With the Destiny beta having come and gone, and a total figure of 4,638,937 unique players having participated in the game’s beta — according to Activision — many doubts have been put to rest over Bungie’s upcoming AAA title, but many still remain. Essentially, the game can be described as Halo meets Borderlands meets World of Warcraft, and its strength and flaws reflect this.
Destiny is built on a foundation that strongly resembles Bungie’s own sci-fi classic, Halo — the characters, vehicles, weapons, and, especially, the landscapes draw heavily from the company’s past, and it’s often hard to get away from the Halo-esque vibe that the game gives off, as you pass through cutscenes that wouldn’t seem out of place in Halo 5: Guardians. Incidentally, the fact that your playable character is referred to as a “guardian”, means that confusion may well reach “Is Ellen Page the girl in The Last of Us?” levels (for those wondering, the answer is no). Likewise, gameplay follows the classic loop of a bubble of action — engaging NPCs in a firefight — interspersed with a little exploration. Then, repeat the same in the next mission. The combat feels weighty and connected — very much in the Borderlands territory — but the enemy A.I. seems stuck restlessly prowling but displaying little innovation, a last-gen relic in a supposedly genre-redefining game. Like Borderlands, and many games like it, you’re drip-fed a steady flow of loot in new weapons and armour, and XP in order to level up, but nothing that stands out in the memory.
Destiny looks unlikely to reinvent the genre in the same way that Halo: Combat Evolved did over a decade before, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t be worth the effort when it releases in September. While the aesthetics and gameplay may be reminiscent of its spiritual predecessors, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Halo, Borderlands and World of Warcraft all remain immensely popular games, and creating something new by merging already established ideas has paid off in the past, and will no doubt do so in the future. Take Mario Kart, for example, which combined classic Nintendo characters with arcade racing games and became one of Nintendo’s foundation titles. Derivative they may be, but it is hard to label the aesthetics of Destiny as anything other than breath-taking. The worlds that you travel through may resemble the Halo universe, but it’s Halo at its best, and that’s a lot to be said.
Similarly, the three unique character classes — Titan, Hunter and Warlock — all manage to feel uniquely different, providing a fresh perspective on gameplay. The Titan is your standard tank, capable of taking and dealing out a lot of damage, but does not have the same long range abilities as the other two. The Hunter is the stealth class, giving you the option of making precise kills from long range, but suffers at close combat, and its special ability is somewhat underwhelming. The Warlock grants you the ability to effectively carry out both close and long-range attacks, balancing out your options.
The three unique races — Human, Awoken and Mech, appear to be entirely aesthetic, and will not impinge upon the storyline. While the ability to customise your character is impressive, and allows for a wide variety of appearance among players, the lack of explanation as to what the Awoken actually are, and why you can play as them, really catches your attention. While we have only seen the game in its beta form, it’s yet to be seen how much further the full game will expand on this universe’s backstory, and this leads on to one of the biggest flaws in the Beta.
There is very, very little story. Throughout the beta, only three cutscenes appear, which do just enough to lay the scene before you as you step into this new world, and attempt to ensure the survival of humanity in the face of evil. We are not introduced to any real villain, instead thrown into combat against a handful of repetitive enemy types, and that could be a real concern down the road, if it’s not rectified in the full release. Your Ghost — the ever-present, relentless A.I. companion voiced by Peter Dinklage (Halo comparisons will, no doubt, resume at this point) — does little to expand upon these cutscenes, and indeed, has become one of most constantly criticised aspects of the game. Since the Alpha version of the game, Dinklage’s voice has been modified with a robotic filter, in order to quell the complaints that the Ghost sounds too detached from the events of the game, though personally I found this to be an unnecessary addition. Similarly, the now infamous moon-wizard line has been removed from the game, though lingers on in meme-form.
The lack of story is the real concern though, in the face of an announcement by Bungie that the beta contained roughly 10% of the full retail game. The beta itself took only a handful of hours to complete, and the multiplayer element, while enjoyable, offered only one gametype – a Domination style match, with three command posts up for grabs at different areas on the map, and victory achieved by a team holding these posts until they gained a set number of points. In the face of this, Destiny’s replayability – a vital aspect of today’s video games industry – is in doubt, particularly for a game that has set itself up to be the first AAA FPS MMORPG (abbreviations seem to be thrown out more and more, these days).
Ultimately, the Destiny beta delivered a sample of what looks to be an interesting game, but it didn’t justify Bungie’s claims that this game will begin a franchise that will last a decade. Of course, it is far too early to condemn a game at this point — we’ve only seen the beta, at this point — but I would recommend that those on the fence about this game should wait for reviews of the retail version to come out, as it doesn’t look like quite the slam-dunk that we had been expecting.
Destiny is released 9 September, 2014 on PS4, PS3, Xbox One and Xbox 360.
