Destiny

The biggest disappointment that you will continue to play.

It's better to keep your expectations very low for this game, yet it has some high points. When Bungie boasted that this universe was going to be as rich and diverse as the Star Wars Universe, that is making quite a statement. Making such a claim was only tempting fate, just like the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable. Bungie basically started working on this game after they finished and launched Halo: Reach in 2010. For the amount of time they had to work on this game they have failed to deliver on the boast. What was Bungie doing with all this time? Visually they have a nice looking game. The differences in the guardian character are well balanced, they are fun to play with, and you will end up playing all three. They have taken a shooter and merged it with a MMORPG set in a sci-fi universe. I would say that is far from revolutionary or in any kind of groundbreaking territory. They have made small innovations in the game, most notably you can now hold three weapons and access them all quickly with one button. Tapping the Y button will switch between your primary and special weapons, but holding the Y button lets you switch to a third heavy weapon. Why has someone not thought of this sooner? That is a simply way to solve a problem that is amazing really when you think about it.

There are also some great individual designed items within the game, for example items such as the Dragon Breath heavy weapon & the Shroud of Flies Hunter cape. The Dragon Breath is a heavy weapon that when not in use emits steam from the dangerous end. Using the weapon turns the exhaust ports red hot. Little details like this is what the entire game needed from the start which should have been applied across the entire world. They had the time, but squandered it. What Bungie failed miserably at in this game was providing a good story and game content. It is pretty sad that there is more to do in Elder Scroll's Oblivion which came out almost 10 years ago then what this game has to offer. Instead of creating a compelling in game story you need to unlock Gilmore cards (That is what I have dubbed them) in the game. You are then expected to travel outside the game to the Bungie web site to read these cards to somehow figure out the fragmented story there. These Gilmore cards are full of nonsense and I don't care to spend the time to do their job for them. This brings me to the worst dialogue I have ever heard in a game. The now infamous " I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain " dialogue that The Stranger vomits during one of the mission cinematic. Yet the character had enough time to utter this nonsense twice (What a mook of a character, maybe she should go get the papers, get the papers. To bad you can't hang her on a meat hook in a refrigerated truck and never see her again).

If you bought the $30 season pass, you will also be disappointed. For one it comes with zero new achievements. This was one of those hugely anticipated type of game and Bungie skimps on the achievements? At least some new achievements would have made the DLC semi-tolerable. The DLC just continues the unending grind of leveling your equipment, armor, and light levels. When you have three characters your bank and inventory is constantly full. You have to waste a good deal of time managing space. If you worked hard for an item why should you be forced to destroy it because you don't have any more room in your bank? The continuing story is just as thin as it is in the original game. The content is even thinner then the base game. The end raid in the first expansion was beaten by a single Hunter when Bungie designed it for six people. Kudos to the Hunter, but that is ridiculous. With this expansion you would expect the content to at least doubled. It is no where near enough to justify the price tag and the time sink the game becomes. The biggest slap in the face is the DLC offered a year after the release of the base game, The Taken King. Properly named because you have to pay another $40 for the content when you already purchased a season pass. They can justify the added cost because it has been a year since launch. The new expansion doesn't add any great content, but it adds additional micro transactions in the hopes that you will buy new dance moves and emotes. At this point this is where you are " Taken " to the cleaners by the developer and the publisher.

The Taken King/Year two has completely revamped the game. It took four years to release a game that they then redesign in a span of one year. That just says they got it wrong the first time. The dynamics of playing the characters are still the same, but how you interface with the exact same quests and missions is different. You could say that is has improved. The bank is expanded, but you will find yourself in the same spot as before destroying items you have earned. The expansion has some new abilities, new missions, and a new raid. The light and armor ratings are different and have more meaning now. The joke of it all is that after another month the game is exactly the same before the revamp. You will be grinding out more equipment and abilities with the same limited redundant missions with a week nonsense of a story. Bungie is clever in disguising old content as new DLC. Mostly by letting you run through maps backward, by coloring the same character models as a white to black gradient, and blurring your view of the world when you run into these " New " enemies. Even if you just purchased the game a year later with all the DLC for $60 instead of $130 a lot of gamers shelled out you would not be getting your money's worth. This was Bungie's chance to be great again, but all that effort went to waste. They instead partnered with a no vision publisher and thought that it was more important to milk gamers for $130+ for an overly repetitive mash up of a game.