Keegan Dolinar
Rating: 7 out of 10
platforms: Xbox one, Xbox 360, PS4, PS3
players: 1
Activision announced Destiny made over $325 million in sales worldwide in its first week, making it the best-selling new video game franchise of all time.
Players had logged more than 100 million hours of online play by the end of the game’s first week, with 137 million missions taking place.
Within hours, I could tell that its developers Bungie wanted it desperately to be loved by many different types of players. It attempts to weave threads from many popular genres (action, puzzle, arcade) together into one interconnected web, but your experience will depend entirely upon which of those threads you tug on hardest.
The game is a role-playing game and is different from anything I have played before.
Destiny has a rich universe with proper storyline but I think Bungie was trying to avoid flooding the player with cut-scenes and background knowledge that it hasn’t given the player quite enough to work with or get worked up about. For a game that’s establishing a whole new universe, that’s a concern.
Even if it isn’t as open as it first appeared, each of Destiny’s four main planets are more than big enough to get lost in. Even while using your summonable, a Sparrow bike, to get from one end of a planet, to the other takes a while. Factor in all the caves, temples, and other structures; there’s a lot to do and explore. Perhaps not as much as an open-world role playing game or a third person shooter, but despite its similarities, Destiny isn’t either of those things. Overall it has more character than most games of those types anyway.
Even on last-gen hardware, the display throughout Destiny’s landscapes is masterfully crafted. Every rock face, outpost and ruin looks spectacular, aside from a few repeating sceneries. Even if I didn’t always stop to stare at how roads look carved into the terrain, or how gas bubbles to the surface of the iridescent water pools on Venus, these details silently pulled me in and constantly reinforced the idea that that this is an actual place.