Photo by Bungie
By Chris Parsons
Let's just start this off right... I am a fanboy. The experience delivered by Destiny and Destiny 2 has been nothing short of immersive and I cannot offer enough praise for that. The biggest complaint that I have seen has been that they skimp on story while they are creating a beautiful game. I can see pouring time and resources into something that is visually stunning, so that isn't a deal breaker for me, but I understand that there are people that crave brilliant storytelling. ( I just want to punch things and throw grenades.) The PVP is topnotch and a freaking blast.
One thing that destiny has done often and fairly well is provide updates and expansions for the games. I'm not going to get into bugs or glitches, but you can do some googling and get the laundry list of glitches and fixes. They have given a few expansions away but have made us pay for most of them. While I understand this from a financial standpoint, it is disappointing as a consumer, seeing as very little changes from expansion to expansion. You may be fighting more Vex than Taken today, but it's the same thing, and I'm not the biggest fan of that redundancy. I would like to see new antagonists introduced especially when spending $20 for the next little bit of content so that I can remain relevant on the PVP side of things, but lets see what the future holds. I have enjoyed playing the Curse of Osiris expansion, and flying from level 20-25. Seriously, I could not believe how fast those five levels went by on my titan.
Clans! I have always been a primary solo player, even though I know that there is an awesome community out there, but recently I received a random clan invite and thought I should give it a whirl. I love that there is a level?reward system for clans. It's cool being rewarded for group contributions, and it's like getting extra stuff for something you were already going to be doing. I have had limited interaction with my clan, but the little bit that I have had has been positive. I'm sold!
With shaders and gear in Destiny 2 I haven't been super impressed. I liked using a single shader to change the look of all of my gear, but I do like being able to change the color on weapons, ships and sparrows. It's just fun! You don't like the green jump ship that you just received, make it another color. It doesn't really effect game-play, but it looks bad ass. Then we get a bunch of the exotic gear that was available in the first release, and it performs basically as expected. Great! You don't have to rely as much on getting the "god roll" that you did in the vanilla version and I think that's awesome too. With that said, there are those weapons that just hit a sweet spot. They may even perform better than an exotic weapon, and you just live this digital destroyer of evil. How do you get to make it better? Masterwork! It doesn't really give you an unfair edge, but it helps to generate orbs on multikills on a gun that you are already dominant with. Then the bragging rights that come with the body count, proudly displayed on that weapon. It's just beautiful.
With the story mode in the game you get beautiful cut scenes that give you an idea of why you just killed a room of 50 Cabal. There are also several planets for you to explore and partake in public events. When It comes to open world games I love getting to unite with strangers to defeat a common foe. The one thing that I would like to see is open world PVP. As a former WoW player I have spent so much time ganking players who were only attempting to complete what should have been simple quests. Something about that is just so fulfilling and it is the itch that Destiny just can't scratch.
If you couldn't tell, I'm enamored by the player vs player element of games. I love the Crucible and I love the competitive playlists even more! I have noticed some latency issues and at first suspected my internet connection, but realized as I played that I too was killing people after they were already behind cover or no longer in my line of site. This could be an auto aim issue, it could be server latency or it could be bad internet connections, all I know is it's frustrating... Mostly when it isn't working in my favor... I love being able to level a character in with PVP and they give you a prime opportunity to do so in these games. The folks at Bungie have once again managed to offer a smooth, mostly perfect experience player vs player experience and my hat is off to them for that.
In conclusion, Destiny and Destiny 2 are a blast and you can easily get lost in playing them. Are they perfect? No. Are they fun and beautiful? Hell yes! If you haven't already get a copy and play. Destiny 2 is available on Xbox one PS4 and PC. Thanks for reading
Stay Geeky!