I wrote before that sometimes you want to think about a game, and sometimes you want to smash things. Destiny lets me do both.
Sometimes the fun of the game is the button-mashing, trigger-happy action. Sometimes, it’s carefully plotting out what needs to be done to meet objectives. Smashing things is the inner core, while thinking about things could be seen as the outer wrapper.
Functionally, Destiny’s inner core hasn’t changed since I started playing it years ago. Run and gun, jump around, kill everything in sight. The difficulty is increased by making the enemies tougher, not smarter. Loot flows like water, quickly getting you to the soft cap.
Not that there’s anything wrong with this. While it’s been fine-tuned and tweaked over and over in its seven year lifespan, the core Destiny experience has remained largely the same because it works. It’s fun. You drop onto the surface of a planet, shoot everything in sight, and get rewarded. Shoot and loot while feeling like a superhero — Destiny captures this perfectly, and it’s a lot of fun.
What surrounds this core has changed repeatedly, though, for better or worse. Most notably, the shift from Destiny: The Taken King to Destiny 2 was drastic enough to make it a new game. What’s interesting is that a lot of the changes made in vanilla Destiny 2 were walked back for the Forsaken update, a year after Destiny 2 launched. Shadowkeep, the current expansion, brings the game even closer to TTK with the introduction of Armor 2.0 and more detailed stats. Yet a stated goal for Destiny 2 was to make the game simpler and more accessible than TTK, which was seen by a lot of Destiny outsiders as confusing and opaque. Trying to explain Destiny to someone who didnt play was difficult.
Of course, one solution to that is to let the game speak for itself, and maybe that was the original Destiny’s problem. I’ve been playing video games for decades, but it took me almost a year to “get” Destiny. If my close friends hadn’t been playing it obsessively, I probably wouldn’t have stuck with it. But now, six years later, almost all of those friends have moved on.
Once I did get it, Destiny became my second life, that other world that I could lose myself in and forget about the stress and cares of the real world. I went from not getting it to easily having more than a thousand hours logged in Destiny 1 when it ended and we moved to Destiny 2.
I was there on launch day for Destiny 2 and for Forsaken. Technically, I was there when The Taken King launched, but I was too low level to notice, and came to it late to the party. And while Destiny 2 was supposed to save the game, I only lasted about four months before I got tired and moved on to other things. The Curse of Osiris expansion was disappointing, with its new map a dirt-track oval and its new strike one of the story missions from its campaign. I came back a little bit for Warmind, and played for a while, and then wandered off again. Four months after Forsaken came out, I was playing something else, and few months after that, I deleted Destiny from my system for the first time ever.
If Destiny 2 was intended to cure all of the supposed ills of The Taken King, then why did I quit playing after a few months? Forsaken was the cure for vanilla Destiny 2, and it also lost my interest. If we roll back to the end of Destiny 1, to the Rise of Iron and the Age of Triumph, I was grinding away daily. Destiny was important to me; it is one of the few games that I actually have clothing for, and it’s one of the only times that I’ve ever completed something in a game that gave me a real world reward. I jumped into Destiny 2 hard, and played hard for months. When Forsaken launched, I was happy to be back into Destiny, but again, I stopped, moved on, and then took the extreme step of deleting Destiny from my hard drive, meaning I wasn’t likely to play it again soon.
I didn’t pay much attention when Shadowkeep was launched, but I did notice that the people in my friends list who were playing Destiny were playing it religiously again. Recently, I found myself casting about for a new game; I had just finished a four month stint in RDO, and wanted something to fill that void. What prompted me to reinstall Destiny was just the urge to run and gun again, to shoot and loot, just those simple actions. Honestly, if I hadn’t been thinking of what I’d like to play and flashed onto a memory of fighting the Fallen in the Sludge, I wouldn’t have reinstalled it on a whim, just to go do that for a while.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. After signing in, I tried to make sense of all the changes that had occurred since I had last played. All of my light levels seemed to have boosted up, but honestly, I can’t remember what they were at before.
After running around and talking to all the people who wanted to talk to me, I set off for the moon to start the Shadowkeep adventure. It was interesting, going back to the moon. In the original Destiny, you mucked around on Earth for a long time, but then the moon was the first place that you went after you got a jump drive. For me, the moon was where I started to get it, though my real ah-ha didn’t come until later, on Venus.
Shadowkeep‘s moon map is a faithful homage to Destiny 1’s moon map. Things are in roughly the same place. If you were familiar with the original, than you’re familiar with the new one. New areas were added, and it feels like the scale was tweaked a little bit, probably to incorporate the new space. The area around the Hellmouth feels smaller, in particular, though for some reason Archer’s Line feels larger to me.
Destiny is like riding a bike. Once I had gotten oriented and had an objective or two, I was able to lose myself in the fun. The game started me out at light level 750, but blues were dropping that allowed me to quickly raise my light to the soft cap of 900. By the time that I got to 900, I had a nice set of purple gear ready to go.
Now, this is where it gets interesting, and where Shadowkeep might be able to hold my interest when Forsaken and vanilla Destiny 2 couldn’t. Back in The Taken King, the way I raised my light past the soft cap was by doing patrols and bounties to grind out faction reputation. Each level of faction rep you achieved awarded you an engram, either weapons or armor or chroma armor, a strange variant of regular armor that didn’t really serve any purpose other than looking cool. It took a while, but at least I had a reason to sign in each day and grind something out, because I felt like I was working towards something.
In Destiny 2 and Forsaken, however, the engrams that you get from factions wouldn’t boost your light. The only way to boost your light was through special engrams called Prime Engrams, which were awarded for completing weekly challenges. The problem was that there was only one weekly challenge per activity, and once you completed it, you had to wait until the weekly reset next Tuesday to do it again.
This was limiting to me because there were only a couple of activities I was interested in, and a lot of activities that I wasn’t. I felt like the game was forcing me to participate in the PvP in the Crucible, or the PvEvP of Gambit, or to do raids, just to advance. As it was, I would sign in at the start of the week, do the two or so challenges I wanted to do in a day or so, and then be basically stuck the rest of the week with nothing to do. Eventually, I found a game to play the rest of the week, and it eventually became the main game I was playing, and Destiny fell by the wayside.
They seem to have tweaked this with Shadowkeep. Engrams in the world are dropping just above my light. Not much, but enough to keep gradually bringing my light up. There are still weekly challenges, but they no longer seem to be the be all, end all of how to raise your light. I hit 900 at the start of the week. Since then, I’ve only completed two weekly challenge, but I’m now at 907, thanks to doing different quests and bounties.
What I loved doing in Destiny was open world bounties. Now in Shadowkeep, I can get a complicated series of bounties and have to figure out different ways to complete them, and they help me work towards the goal of gradually raising my light. I think there’s a decent out wrapper, and the core is the same as it’s always been, which is so very, very good. Maybe Shadowkeep is the formulation that gets me back into Destiny again.