Posted in: Games, Movies | Tagged: Comics, Destiny, entertainment

May Your Destiny Be Dull, But Fun – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh writes,

This past week, the video games scene has been all about Destiny. It's the biggest launch of a new original game franchise for ages, already making back its $500 million investment. Many people have been shocked at the sheer decadence of Activision spending that much money on a game, but I've been told it's the amount earmarked for not just the development fo the game, but future content, DLC, expansions and marketing. That sales have already made back that money makes the investment justified.

At heart, Destiny is an MMO RPG where players are expected to level up their skills, keep getting better pieces of armour and weapons with better statistics, the gameplay design a combination of Halo and Borderlands where meanies shoot at you and you shoot at them until they fall over. There's no complexity to the gameplay at all, and it seems to be aimed at the tens of millions of fans who are already fans of the Call of Duty games and their multiplayer. It's all shooty-shooty all the time. The gameplay design has been honed to a fine point where anyone who's ever played shooters would settle into a happy groove. It's the games equivalent of comfort food. It's compulsive and addictive if you're into that sort of thing. It's really a fantasy quest dressed up in a Science Fiction shooter skin.

I wonder why the game lets you customise your character's race, gender and face, and then insists on making them wear a helmet that looks like an expensive ice bucket through most of the game so you can't see the face you created. And if you're a robot with a metal head, why do you need to wear a helmet?

Anyway, while the gameplay is addictive, compulsive and fun, the story is bland, generic and flat. There's a huge back catalogue of lore that you can read about away from the game, none of which makes any difference whether you know about it or not. The most basic premise – the far future where the player is one of many soldiers guided by an AI (reminiscent of Halo) to defend the last city on Earth against hordes of nasty aliens and an impending doom called The Darkness. The story is full of portentous names like The Speaker, The Fallen, The Hive, to convey a sense of the mythic, but it only highlights just how bland and devoid of personality the writing is.

There's a story in there struggling to get out but was ultimately suppressed, like anything interesting was filed down to a dull, flat surface. None of the characters have any personality whatsoever, the dialogue is flat, and there's nothing to make you actually care about the story or what's at stake. It's not like the developers aren't capable of telling a reasonably compelling, epic story before, they proved that with the Halo series. One reason Halo has millions of fans, other than for the multiplayer, is because of the story and the characters.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZyQK6kUdWQ[/youtube]

Hell, the expensive live action trailer for Destiny, directed by Joseph Kosinski, who directed Tron 2.0 and Oblivion, has more personality and humour than the entire game. I suppose what it gets across is the personality that players bring to the game when they play with their friends and talk to each other via chat, since there isn't any personality from any of the scripted characters in the game story itself. I wonder if this is what $500 million gets you, a game where any quirky detail or personality or wit gets cut out to achieve a bland, generic sheen. Its success points to players not really caring about story so much as the multiplayer. The colourful art direction and designs reminiscent of 70s Science Fiction paperback art is just evocative window dressing for a game that's creatively an unambitious cobbling together of RPG and MMO elements, if combined very well into a flawless and satisfying game controls. Destiny is a game of wasted opportunities, especially considering I've been told that many at Bungie are fans of the late Iain M. Banks. There's even an achievement in Destiny that's a direct reference to Banks' Science Fiction novels.

Imagine a $500 million MMO game of Iain M. Bank's Culture novel that's more a full-on RPG than Destiny is: a galaxies-spanning universe where players can choose to play as Ships or agents from The Culture, or the races who oppose them, where there are worlds offering missions where members of the Culture play characters secretly intervening in their wars and political affairs, including worlds still too backward to have interstellar travel but have members from The Culture's Special Circumstances and their enemies on the ground fighting over the evolution of their society. And on a macro level, you could have the epic space battles between different classes of Ships at war with those of Luddite or imperialist galactic civilisations. On a micro level, you can have different types of roles and classes that players can choose to play, On a micro level, you can have areas on worlds that are PVP where soldiers from the Culture and its enemies engage in endless battles. If players don't play the Ships that patrol and oversee the stability and evolution of civilisations and planets, players can choose various species, humanoid or not, and roles, whether as mercenaries out to fight wars, soldiers or rebels, or diplomats engaging in political negotiations. There could be story content where players discover the worlds of The Cutlure as they level up and go on quests like racing to rescue a recently-birthed Ship AI (as detailed in the first Culture novel Consider Phlebas) or escorting a professional player of games to a tournament where the fate of worlds are based on the outcome of the game he plays (as inspired by the novel The Player of Games). The result would be a living, breathing, ever-evolving MMO game universe that's constantly in-flux, unpredictable and playing out Banks' political themes and questions of political intervention, war, free will and utopianism.

That game will never happen, but it would be a fitting memorial for Iain Banks and his brilliant body of work.

My destiny is a late lunch at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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