Corrected at 9:30 a.m. Pacific with the proper Metacritic score for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.
Destiny, the upcoming shooter developed by the guys that brought you Halo, has a fight for survival ahead of it as daunting as any that players will face on its worlds.
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Bungie’s Destiny takes a shooter and builds in variations of all the classic MMO gameplay: leveling up of characters, item upgrades that affect abilities, interaction with random other gamers (including player-versus-player combat) … even cooperative group raids with others against common enemies.
But to succeed, Destiny will have to avoid a minefield of common console-MMO booby traps when it launches September 9 for PlayStation 3, PS4, Xbox 360, and Xbox One. We made a checklist of the pitfalls and then played the beta and asked the developers to find out how Destiny might cope.
Above: Makeup choices: File this under “things that are rarely seen in shooters.”
Built for PCs … awkward on consoles
This is the classic blunder for console MMOs. (Most have avoided playing through a land war in Asia.)
PC games use up to hundreds of commands, which is fine for a 14-button mouse and a keyboard full of hotkeys. Translating that to a pair of thumbsticks, a few buttons, and a D-pad inevitably slows down the pace of a game that was already leisurely. See: every MMO released for consoles to date.
Games like Destiny have a bit of an advantage in this area: Because they’re shooters, they have an established controller setup. You’re still going to spend a bit more time than usual staring at your gear and abilities, but the action is first-person move, aim, and fire, feeling remarkably like … uh … Halo. Coincidence, that.
Luke Smith is the raid design lead for Destiny, creating private bosses that small groups of players tackle in coordination. He says that freedom makes Destiny’s six-person raid encounters very different from a PC MMO.
“I’ve raided a lot in MMOs through the years,” he said. “The emotional core of that activity: camaraderie, team-building, challenge, execution, prestige — Destiny’s Raids will touch all of those things. But again, because we’re an action game, there are things we can do with — and to — players that other games can’t.
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“It’s kinetic; it’s action-based. It’s not a battle against the UI [user interface] …. In fact, there’s not much in the way of UI at all. No waypoints, no helpful objective text, no obvious hand-holding.”
Built for consoles … lackluster on PCs
This is a pretty tiny group compared to the mountain of game corpses over there in vice-versa land, but it contains one notable entry. We’re looking at you, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn.
There’s a reason your Metacritic score, the average of all major professional reviews, hit 86 out of 100 for the PS4 version this year and 83 for the PC. Standards that make you one of the most critically acclaimed MMOs ever to hit a console may not line up with PC gamers’ expectations.
Destiny avoids this one the easy way: No PC edition will be available at release. “It’d be dishonest to say we haven’t talked about a PC version,” Smith said. But so far, it’s just a discussion.
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Above: The few, the proud, the ones that can talk: Fireteams, shown here in Crucible PvP mode.
Cut the chatter
A free-flowing mix of chat and voice interaction are PC MMOs’ social hook, giving titles life through player interaction long after they would have died a natural death based solely on gameplay. Console controllers often make MMO players frustrated that they can’t type out Chuck Norris jokes fast enough (or say them to a large enough audience).
Yes, of course you can use keyboards and keyboard controllers with some games. But really, if you wanted to use PC-style controls with a keyboard and mouse, you should just hook up your laptop to the TV.
Destiny avoids this problem, and trolls in voice and text chat, by only giving you the ability to talk with people in your Fireteam, the groups used for co-op bosses and in the Crucible player-versus-player area. But that in turn makes this huge game feel much smaller.
You can use character gestures elsewhere, and Bungie intends for players to interact — by cooperating — to carry out missions or kill bosses that spawn randomly in public spaces.
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“There’s so much future potential in how we want Destiny players to interact with one another, both in public spaces and in the Tower,” Smith said, referring to the game’s central gathering area. But even now, he said hopes players will still take note of other players, even if they aren’t fighting or shopping together.
“Sometimes you’ll catch a player drive a Sparrow off of a cliff, dismount mid-air, and disappear into a cave. We hope you’ll be tempted to follow them in and see what you both find.”
Above: A player and a Sparrow like this one.
Like this game on PC? You’ll love it on this toaster!
The vertigo-inducing drop in graphics capability and storage from PC to consoles has historically kersplatted promising titles. We blame EverQuest Online Adventures, a port of the uber-popular PC game, which set the trend back in 2003: Compared to EverQuest for PC, the game offered a fraction of the quests, all the endless grinding, and subpar graphics.
Only now is the stronger hardware of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One offering hope for games like Destiny, though neither one approaches an average gaming PC.
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“Building a game like Destiny brings with it enormous challenges on all platforms,” said Natasha Tatarchuck, Destiny graphics engineering architect. “The sheer complexity of geometric detail and texture density required to make the worlds immersive means that we had to work hard to craft believable, performant and visually stunning destinations for last and current generation consoles.
“We can proudly say we did not compromise any gameplay related aspects to achieve that goal.
“Destiny’s core player-facing features are consistent across all platforms, and this includes the character count, gameplay mechanics, matchmaking, and other core functionality.” Good news. But before you get too optimistic …
That one was terrible, but THIS one will be better
Oh, MMO players: In our hearts, we really do want an option that will allow us to occasionally plant our butts on nice, cushy couches instead of office chairs. Perhaps that’s why we’re so eager to feed into the hype that surrounds every new console MMO title and so willing to tank its user review scores with our bitter tears.
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Before release:
“DC Universe Online/Free Realms/Age of Conan/MAG/Mythica/Defiance/Final Fantasy XI/XIV will change the way console gamers play/revolutionize console graphics/be as popular as the PC versions/do it right this time!!”
After release:
“Wait … what do you mean it’s not coming out? We aren’t playing together? It looks like THAT? What do you mean I have to run across the map/get 10 more levels/figure out how to type in Portuguese to get my next quest? ONESTARGRRRRRRR.”
Still, we want them to succeed so badly. Destiny and The Elder Scrolls Online console port are now at the top of our optimism list, thanks to their impressive developer pedigrees.
Above: Strike missions in Destiny involve small co-op groups.
It’s an MMO. Sorta. Depends on what you mean by “massive”
This tricky no-shoulder cliff road has tripped up games since Phantasy Star Online first debuted its multiplayer online action for the Sega Dreamcast.
Oh, it’s massive all right, until you choose your party and head out. Then you have phenomenal cosmic powers … and teeny tiny living spaces. Whether it’s in DC Universe Online’s superhero-themed small-group Alert missions, a standard small-group fantasy quest in PSO or its sequels, or one of Defiance’s sci-fi solo missions, you can be thrown into a part of the world alone or with a few new friends and never see another soul.
Destiny mixes up its public landscapes with Strike missions that invite just you and a couple of friends along for the ride. Raids will include six. And while you may see dozens of people pass you by if you stay in a public area, you’ll see no more than nine at one time, Smith said.
Above: Room for expansion? Destiny allows you to choose from three classes: titan, hunter, and warlock.
But wait, there’s more
PC MMOs keep people playing by offering wave after wave of new content. Patches offer free tidbits: the drug dealer’s “free sample” come-ons that keep players addicted from week to week. Expansion packs keep them buying and subscribing, which in turn pays for more development. It’s how games like World of Warcraft, or EverQuest before it, can keep us hooked for a decade.
That model causes issues on consoles. Downloadable content is available, sure — think of that as the expansion packs, purchasable additions to the main game. But free patches are more problematic, especially when the game company doesn’t control the servers the game runs on.
Destiny has two expansion packs already under development, Smith said: “The Dark Below” and “House of Wolves.”
“Those are paid content — and we clearly want to do more than that,” Smith said, adding that even the Halo franchise level of post-release support (map packs, playlist updates) won’t be enough for this audience. “We have to be more reactive and agile than we’ve been. We’ve got a lot to prove.”
Above: Lighting your way to a brighter future: Peter Dinklage, the Ghost robot. (No, really.)
So few successful role models to follow
In an industry where sequels rule the shelves, there have been stunningly few console MMO successes to build on. If a game imitates a prior console MMO – or even a successful PC title – it usually fails.
For PCs, games have been building on the success of prior MMO generations since the days that Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Lineage ruled the genre. Even World of Warcraft’s monstrously successful light-fantasy MMO owes a debt to EverQuest – in many ways, it took that model and attempted to eliminate everything about it that players found overly difficult, dull, or distracting.
For console MMOs, no game is safe to copy.
Superhero-themed DC Universe Online was the last truly well-reviewed console MMO before Final Fantasy XIV, all the way back in 2011. But it didn’t inspire universal raves. “It’s decent enough,” said one site at the game’s release, and that was the general consensus. (You can play it free on PS3, PS4, and PC now.)
Gamers met most recent titles with a resounding “meh.” Defiance earned some props as a shooter last year, but the MMO part felt bolted on, the world was static, and the missions redundant. Dust 514 was innovative in concept — its console players essentially acted as mercenaries for PC players — but critics and players slammed it for its poor maps, endless menus, and lack of fun.
Destiny gets more of its DNA from well-reviewed online shooters like Borderlands and the PC version of Sony’s massive online FPS PlanetSide than from traditional PC-based ports like EverQuest and Final Fantasy. PlanetSide 2 will be Destiny’s major competition when it releases for PlayStation 4 this fall.
As a result, while Destiny’s beta was very well-received by the millions who played over last weekend’s open stress test, it didn’t feel particularly massive in-game. And perhaps ironically, to have a successful console MMO, that may be exactly what it takes.