About the Destiny 2 Beta, I half-joked: "Hmm. A less-polished, half-framerate Halo. But it's a start!" We might say the same thing now, at the eight-month anniversary of launch, except we'd be wrong. Nearly all in-game activities share only vestigial DNA with John-117's odyssey. But! Your favorite sub-optimal solo queuer isn't touching those various in-game activities in the first place. No, our typical gaming session on Destiny 2 looks pretty much exactly like it did in the Beta, which is to say, quickplay after quickplay, often with map repetition sufficient to inspire Beta flashbacks, to boot.
I found the campaign to be a chore. Taking me wholly out of the experience: I cannot get behind the silent player-character design choice, which turns the player into a robot assassin capable of story arc and agency only to the same extent as your everyday General Atomics MQ-1 Predator.
Pictured: Your Guardian, with Ghost
Beyond the story's having no chance to function properly (that is, grab me, move me, make me care about any plot point or other character or stir any interest in finding out what comes next) without a protagonist, there was the nonsense of it within the established game universe logic. One could tell, from the start, "okay, so we're pretending Rasputin doesn't exist. And that the Fallen and Hive would be cool with a new enemy faction encroaching on their terrestrial footholds. That the Vanguard's first move wouldn't be to queue all the light-strapped Guardians up to get zapped back to omnipotence by the Dead Zone shard. And that the Traveler was just waiting all along for the right moment to rise from the dead and ex machina the ever-loving hell out of our difficulties."
I screen capped my friend's name in the credits (he is a lead tools engineer) and posted the picture on Facebook. I wrote, honestly, "[C]ongratulations on this milestone. You are a lead among tools! Seriously though, all the player community folks I know are over the moon about it."
It was honest reportage. Folks *were* over the moon. At the time, there in that first week, most were glad to have cutscenes and a collection of plot points they could deem to be "story." But everything since has been communal sighs or outcries tempered by the occasional giving of "propers" for things like quality raid encounters or promised improvements—some since realized, some deferred.
My worry, in the final weeks and months of Destiny 1, centered around the fact that I thought year 3 Destiny 1 was damn near perfect. Re-tooling things for a sequel seemed likely to frustrate my enjoyment, at least enough to downgrade Destiny from "#1 hobby" to "game I play sometimes." The *feel* of the first game, more than anything else about it, was a precious thing to me. There was unmatched perfection in how it felt to shoot, to jump, to let fly my skip 'nade pretties. In addition, there was the sense, always, of striving for more. E.g., I was blessed with a pretty nice collection of Eyaslunas, but I was ever on the lookout for The One - the WishYouLuck special (sureshot, rangefinder, rifled barrel, luck in the chamber). And the power fantasy of my guardian was borne out in the ability to solo almost every Nightfall strike.
But at the end of D1, after the glory of Age of Triumphs faded, the game population dwindled and it seemed like so much of the community was giving other games a try, all of us party to an unspoken agreement that we'd come back together, as one, come the launch of Destiny 2.
That coming together - that one-ness - proved incomplete, short-lived and ultimately illusory. Not everyone came back, or did so fleetingly. New clanmates popped in, migrated to PC and then off the game entirely. Crucible gods climbed down from their peaks, judged the scene harshly, and sprinted to promised riches in some cartoonish third-person battle royale or another.
August 2018: On the eve of Forsaken, a visit to Bungie
Family vacation took us through Seattle. We naturally visited with our good friends who live there. They are a couple, with the husband (let's call him "Randall") having undergone a career change from school teacher to game developer. Our prior visit was ten years earlier, when Randall was still with Microsoft Studios and installed on site at Bungie's old location to help with Halo:ODST testing. But by the time of this 2018 visit, Randall had officially moved over to Bungie and had been there long enough to be part of the "Old School" (he'd been "Middle School," with the t-shirt to prove it, when he'd visited us out east a few months after launch). Now, knowing how much I enjoy the game, Randall offered to show me around the offices. The fam and I waited outside the studios for closing time (which, surprisingly given the imminent launch of a major expansion, was 6:30 pm), posed for pictures with the Destiny logo and the Bungie releases timeline pasted on the wall outside the main entrance. Luke Smith blithely strolled out just before 6:30 and I let him pass unmolested (as required by my
Inside, Randall showed me just about everything there is to see. Almost none of it particularly noteworthy, save the following:
-- After hours, the place is properly empty, save a few scatter souls attending to their coding (or, in the case of one conference room, watching 70's kung fu movies, with at least a couple recognizable design leads in attendance).
-- A couple dozen PS4s and XB1s are perpetually stress testing running the D2 software. I didn't press regarding fail rates. Damn. Next time.
-- Near the second level rock wall, there is a large dual-screen display showing the current population by console/PC, among other tidbits.
-- Throughout the hundreds of unmanned work stations, I spotted far more XB controllers than PS controllers. FTFW.
-- This was not a one-person community summit, mind you, but I put in a request: give us an emblem that tracks rumble 1st place (or even just podium) finishes. Still waiting, *Randall*.
A couple of pictures:
Clan's pretty much gone. It was built around a Destiny podcast that ended about 9 months ago. But that's okay. Clan was mostly just a thing to display a couple letters at a time in my emblem on someone else's death screen. I miss the active discord, but I scratch that itch in another discord now. Sub to a couple of Twitch channels at any given moment, remain not very active, and hit up the Bungie-created D2 app if and when I need to team up for something like the Outbreak Perfected mission or Thorn strike. The rest is quietly soloing to pinnacle weapons and then not using them very much, if at all. (Other than Recluse, which is a 100% of the time must for endgame PvE.) Not sure whether I'll have much to say about the current or near-future states of things in D2, except to affirm, for now, that it is back to hobby status, if it ever left. It's fine.
This is fine.
