Because for all that it gets wrong – and it gets so much wrong – it remains a phenomenally-executed game, offering moments of pure joy I’ve seen very rarely in any game before and since. Rumours of a wholesale rewrite months before release, stripping the majority of the plot out and shoving it in a companion “grimoire” app, were never confirmed, but lapped up by a player-base eager for some explanation as to how the developer could misstep so spectacularly.Ī year on, I am still playing Destiny. Where Halo’s sprawling space opera presented an engrossing world with memorable characters and fully-realised motivations from the off, Destiny’s plot was a forgettable, confusing mess, with plot threads left hanging, foes whose motivation was barely more than “space zombie”, and voice acting which took an all-star cast (Peter Dinklage, Nathan Fillion and Bill Nighy all play a role) and couldn’t eke a memorable line from any of them. Worse, Bungie had seemingly forgotten its own history. Those are problems World of Warcraft experienced at launch, too – over a decade ago. Earning high-level loot, explicitly required to participate in the game’s high-point, the Vault of Glass raid, was an exercise in frustration and destructive psychological loops to the extent that players chose to stand outside a cave shooting low-level enemies for hours on end to earn rewards, rather than play the game “as intended”. Bungie insisted on treating co-operative and competitive play the same for balancing purposes, ensuring that weapons were frequently bizarrely overpowered or completely useless. The game launched with almost no matchmaking functionality for any serious play, requiring players to put themselves into teams of three to six friends manually. Where World of Warcraft has spent the best part of a decade iterating and improving MMO mechanics, Destiny seemed intent on reinventing them from scratch. For something so clearly standing on the shoulders of giants, there was a bizarre failure to learn the lessons of the past. But as the novelty wore off, so too did the shine. Those first few weeks flying around in space with your AI “Ghost” buddy in tow were glorious, even if Peter Dinklage’s delivery as the sidekick was so bad that simple adjectives like “bored” and “wooden” fail to do it justice. On top of all that was a smattering of World of Warcraft-style massively-multiplayer content such as raids and public events. The first new series from Halo developer Bungie since 2001, it combined the meaty gunplay and polished exterior of that series with the deeply satisfying loot-gathering of a game like Diablo. I t was a year ago when Destiny hit consoles, promising a new era of super-connected online shooting.

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