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Like many young men and women who came of age in the mid-2000s, a large swathe of my teen years were dominated by World of Warcraft. Released in 2004, this massively multiplayer online role playing game poisoned the minds of millions of high school and college students across the world. The game crushed GPAs by requiring a couple dozen hours of weekly play to succeed in the games ultra-tough endgame challenges called "raids" that rewarded users with a massive dopamine hit via the opportunity to receive high powered items at random.
I played World of Warcraft from 2004 through 2009, when "not failing law school" became a much larger priority for me than my weekly Naxxramas run through. Since then, I've been a fairly casual gamer. I mostly limited myself to two to four major titles per year—in recent years, closer to two—mostly because I've found gaming for gaming's sake to be less enjoyable in adulthood than it was as a teenager.
But this year, one game was supposed to change it all.
The new first person shooter Destiny 2 by Bungie, the studio behind classic early 2000's sleepover staple Halo and it's sequels that only nerds played, was supposed to be the MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game) that redefined the genre.
I never played the first Destiny, released back in 2014, but I was told by several friends that the game was a huge pain in the ass and not worth the time, a sentiment which had been echoed in early reviews of its sequel, which I was told solved many annoying logistical problems from the original. But much like World of Warcraft, the original developed a slavish fanbase that stuck through its many flaws and generated an enormous amount of buzz for the follow up. As I was just about ready for a new game after having finished the excellent Resident Evil 7 a few months back, I thought i'd jump back into the gaming pool with a throwback to my wasted youth.
The premise of this game was stock-standard to gaming: You are a superpowered futuristic being with a bunch of cool guns, and you must save the galaxy from an asshole alien that looks like a giant frog wearing Space Marine armor from Warhammer 40,000 by shooting guys and using sweet magic powers that you get from a planet-sized being called the Traveler.
Playing Destiny 2 comes in two stages. The first is the game's story mode, which sees your character—a customizable human, robot or human-like alien, which specializes in one of three "classes" that gives you different powers, Warlock, Titan or Hunter—go from neophyte to badass by gaining experience, collecting new guns and acquiring new powers along the way. This is fun, but with most MMO's, it's a mostly perfunctory (you can blow through this in maybe 15 hours if you try) step towards the second step: the endgame.
Destiny 2's endgame is currently defined by three weekly activities which, once completed, refresh every Tuesday. The first is a "strike," a challenge against the computer which requires three players to fight a bunch of baddies and kill a boss in about 15 minutes. The second, a "raid," a more complex player-versus-computer affair that takes about two hours and requires six well-coordinated players. Finally, player-versus-player, which involves battling other people's characters in teams of four across about ten different game maps.
Over a month in, and I'm mostly bored with the first two of these three activities.
Don't get me wrong, the first month of running around Destiny 2 was a lot of fun. The game's five (and some change) worlds are just the right amount of enormous, and gorgeously rendered in gently cartoony graphics. The game's item-based progression system—meaning your character gets stronger by collecting items—is very satisfying as you climb towards the game's maximum power level. Destiny 2's one available raid and selection of strikes are complex enough to not be beatable by a team of numbskulls. It is also very fun, for a while, to dress your character up in different shawls and cloaks and so forth and outfit it with different rifles, like it's a robotic Ken doll from the future.
Yet, what made World of Warcraft's endgame so compelling was that it was brutal. Besting that game's raids required several hours of gameplay to gather the items needed to withstand enemies that could kill you in a single blow, coordinating teams of 40 (later, 25) competent people to complete a half-dozen complex tasks with agility. Then, learn a different set of them for another dozen encounters, and months-long commitments to acquire ultra-rare items which you would have to then compete for against your teammates. It was gaming as a lifestyle. No one was able to succeed at WoW's endgame without revolving their life around it as one would study or a job. Was revolving your life around a video game a "good" idea? Maybe. Was "having a sense of accomplishment and a social group to regularly interact with" nice? Yes.
With Destiny 2, I've completed the raid once and the strike a handful of times. My character, a black-and-white robot that shoots lightning bolts out of its hands and bullets out of a rifle called a MIDI-Multi Tool is almost as powerful as it can possibly get.
Functionally, most of Destiny 2's endgame gameplay is cosmetic. Items have a handful of statistics that make your character tougher or faster, or make them deal more damage. But the randomly generated items that you pick up across Destiny 2's endgame are often functionally the same, the major difference being their color schemes and the arrangement of pixels on the screen. It isn't hard to get you character as powerful as it can possibly be with dedicated play and a small group of friends able to devote only a couple hours of week to the grind.
Which isn't a bad thing, of course. I don't have to spend 25 hours a week gaming in order to have a powerful character, and the fun of playing with friends doesn't diminish because my chance of improving my character isn't particularly high. The game is remarkably fun and accessible, letting you "be good at it" without having to commit eight hour days to raiding.
But if you are a competitively-minded, it isn't particularly satisfying to repeat a set of tasks week after week with little chance to actually improve your character, or to complete a set of armor which almost no one will notice, even if it is completely color coordinated. I spend enough time on my outfits in real life.
And this isn't to take away from the player-versus-player endgame, either. I love this game's short, ultra-accessible rounds of head to head combat. Whether you are playing a pick up game or with a team of friends, the PVP rewards coordination, teamwork and creativity, and is balanced so as not to punish those who don't have lightning-fast reflexes. I've spent the vast majority of my hours on Destiny 2 in the last couple of weeks just bouncing around pick up PVP games, and I haven't yet tired of getting into shootouts with strangers, or shocking them with lightning out of my steely claws.
But I don't really have much enthusiasm for doing anything else in Destiny 2 right now. One of the game's issues is that it's best weapons are fairly easy to acquire, and it simply isn't a good use of my time (I gotta get these posts up!) to revisit the same raids and strikes over and over. To start a new character would just be to repeat this cycle on a macro-level. I'l likely be spending less time on the game until the just-announced Curse of Osiris comes out in December. It's just not giving me the sense of accomplishment that I need to warrant setting aside whole evenings for gaming.
UPDATE: Destiny 2 announced that the game's first expansion, Curse of Osiris, this morning, to be released across all platforms on December 5. I look forward to shooting more robots on the planet Mercury. Check out the trailer below:
Discussion questions: Did World of Warcraft ruin YOUR chance of getting into a good college? Should MIDI-Multi Tool get nerfed? Which rocket launcher is better: Sins of the Past or Curtain Call? Should I ever write about video games ever again?
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