Destined for Greatness?

As the beta for Bungie’s forthcoming MMO/FPS hybrid Destiny ground to a halt on Sunday, many Guardians were left wondering what to do in the six weeks or so until its release on September 9th. And even though I’m not really a Halo fan, I shared this sentiment. Although I can appreciate Halo’s contribution as a genre- (and system-) defining game, it’s a series that never really grabbed me, so imagine my surprise as I found myself enthusiastically embracing a game that my friend introduced as “the Halo RPG”. Perhaps it was the game’s tone, which evoked a unique sense of seventies sci-fi mysticism (courtesy of mysterious floating orbs and moon-wizards), which initially grabbed me; but it was the solid mechanical precision of the combat that kept me repeating the handful of missions on offer long beyond the point I could justifiably claim it as idle curiosity.

Each of these events, the game’s equivalent of WoW’s quests, is scripted and paced like a mission from a FPS campaign, with highs and lows of action, shifting objectives and a narrative pay out.

You see, the thing that’s always turned me off MMOs is their core gameplay that tends to revolve around clicking on things until they die and waiting for skill timers to cool down, so you can click on more stuff. Even MMOs that give you direct control of your character have failed to shake this automated approach to combat. Where Destiny excels is in using the structure and progression systems of an MMO, but building around it the engaging gameplay of a shooter, so even the slightest encounter is a test of skill.

Each mission in the game sees you entering a public area and making your way to an instanced ‘dungeon’ either solo or in a fire team of up to three players, which is a remarkably seamless process. Each of these events, the game’s equivalent of WoW‘s quests, is scripted and paced like a mission from a FPS campaign, with highs and lows of action, shifting objectives and a narrative pay out. In fact I found this aspect of the game so engaging that I often forgot I was playing an MMO at all, particularly during dramatic moments like the fight with a floating mechanical eye (a kind of sci-fi take on Dungeons & Dragons’ Beholders) that forms the final encounter of the beta’s ‘strike mission’.

During the two weeks of the beta I’d endeavoured to get all three classes — Titan, Warlock and Hunter — up to the level cap in order to try and make the decision about which one I’d rather play as. My feeling is, although the Hunter and Warlock have interesting skill trees, the Titan is a lot more forgiving to those of us who aren’t FPS aficionados. The fact that he has a whole lot more armour means you’ll die a lot less and his skills are a lot easier to use, with Fists of Havok particularly useful for getting out of tight spots. The Hunter’s initial Gunslinger class, by comparison, summons a golden gun as its special, giving you three powerful shots; but you’ll have to aim carefully if you don’t want to waste them, meaning that the class will be better suited to highly skilled players. For each class two sub-classes were visible, each with their own unique and quite large skill tree, and you can only assume that there will be others, resulting in a decent variety of play styles along the lines of the Mass Effect classes.

The beta saw thousands of players scouring the post-apocalyptic landscape of Russia, dancing in the Tower or shooting each other down in the Crucible (the game’s PVP area). When Bungie briefly opened up the moon at the end of it all, I was there like a flash, eager for new content, which leaves me to worry just how much world there will be to explore from the outset given Bungie’s plans to expand the game over the course of the next decade. The abandoned Russian cosmodrome, which we’ve seen in the alpha and the beta, is an evocative setting but given the game’s epic sense of scale and grandeur, hopefully there will be a range of equally interesting settings on Earth and the off world colonies of Mars, Mercury and Venus. The ships that carry you to and from your missions seem like mere cosmetic items for the time being (mounts that only appear in loading screens), but could a future expansion introduce space combat along the lines of Star Citizen? More so than Peter Dinklage’s voice acting and the true origins of the game’s wizards, it is this question of content that is the biggest mystery hanging over Destiny and the thing that can make or break it.