, and can be reacquired at a higher power level in exchange for a handful of easily-acquired materials. This system solved the problem that plagues the ‘Borderlands’ series, with players out-leveling their favorite guns and finding them useless as they progress through the game. Furthermore, it was possible to infuse undesirable guns with high power levels into old, low-leveled favorites in order to bring the lower-level gun up to the higher level. When Bungie released ‘Forsaken,’ however, they changed it so that all legendary weapons (and even armor) moving forward would have randomly rolled perks, and that items with randomly-rolled perks could not be reacquired from the player’s Collection. On top of that, the infusion system was changed so that only higher-level copies of the exact same item could be infused into a lower-leveled item for a sane amount of resources, with other infusions costing a large amount of materials along with a few Enhancement Cores, hard-to-find endgame materials which had previously only been used to apply a Masterwork bonus to a random stat on a gun. While, ultimately, these changes did little to affect endgame players or the obsessed “Destiny 2” streamers who demanded them, the effect on new and up-and-coming players was quite dreadful, making player loadouts a function of the Random Number Generator rather than a strategic decision on the part of the player.
Fortunately, the central object of “Destiny 2’s” loot system – Exotic items – wasn’t affected by the addition of random perks and gimped infusions. Unfortunately, the Exotic item system was just kind of gimped from the outset. See, Exotic items are the top rarity gear in the game, and typically come with some sort of rule-breaking perks or gimmicks that make them much more interesting than a standard weapon or piece of armor of their type. Examples include a revolver that makes enemies explode when killed, and those exploding enemies make other enemies explode in a chain reaction of death; an assault rifle with four barrels that fire all at once, like a 31-round auto-shotgun from hell; a heavy machine gun that causes lightning to strike in the vicinity of its targets; gloves that reload the equipped weapon when the player hits an enemy with a melee attack; and boots that restore a large amount of super energy upon hitting enemies with said super ability, thus allowing it to be used over and over in rapid succession, ignoring the typical cooldown period. There are tons of Exotic items in the game, and most of them are a lot of fun, but “Destiny 2” won’t let players use all of their fun Exotic toys in the name of PvP balance. Thus, players may equip ONE Exotic weapon and ONE Exotic piece of armor at a time. No more.
Overall
Between its breathtaking presentation, thought provoking and classically-inspired lore, and polished gunplay, it’s easy to recommend “Destiny 2” to fans of open-world, loot-based shooters. However, because of its heavy-handed monetization, incomplete narrative, fixation on goading everyone into PvP regardless of whether they like that kind of thing or not, and recent misbegotten changes to the loot system, it’s easy to think of “Destiny 2” as just another disposable Live Service. Still, if you can get your hands on the ‘Forsaken’ bundle – which includes everything except for Annual Pass content – at a discount, you could do worse than to spend a couple months in Bungie’s amazing, yet flawed, world.
Presentation: 4/5
Story: 4/5
Gameplay: 4/5
Overall (not an average): 4/5
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