So that guy is saying that Bungie packaged a collection of limited and repetitive content into a shooter with fantastic mechanics and they used the best psychological techniques available to hook us into an extremely mentally addicting reward system, and that is why we keep playing...
Yes. This is one of the best analyses of the game I have seen and it's worth watching. Absolutely fantastic work, and I'm pretty sure I agree with every word, If you are at all interested in what Destiny
means, especially in terms of how it relates to game design as a whole (rather than just one piece of entertainment you might enjoy or not), I urge you to watch it. If you have for some reason desired my ranting thoughts to be delivered in the form of a youtube video, go
here.
I love this part:
"I think the reason that Destiny is so contentious and really divisive is it's kind of one of the purest examples of what games
are."
Destiny is one of the most "videogamey" games I've played in years. If you want a game to transport you- via character development, plot twists, esoteric design choices, unprecedented mechanics- into a state where you kind of forget that you're ultimately just wasting your time playing a videogame... Destiny is a failure flat-out. But as an
entrant in the honest, up-front timewasters category, it's one of the best the world has ever seen. That's not to say by any stretch that it's a bad idea for games to aim high and attempt to do this- make you forget, even for the briefest instant, that you're even
playing a game, or at least examine the act beyond the experience of doing so- but if the market was dominated by games that attempted to "be
The Last of Us" or "be
Spec Ops: The Line" or "be
Journey," the
bad games with that design ethos would be absolutely intolerable. Sometimes, it's okay for a game to be just a game.
I honestly got goosebumps when he started talking about what "genre" Destiny belongs to because I was 100% sure of where he was going. No, it's not an MMO. It's certainly not a standard online shooter either. I've said since launch that the game it reminds me most of, the game with the most similar core gameplay loop, is Phantasy Star Online. I apologize to anyone who loves that series' plot, but am I supposed to remember said plot? Did it have one? I remember the planet was called Rygel, I'm pretty sure. I think Mags were actually alive? *shrug*
Now, I fucking LOVED that game, I played it nonstop on a 56k modem on my Dreamcast which alone blew my mind. I remember falling asleep with school the next morning and waking up with the controller loosely still in my hands. it was just a blast. and Destiny makes me feel like THAT again. It's an itch that games don't often even attempt to scratch because it can go so wrong, and I think that a lot of the superficial criticism of it would argue that it did all go wrong in this case. That ultimately, Destiny is more of a missed opportunity than something special.
But just look, it's still October, we're in fucking OT9. I'm pretty sure someone about there will be immediately thinking, "bah! if the whole game wasn't filled with shit to complain about and get pissed at, we would never have been talking about it so much." But that's just not how it works. Bad games, failures, it's not continuous criticism that tells the tale. It's silence. People stop complaining about them, in that they stop talking about them altogether. That, as a developer, is your worst nightmare- far more than the most hateful vitriol you can conjure to toss Bungie's way. And GAF has
not been silent on the topic of Destiny.
