Its flat dialogue didn’t help, and some of the voice acting, notably featuring Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage, was later scrubbed, rewritten, and redone post-launch. Its original plot was so convoluted that players clamored for the ability to skip the shallow and infrequent cutscenes. The game lacked character development and emotional context. The Darkness) and unexplained “cataclysms” that ended “the golden age” of humanity. The issue is that everything in the original Destiny felt like a cliché storyboard placeholder, with generic titles (The Light vs.
It also attracted an evil force known as the Darkness, which sought to extinguish the Traveler and set off a series of multi-planetary wars, fought thanks to the Traveler’s “Light,” which transformed humans into magical killing machines that could be revived endlessly. Like many sci-fi stories of the past, the Traveler arrived in the Solar System and thrust humanity forward in terms of technological progress. The crucial pieces were there: players knew they were superheroes, capable of astounding feats of magic, thanks to a giant, moon-sized alien entity known as the Traveler. The original Destiny was a narrative wreck. DESTINY 2’s STORY IS FINALLY WORTH PAYING ATTENTION TO The question now is whether it’s enough to breathe new life into the series. While many of the series’s ingredients remain - you still shoot guns, run from one area to the next, and take down big bosses - the game has been reworked in an attempt to address, if not alleviate, virtually every annoyance and complaint that existed in the first game.īased on my time with Destiny 2, I can say Bungie has largely succeeded.
For Bungie, it’s also an opportunity to prove its learned from everything it got right and wrong with the first Destiny.Īt an event in Bellevue, Washington, last month, I was able to play nearly 20 hours of Destiny 2 on PS4 from the beginning with a newly created character. The area sets the stage for a comeback story, as the game’s protagonists, the Guardians, attempt to retake the god-like entity that grants them power from the invading Red Legion.
The EDZ is the first and largest new environment players will experience in Destiny 2, the sequel to the Halo maker’s bold gamble on the future of the first-person shooter. This is what developer Bungie does best: it makes you feel powerful and reassures you that your time spent in this virtual world is worth it, even when what you’re doing is maybe not all that remarkable, or, in this case, all that new.
It’s all leading up to the activation of my super, a transformational ability that allows me to dance across the ground, unleashing a torrent of blue energy waves against my enemies in what has to be the closest approximation to feeling invincible that video games have to offer. Instead I’m focused on how great it feels to pull the trigger of my virtual firearm and the beautiful sound it makes. It’s a clever plan, but I’m not really thinking too much about the specifics. We’re in the process of trying to pit two alien crews against each other, by spoofing the signal of one and sending it to the other. Unlike myself, he does not possess the “Light,” which is a fancy way of saying that when he dies, he stays dead, while I come back to life to continue the fight. I’m communicating by satellite transmission with a man - a grizzled sniper with an unplaceable accent - named Devrim Kay. Yet, the exhilaration is unmistakable as I fend off wave after wave of alien enemies on a covert mission to take back the land for humanity. Except here we are, stuck back on Earth following a devastating attack from a foreign invader, trotting through the depressing gray debris and green overgrowth of a disaster zone. Perhaps it’s been thousands of years since humans colonized the Solar System and entered the realm of the supernatural. The EDZ, as everyone calls it, is a barren wasteland of abandoned structures, decrepit tunnels, and long-lost architectural trends because, well, this is Earth in the far future. I’m about five hours into the European Dead Zone and I’m finally starting to feel alive.