2014.33: Destiny

Completed all Story missions, all Strikes (many many times...), and THE RAID. Time played: 50hours 54mins

Let me start by saying the core game is great. The shooting, the universe, the graphics, the art style are all excellent. There was something about it so addictive you'd feel mad playing the same things over and over again but you still would. With very limited amount of content, it's amazing in itself it managed to keep me interested for nearly 51 hours.

The problem? Now I can't even look at the game. I have passed the point of being driven mad by doing the same things over and over again and I guess my limit is under 51 hours.

The game's "saviour", one Bungie pushed, was the PvP, but I'm just not interested in the PvP of this game. There is nothing really wrong with it, I just didn't like it, and I'm not much of a PvP player. If you are not playing PvP, you are playing the same missions over and over. Albeit weekly and daily challenges provide "modified" versions of them (read: Harder). But they are still exactly the same in design / flow / bosses etc. No thank you.

There are also other hooks thrown in an attempt to catch you. Like stranger coins to collect, planets to harvest for materials and upgrades but these all VERY SOON start feeling like grinding for the sake of grinding and get tedious very quick.

Imagine a mobile game designed with transactions in mind, where there is an artificial "play time" of 3 hours before you get something cool. It's exactly like that, but you can't speed up the grind via micro-transactions (which is good, may I add as it shows that's why they didn't design it like that but the design is still shitty). To top that off, you are never guaranteed to get anything good at the end of all that grinding. As Bungie seems to have taken the philosophy that RANDOM IS FUN in this game. Umm. Not sure when week after week people grind the same things in hopes of a 'reward' and they get something crappy that they enjoy that experience, but it's random so lulz. Similar in PvP, how well you do does not reflect on what loot you get. It's all random! Yay!

So there isn't really a feeling of "OK I'll grind this bit out to get this good reward" as you might just get something shit. Why bother. Far as I'm concerned I am done with Destiny. Expansion packs that add 3-4 missions here and there are not interesting to me. Now that The Raid included in the core release, which I considered to be the 'final boss of the game', is done, I can safely say I completed this game and move on.

Destiny has been a crazy and mad ride. And at the end, proves itself to be a great gameplay designed around some very lazy, artificially 'lengthy', grindy and tedious design that eventually will reveal its ugliness to you. For me it was just under 51 hours, for you it might be 20mins, for someone else it might be 100 hours. 

I will say overall it was a Very Good game (granted this feedback was mostly rant but do keep in mind I did play it for 50 hrs + the positives I started the feedback with do hold the game together very well). But please Bungie, more variety, and less insane decisions in the next one.

7/10.