http://brkeogh.com/2014/09/14/notes-on-destiny/Quote:
1. Destiny is a ‘well designed’ game in the way a chair might be well designed or a lampshade might be well designed. It is the IKEA Billy bookshelf of videogames: safe, sturdy, inoffensive; as a Billy bookshelf does a very competent job of being a bookshelf in the most generic, conventional sense so that there is not a home that a Billy bookshelf would look strange in, Destiny is a very competent game in the most generic, conventional sense. It’s the safest possible game Activision and Bungie could have created. Like some kind of ur-videogame object. Maddy Myers said on Twitter yesterday that it looks like the kind of videogame you would see in the background of a film, and she’s not wrong. It is derivative, generic, and conservative; but not in the sense that it fails to achieve some innovative greatness that it is aiming for. Rather, it is clearly derivative, generic, and conservative by intent. It doesn’t want to be something creatively progressive or imaginative. How then to evaluate it? I typically like to approach a game on its own terms. Not in some sort of ‘authorial intent’ kind of way. Rather: what does the game tell me about what it is striving to achieve, and how well does it achieve that? Destiny tells me it just wants to be a safe, competent videogame object, and it achieves that very well. So therefore it is ‘good’, I guess. But there is nothing here critically or meaningfully or thematically. There’s no depth. It’s a bookshelf. It’s an object. But it wants to be an object. Ok the
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5. So there is a lot of Halo here. But Destiny also lacks what made Halo interesting. It’s hard to over-estimate just how satisfying Halo‘s battles were with the explicit hierarchy of enemies: cowardly grunts, elusive jackals, and cunning elites. Every single elite felt like fighting an equal to Master Chief, and they felt that way, in large part thanks to the many grunts and jackals backing them up. Every encounter was a strategy of figuring out how to pick off the small enemies without being destroyed by the elite, so that then you could destroy the elite without being destroyed by them. It was a juggle of weapons, where individual weapons did not matter so much as what combination of weapons you had. There was so much moment-to-moment strategising that people often fail to appreciate, instead remembering it as the conventional run-and-gun modern shooter that it helped to normalise on consoles. Destiny lacks that. It has interesting-to-fight enemies, to be sure. But they are all the same except for a slightly different placed weak point. Some areas are satisfying to fight in, constantly moving and spinning and throwing knives and grenades. But it’s all grunts and no elites. Even the tougher enemies like wizards don’t require any real kind of strategy, just more bullets. It’s wrong to fault Destiny for not being Halo, but as its similarities help us detail its strengths, this difference helps us detail its weaknesses: Destiny is not strategically interesting. It is just running-and-gunning.