Destiny is a frequent topic of conversation around Kotaku‘s team chat. Some of us play the game religiously, others have barely played. All of us struggle to get our heads around how a game can be so simultaneously brilliant and maddening.
Kirk, Patricia And Stephen Talk About How Maddening Destiny Is
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6 responses to “Kirk, Patricia And Stephen Talk About How Maddening Destiny Is”
The example of destiny being enjoyed by friends online, should be the perfect kickstarter conversation of how much extra praise do I give a game because of my friendships, instead of the quality of the game.
When playing Destiny with strangers online I never had one fun/good experience. Destinys gameplay across the board in my opinion does support the conclusion that Destiny has good quality gameplay shown by either in single player or online with strangers.
If the game hast to stand up to real scrutiny, the bias of your friendships should always be taken out of the equation and then judged from there.
You can then add in your play with your friends as a valid experience, but it’s not something that the game should be more given much more credit for, than your friendships.
See, I don’t know about that. I think that those friendships and their quality SHOULD be factored into your appraisal of the game.
Bungie specifically didn’t allow matchmaking for things like the raids because they understand how crucial these friendships are to the game. Their game design indicates that the act of playing with friend was a key component of their design considerations, and they took a big risk on things like the raid in the hope you would use your friendships to experience the game. It’s the same with the weekly heroic / nightfall strikes as well (the key reasons, along with the raids, to load it up every week).
It’s not some accidental thing that makes the game better, playing with friends was a clearly a key requirement to the full enjoyment of this game, and as such, it should be considered as not “extra praise” but simply praise, for the game’s ability to facilitate and encourage those moments with your friends.
I said that both should be done. But almost no-one separates the games itself as a serious criticism, and differentiate that from the bias of friendships. Friendship bias and enjoyment, in no way near as much, should get credit towards the game systems itself. I’d love to hear who does that.
Games with multiplayer get far more credit, and can get away with much more, now, and more so in the future, because publishers have already worked this out.
Publishers will release a shorter developed, undercooked, homogenous, derivative…..multiplayer, because gamers bias and their friendship bias, has the vast majority of unthinking and uncritical gamers self willingly easy to exploit.
This is one of the reasons that single player will diminish in importance going forward and I like single player games just as much.
I’m preparing others, and sounding a warning to those who want to listen. If not, then expect no pressure from gamers to get way better games than we deserve.
Destiny, as Bungie’s easily worst game in many years, still has the exploitation hooks of multi, loot and gamer bias…to feed that mindset of people won’t don’t really want to criticise how bad the game really is.
Destiny as a severely undercooked and underdeveloped game, as well as pales in comparison to it backlog, is the perfect warning sign, and I’m not seeing fightback from those that need to say more.
I don’t like the trend toward multiplayer-only/heavy games. I couldn’t give less of a shit about ANYTHING in the world than MOBAs, F2P PVP lobby shooters, or eSports. Well. Maybe I care less about youtube ‘celebrities’, but multiplayer fad games are big up on that list. It’s kind of depressing that companies like Blizzard are moving to embrace that side of things whole-heartedly, leaving behind the single-player I crave.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a corporate decision based on how much easier it is to make money off ’emergent gameplay’ instead of actually creating content. Who wants to bet that’s why Destiny’s story is one of the most shallow pieces of dross told in the most uninspired way you’ll see in gaming since Doom-clones started slapping some text on a story-card in between levels? Who wants to bet that’s why the lead writer quit mid-production? I’m going to hazard a guess that doing the story justice with all those chopped-out cut-scenes shown in dev diaries, all those grimoire cards and quest objectives which vanished and were altered to make no sense… crafting a compelling, well-directed experience was either philosophically dangerous to the, “Nah, we need to get the CoD-bros, all PVP and ‘bring your friends brah!’ co-op blasting, all this space wizard shit is way too geeky,” execs, or was going to result in missing deadline. Which, with this much money on the line…
But that said… Single-player will always be doing OK. As long as people want to tell a story, they’ll tell that story. And sometimes – quite often – games will be the medium they use.
And I wouldn’t rule out greed, either. Destiny got fucking hammered in reviews. The expansion was way too late to pull it out of its narrative nose-dive, but you can see in the first couple minutes the signs of devs paying attention. There’s no Dinklage, for starters. Exposition is delivered by Eris, instead. (Again, a fundamental lack of understanding as to how you build rich, meaningful characters on Bungie’s part… if they had any awareness as to what the complaints were, Dinklage would’ve been reacting with you to Eris’ talkytalk. Dialogue is always better for character/world-building than monologue. Which they still haven’t yet mastered.) And in the first minute of landing on the new missions, you get to use the sword everyone gushed over from the Sword of Crota mission. So they’re ham-fistedly trying to please us, without really showing that they know exactly why people were pissed.
It’s like they looked at all the multiplayer mechanics and systems in wow and thought “we can do it better, we’re bungie” then royally did everything in a horrible fashion.
like, so much falterings