So, it has been a while. There is one very big reason for my long absence. Destiny (the game). Having anticipated this game for more than a few years, I was immediately consumed by its daily grind. As one who had scoffed at the effects of MMOs and their soaking up of free time, I was genuinely surprised at the time I have spent on this game.
However, the fallout is that I lost time writing, time spent with family and time developing my own interests and pursuits. A completely unfair trade. Even until a week or two ago, shortly after the "year two" version of the game was released, I was still having internal debates regarding exactly how much time I needed to gather this sort of material or in search of that particular weapon or armor piece.
I've spent hours playing Skyrim and Falllout 3. Long nights playing Mass Effect (exploring every nook of every planet). Destiny completely wiped out those investments in time. Where I might once have spent a week or two (possibly with a few overnighters) playing through the story of a game, Destiny kept me going for
months seeking more powerful gear, more materials for upgrades and greater PvP accomplishments (something that was never a concern, prior to Destiny).
I'm still trying to understnd it. I may never really do so. I really can't stand games without stories. I have still not played through all the side missions in Fallout 3 after many, many hours of play. Each time I pick up that game, it has something new to give. Where as Destiny only offers the same thing, over and over. The grind. One more shader, one more gun. A slightly more powerful set of gauntlets.
Only recently, after a year on the market in players hands, did Destiny actually come up with a decent and engaging story. I don't know why I accepted that sort of game quality from Bungie. I am not a teenager, willing to try anything out, having experienced very little of quality games. I cut my teeth on Ultima, Legend of Zelda and Baldur's Gate. Story and gameplay matter to me. I'm not a mindless shooter. But Bungie somehow convinced me that was the kind of player I am. Bungie. The creators of Halo. A genre-defining game, in most part, because of the storytelling. Halo 4 took a deep dive from that standard, in part because 343 Industries just didn't have the storytelling chops for the takeover.
And I don't think it was too much to ask or hope that I would have a similarly expansive experience with Destiny. The raids were good. In fact, having never played WoW, I can easily say that the Vault of Glass (VoG) really set the standard for raids - challenging gameplay, challenging puzzles, and a required system of teamwork. Really stupendous.
But the raids added nothing to the story. In fact, we really only get hints at the larger story now with side missions from The Taken King (the latest update to Destiny). Sure, there are little "grimoire" cards that you receive as you find special items throughout the game, or complete specific milestones in gameplay. But that's not story. Especially if what you functionally have to do is go through disparate pieces of information, collect them like so many post-it notes and then assemble them in an assumed order to reveal a character narration or two. That's just not a story. Certainly not a story Bungie is capable of.
So I sit here, in a cafe, dumbfounded as to what kept me playing for so long. I think what really happened was that I became habituated to the rewards that I could receive each week (in year one) and actually sought out the comfort of having a small goal to attain each day. And don't mistake me. I am not really blaming Bungie for this - I am just as at fault for seeing an obvious trap and willingly falling into it. Also, Destiny has the sharpest gunplay I have ever had the honor to experience. So many guns that add so many unique ways to play through the game. But expending ammo isn't the be-all and end-all of any game, no matter how convincingly Bungie presents it.
What has changed? Well, for one thing, the daily small set of goals are gone. The economy has essentially flipped to something I cannot understand and which does not really reward me in a way that I can perceive as valuable. The new raid (King's Fall) requires far too much teamwork and investment of time to be valuable to me. The raid is essentially broken into four (or five?) encounters, the last of which can take an hour with an inexperienced team or with one player uninterested in following team guidance. It is essentially a minimum 3-4 hour time investment which you may have to just give up on as your teammates tire and decide to stop their Sisyphean task
Believe me, I've been through that on both the previous raids. Getting two or three friends together with a couple of randoms and then attempting VoG was often a nightmare. And VoG could regularly be done in about 40 minutes with an experienced, if not perfect, team. I don't want to, and cannot afford to, go through that with a 3-4 hour time investment. Something like that is just not possible for me.
What else has changed? Better to ask what has not. Destiny's PvP experience is a mess. In an effort to improve the gameplay experience and, I assume, with the expectation that most players in an online-only game would be coming in with a good-to-great network connection, Bungie developed netcode that essentially handed off server duties to the consoles. What does this mean exactly? Well, no one can really tell for sure, because Bungie has been completely secretive about how they actually handle matchmaking in terms of network quality and skill. There are some basic results I can personally report, however.
People with bad network connections are given advantage over those with a better connections. Pre-made fireteams (a six-player team made prior to matchmaking) are given a huge advantage, not just because of the ability to communicate with teammates, but because they are almost exclusively matched with a group of random players. Pre-made fireteams with one "bad-network" member are given further advantage. Matchmaking eventually shifts further and further geographically as you improve, as Bungie's matchmaking servers have a harder time matching you with players at your skill level also looking to start a game, locally. So how does this all happen?
Well, remember that in a match type called Control, where there are two teams of six playing against each other to control three objectives, each player can act as the "server" or host, and the other eleven players are clients. Good gameplay requires that each of the clients report in to the host on schedule (in terms of milliseconds) and if they don't, then one or more players create high latency, or "lag."
If you do not have the correct ports open on your router or cannot open them for some reason (you're playing on your university's network), you will almost always have high latency. Or if you are geographically distant from someone, you could have high latency. Or you could be intentionally increasing your latency by purposefully not opening ports, installing a "lag switch" on your ethernet cable, or by causing high traffic between you and another player via software (DoS or DDoS).
The point is, Bungie has done next to nothing to address this issue in the course of the year Destiny has been out. Occasionally they slap the wrist of a player reported to them through the in-game reporting system. On very few occasions they have initiated mass bans on players who made use of an exploit in their netcode or base code. You'll have heard of the "heavy ammo glitch" or "bumping teams" in order to get wins. But, fundamentally, the PvP experience is a mess - I regularly had 5-6 players out of 12 playing with high latency. That is, 5-6 people playing as "red-bars," making that match almost impossible to play.
Think about it. You would have a 50% chance to aim at a player character representation and have that player character actually be in the location you aimed, as opposed to three feet away, or right next to you with a shotgun. And since the red-bar player is favored in this code, their sync info to the host *overrides* yours and you always lose against them.
And while Bungie has been very responsive and communicative regarding issues in PvE (player vs environment; story missions), they have been completely silent regarding the PvP issues, not even admitting that there is a problem on their end that allows people to exploit the netcode. PvP is literally half Destiny's game with much of the content tied to objectives gained in PvP matches. After a year of atrocious gameplay, with no end in sight and no word from Bungie that something needs to be fixed, I am done with this game. Not to mention the fact that there are two PvP "end-game" rewards-based events (Trials of Osiris and Iron Banner) which become literal madhouses of this sort of gameplay. Trials of Osiris, where pre-made fireteams are a necessity, have less of this type of problem, but it is still very much a degraded experience.
Destiny has become a game of spinning wheels and being stuck in the mud. You can't even finish one of the primary story lines (The Taken War) without finding a team to complete the final mission. Or, you could attempt it solo, and be frustrated by repetitive deaths as you try nearly twenty times to surmount the ridiculously overwhelming odds stacked against you. Many of the exotic item quests also require teamwork and can in no way be attempted solo. For m a particularly frustrating experience, since I prefer playing story missions on my own. And I know I am not alone as frequent front-page posts to reddit attest.
So, it's now an obvious choice to leave the game at this point. after a few weeks of play, I have reached nearly every reward one can reach solo, and the rest of those rewards are hidden behind endless hours of team-based play or grinding though hours of broken PvP. My time is simply too valuable for that. Made even more so by the realization of how much time was wasted on Destiny in the previous year.
I look forward to taking a step back and writing more for this and other blogs. I look forward to doing gameplay videos on my YouTube channel, and removing gigabytes of video "proof" of PvP cheating from my PS4 hard drive. I look forward to letting Destiny go. Maybe I'll play once in a while to enjoy a great shooter but, with games like Fallout 4 and No Man's Sky coming down the line, and an ESO account, I am pretty sure the few hours a week I reward myself to devote to gaming will be spoken for.
