Destiny, a franchise that stands for nothing (rant)
It speaks to Destiny 2’s mechanical excellence that I spent as much time as I did with the game. Bungie nails the X factor of making guns feel good to shoot. The studio has always prioritized the 30-second primary gameplay loop, and it shows. The satisfying pop of a Dreg headshot tickles my brain in a place I didn’t know I had. Its cooperative raids are by far its greatest value proposition, asking for teamwork, communication, and interesting play in a way that few other PVE games do.
Yet, there’s something profoundly grotesque about Destiny as a microcosm of the industry, to see amazing art direction, sound design, and countless developer man-hours wasted on telling a story that goes nowhere, one that begins and ends at the elevator pitch. Destiny is fundamentally a world of influences. Its design mission statement can be summed up as “fantasy archetypes with sci-fi aesthetics”. The idea in itself has a lot of potential; Mass Effect and Star Wars were able to create something special with that very goal. In the world of Destiny, though, players quickly realize that for the most part, nothing happens to the world.
The environments are static, not so much fully realized worlds to explore and more set dressing as you travel from one group of roaming enemies to the next. Destiny is filled with vistas a mile wide and an inch deep, that could be plugged into any major sci-fi setting without friction. It’s a common problem with Massively Multiplayer games, which often prioritize their worlds as play spaces, speckled with random enemies and activities with little consideration for environmental storytelling.
I call it wallpapering. All Destiny has sometimes is visuals and presentation. Obviously, the game’s environments and characters are gorgeous. You can almost taste the money that’s been pumped into your screen. But when we stand in the European Dead Zone, in the Tower, within the goddamn Warmind on Mars, what do we know about the society that lived there? What do the beautiful skyboxes, unique enemy placements, the locations labeled on the map communicate to us about the world, about its relationship with its inhabitants? Very little, without reading flavor text from weapon descriptions.
Locking essential story beats and character moments behind weapon descriptions and lore triumphs is a cardinal sin of linear storytelling for me. It is genuinely baffling how this has been Destiny’s status quo for so long. The vast majority of players will never set eyes on it, and the core campaign stories suffer immensely from the lack of worldbuilding. I’m told that there are interesting lore stories if you look for it, but it’s all so opaque. Why aren’t we playing these stories if they are so much more interesting than the current setting? Players would love to fight against imminent extinction at Twilight Gap or hunt immortal psychotic Dredgens in a world with more personal stakes. Sometimes it feels like Destiny takes place in its timeline’s least interesting era.
Lost sectors, hidden chests, mini-bosses, public events, even strikes – there is rarely any meaningful context to give players a stake in the shooting. Zavala, Osiris, your ghost all constantly throw words at you, but the back-and-forth is homogenous, almost numbing. How many players pay attention to mission dialogue? Perhaps it is a symptom of the medium, the consequence of the endless demand for content that live-service looter-shooters require. The game never gives you a reason to decipher any of its lore – it might as well be white noise.
Bungie’s earlier work with Halo had its own problems with opaque lore, but at the very least the most important concepts and stakes were communicated in a linear campaign. We’ve seen inscrutable “weapon description storytelling” surge in the wake of the Souls-like renaissance, but unlike Destiny, Souls-likes aren’t live-service games that tell multi-year story arcs. At no point in Destiny did I feel like I had a personalized player journey, unraveling the mysteries of the world.
It makes me sad though, when I see what could have been. Due to how uninteractive the worlds of Destiny are, it makes sense that the aspects that have the most staying power in my mind are vignettes that stand out from the homogeneity of the environments. The giant serpent swimming in Titan’s skybox captured imaginations for years. A now-sunset lost sector on the Tangled Shore – “The Empty Tank”, a Nightclub populated by Fallen, complete with a DJ – remains a giddy surprise to this day. These inclusions make the zone feel so much more lived in.
For me, Destiny’s most original ideas are in the lore of the antagonists and the design of their raids. The Cabal Emperor Calus’s Leviathan, a gold-plated, planet-eating pleasure cruise is one of the few areas where environmental storytelling breaks through, as are most of the raid environments. There are compelling motivations to be explored for these antagonistic factions – the Fallen in pursuit of their disowned god, the infinite timelines of the vex, the occult scheming of the Hive, the Excess of Calus.
In practice though, our antagonists tend to appear only at the beginning and end of campaigns and functionally serve as set pieces and speedbumps. Raids are a little better at telling an interactive story due to their challenges and mechanics, but they also lose immersion due to teamchat and their gamified framing, especially where players have learned to farm for exotics.
I’d like to look at the Red War campaign. It’s among the easiest to criticize, but I’d argue that it is also the campaign that gets closest to actually exploring tangible themes and telling a compelling story. The Cabal were a good choice for antagonists. They are the most “physical”, least conceptual threat of Destiny’s rogues gallery, and have easy-to-understand motivations of martial conquest and subjugation. It’s a descision meant to ground Destiny 2 and provide stakes before jumping into the more cerebral antagonists.
I genuinely believe the best mission in destiny is the opening sequence of the Red War. I knew nothing about the universe, but I saw the Last City being bombed by an overwhelming invading force and I knew the stakes already. Fighting in the streets communicated a desperation to the player, that what little progress humanity had made in this harsh world was at risk of being snuffed out.
The Red War should have leaned into this – but we rarely see civilians, refugees, or the oppression of occupying Red Legion forces. When we are a fugitive in the EDZ, we should be seeing runaway civilians hunted down, helpless to save them. When stumbling through the bombed out city we should be seeing martial law established, the consequences of our failure. There’s an entire chapter on Titan where we are told we are protecting refugees but we never see them. Imagine if the Farm, our base of operations, was actually attacked for a second act low point.
Anything would be better than nothing at all.
Returning to mortality after the highs of superpowered combat before was a similarly necessary hook for the campaign, but players get their godhood back way too early in the story. From that point onward, I don’t recall losing a single conflict. Ghaul is trivialized as an antagonist and the Cabal are steamrolled mission after mission.
Destiny takes place in the post apocalypse, but it’s used purely as an aesthetic. Dwelling on themes of collapse would probably change Destiny fundamentally, but a certain degree of acknowledgement is needed to ground the world. The concept of the last city and its guardians is compelling as an elevator pitch, but the last city never feels at risk. Instead, Destiny focuses its energy on celestial conflicts and immortal guardians, discarding any sense of place for the Last City the player is tasked with protecting.
An entire chapter of the campaign is spent on Io with Ikora (the character equivalent of watching paint dry). Ikora’s arc is all about losing touch with her faith after the Traveler is caged. This detour is so nebulous that the plot completely loses track of guardians’ immediate responsibility to protect civilians and the mission to liberate the Last City. Even if the writers wanted to focus on theological themes and the silent god that is the traveler, Destiny never explores these concepts beyond vague symbolism and inscrutable platitudes. Parallels can be easily drawn between the guardians' religion and real-world theology. It’s certainly not the first religion to have a savior figure, a chosen holy city, legions of covetous demons. The guardians repeatedly posit themselves as crusaders or defenders of faith. In the past, Bungie’s Halo used Abrahamic names in a caution against the manipulation of mass religion and the perils of blind faith. Does Destiny have something to say or is it a hodgepodge of ideas used as set dressing?
To contrast, Hawthorne is possibly the character with the most wasted potential in Destiny – a hill I will die on. As the only non-guardian member of the main cast, she should have provided a more human perspective to ground the Vanguard. With the Last City being the last bastion of human civilization, what does it say about someone who chooses to live in the wilderness instead? Hawthorne vehemently opposes authority; she sees the Last City as a walled garden and dismisses the concept of the guardians, having survived for years without their aid. When she is suddenly thrust into a position of leadership at the Farm, there should be lots of juicy internal conflict to explore there. I would have used her to question security versus freedom in the post apocalypse, how the Last City is functionally ruled by a closed, immortal junta (the Vanguard). The Cabal’s martial law is ripe to compare and contrast degrees of tyranny.
Ikora is apparently in charge of the Last City’s secret police, which should be a major point of conflict and moral ambiguity between her and the rules-hating Hawthorne. I don’t remember the two ever interacting, likely another casualty of never seeing the civilian side of Destiny’s world.
Almost every character in Destiny’s universe have these sorts of shortcomings. Most lack any relatability or strong motivations beyond a braindead character archetype. Cayde is a quippy scoundrel. Shaxx is a shouty knight. Ana Bray is a quippy scoundrel (again). You know everything there is to know about the character from the first two lines of dialogue. Many are introduced only to be discarded as soon as their cutscene ends, relegated to be a vendor for eternity. Characters who have any ambiguity at all (Drifter, Crow, Eris) are quickly sandblasted to be a vaguely encouraging voice in your ear.
Amid the controversy of Lightfall’s campaign failing to deliver any sort of story, it’s clear to me that Caiatl should have been the protagonist of that campaign; the imperial politics of the Cabal, Calus’s opulent aesthetic, Caiatl’s complicated relationship with her father, are all genuinely interesting. Unfortunately, our player character prevents this story from being told. For real Destiny’s protagonist sucks balls lol. The stories struggle to explore any meaningful character conflict because all storytelling needs to be sprayed at our blank slate player character. We are functionally a brick wall. When characters interact, we are an unresponsive observer that sucks the energy out of each scene. In a meta sense, most players tune out the story, in a self fulfilling prophecy of disengagement.
Destiny 2 receives a lot of flack its braindead humor, but it’s honestly a step up from the themeless nothingness that plagues the franchise. Characters like Cayde and Failsafe are popular because they manage to engage on some level, which is more than can be said for non-characters like Sloane, Asher Mir, Ikora.
Destiny needs real side quests (not patrols), that explore faction dynamics, reveal lore, and provide context to the shooting, even fetch quests would be good. Making the worlds more interactive, akin to the Wish-Ender eggs in the Dreaming city would be a good start.
The problem with this critique in the first place is that Destiny, at its core, is not trying to tell a story, it is a virtual toy to be played with. Any storytelling the campaigns could do are handicapped by the systems catering and speaking directly to the player. How many campaign stories now have been crippled by tutorializing a new subclass or game mechanic?
Do I regret the time I spent with destiny? Not necessarily. Sometimes, you have to see negative extremes of interactive storytelling to appreciate the good. But if we measure storytelling in terms of economy, Destiny is bankrupt.
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