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“Touch God…? V’Ger’s liable to be in for one hell of a disappointment.”
For a game that isn’t an MMO, its always-online requirement (there’s no single-player mode if online is unavailable as in Demon’s/Dark Souls), forced socialization, and “dailies” (bounty quests that refresh every day) along with other gates to progression strongly hint otherwise at what it aspires to be.
But as much as it sounds as if I didn’t like my time in Desitny, enough worked to keep me playing whether it was the RPG-lite elements that were in play or the lure of possibly landing one more loot drop that might be another exotic piece of equipment. As a longtime RPG player, digging as deeply as I could to see where Destiny’s loot cache was and how far I could push my character were big reasons on why I kept coming back. The other pieces, not so much.
On one hand, it delivers the core basics – weapons to shoot bad guys with, a lot of bad guys, loot, and beautiful backdrops. It’s a bundle of quick blasts of action that anyone can pick up and put back down when the urge to scratch that trigger finger arises. Before doing the post-20 activities, it was a lot of fun doing co-op strikes, pushing through the story missions, and feeling a rewarding sense of slow but gradual progression though grinding up after hitting the soft cap leaves a lot to be desired.
There’s also something refreshing about its mechanical simplicity that kept me coming back while upgrading those exotics I have stashed away to see what they can really do. This isn’t a game that demands that massive a commitment unless you really want to race to level 30 and even then, there’s nothing forcing you to keep up with everyone else or grinding away in the hopes for a legendary item.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture wasn’t quite Star Trek’s best foot forward on the silver screen. It can be ponderously slow in places with too much attention paid to awing the audience with visual pizzazz instead of engaging them with deeper elements found within its diverse characters and setting. Yet it’s not the worst Trek movie I’ve seen by a longshot and like Destiny, there’s enough there that works to some degree in capturing the imagination. In the end, that may be all that Destiny needs to do to find its Wrath of Khan.
