Banifest Destiny: The story of Bungie’s black sheep – Part 1: Pre-release and vanilla

—Blank— Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game

Regardless of how the project came together, Destiny came out handicapped. This is also reflected in the game’s world—four relatively small planets and a pint-sized social hub. This small cage worked to fuel the grind put in place by the original loot system, which would start the trend of insufficiently tested or outright incomplete content being released.

Image via Reddit

You’ve probably heard this horror story before. You finally find a Legendary engram, eagerly present it to the Cryptarch, and then walk away, head low and motivation lower, with yet another Rare-tier item in your inventory. Indeed, even Engrams were up to RNG back then. Bungie only addressed this several weeks after Destiny’s launch.

“We didn’t adequately communicate the potential random outcomes of prediction,” the studio said in a blog post. “Players see what looks like the familiar metaphor of item identification, while the Cryptarch thinks he’s opening a grab bag of loot. Rage sharding of blues ensues.”

This notice came on the heels of the invention and subsequent spread of the loot cave. To circumvent the game’s unfair system, players set up shop at an infinite Hive spawn in the Skywatch area of Earth. By farming enemies and public events, players improved their chances of attaining quality loot considerably.

Aside from the cave, the first round of Queen bounties—which rewarded unique Legendary gear before their return in The House of Wolves—were a popular Legendary hunting method. Along with purchasing gear with activity marks, they were really the only one. However, the low weekly caps on Vanguard and Crucible marks, which could easily be reached in three days, further impeded progression. Fortunately, these limits will be eliminated in The Taken King with the introduction of a cap-free, vendor- and account-wide currency. That also means the problem has been around for a full year. Funnily enough, Bungie discussed this in the reveal of Destiny’s Year Two content, echoing player sentiments on the matter.

“You’re never going to tell me, over the course of a week,” Community Manager David “Deej” Dague asked designer Mark Noseworthy, “you’ve earned enough, stop playing, go away.”

“No, ‘you’ve had too much fun,’” Noseworthy replied.

Image via Gigaventure

Due to limitations like these, patching the loot cave did little to offset Destiny’s uphill climb, though the changes to Engrams, namely cementing their value, helped a bit. But again, we cannot applaud sobriety. The updated system was not only necessary, but originally intended. And the grind continued despite it. Exorbitant equipment upgrade costs tore through materials such as Spirit Blooms and Helium Filaments, which were a hard-earned commodity before they became purchasable via Tower vendors near the start of December 2014. Even this, a loot system devoid of RNG, demanded a considerable time investment.

Destiny is still plagued by a broken loot system, in no small part due to its dependence on RNG, which fails to account for effort. The lack of a trade system compounds this, and the reason behind the omission is salt on the wound.

“You should be able to tell a badass story for every sweet jewel in your arsenal,” Bungie said in an August 2014 update. “Once you earn them, the various Guardians under your account will be able to trade them, but weapons belong to the players who acquire them through action and bravery.”

Pretty words, but in reality all of Destiny’s gear belongs only to those lucky enough to roll it. The dice are less loaded now than at launch, but you’ll never find a Guardian willing to bet on snake eyes.

Finally: A Raid

Of course, RNG is only as unpleasant as the system behind it is tedious. And while monotonous Strikes and the weekly cycle of Nightfalls and Heroics can grow dull, Destiny was not without a trump card. Roughly one week after release, the fabled Vault of Glass finally opened its doors.

This was the biggest step forward yet. The Vault showed, unarguably, that Destiny had chops. It is a multi-step, challenging and rewarding cooperative experience that requires fluent teamwork—at least, it did before Guardians outstripped it in power level. At once tense and relieving, the Vault was a visceral answer to the grind and an outlet for pent-up enthusiasm. It was the best thing in Destiny, because it had to be solved, not arbitrarily followed and filled.

But it was not exempt from the game’s bad habits. All manner of bugs, glitches and exploits were rampant in the Vault for some time. A particularly nasty team wipe was patched up a week after it released, but that was just one fire that needed stamping. Sometimes the Templar wouldn’t spawn in, sometimes Oracles would mark your team even after they were destroyed, and then there was boss pushing, the first of a long line of raid “cheese” techniques.

Raid cheesing exemplified Bungie's underestimation of player ingenuity, something they would trip over many times in the year to come. The loot cave started it, but the message remained the same: if there's a single absolute solution, it will be found and exploited. Even in its expansions, Destiny designed around this. From overpowered weapon rolls to PvP exploits to Raid glitches, players were always one step ahead of languishing systems. This made things more bearable, but not more fun.

The Vault was held together with silly string and hope in its first few weeks, and well into late October patches were still layering masking tape on the thing. Even today, the popular “wipe and snipe” cheese for the Oracle stage is perfectly viable, and Atheon is perfectly broken. Six weeks after the Vault’s release, Bungie "corrected" the way the boss teleports players by making the assignment random rather than proximity-based, but this opened a new Pandora’s Box. Rare is the raid attempt that doesn’t involve a single player being teleported into a time portal, thus wiping the team.

I Can’t Hear You

Ironically, the teamwork forged in the Vault served to highlight how impenetrable the rest of Destiny was. Other than four token character emotes, there’s no way to communicate with passersby. This robs the game of the community engendered by spontaneous camaraderie, if only in the form of a text conversation. In an effort to address this, a November patch introduced a voice channel for certain activities. But still the world was grey. Opt-in voice chat was always dodgy, and clans were token and limited at best.

Image via IGN

The addition of Heroic Strike matchmaking in February 2015 helped brighten things, though. It was one less thing to scour the forums over, and an easier way to knock out part of the weekly cycle. True to form, this too was paired with a step back: denying Nightfalls matchmaking. Rather, continuing to deny them. Design Lead M.E. Chung explained the decision in the update:

“Since players are kicked to Orbit on team wipe, we want people to preserve that group so they could give it another go.”

This would be sound reasoning were it not for the needlessness of the Nightfall mechanic. Why it insists on forcing players to sit through multiple loading screens from orbit, rather than simply restart the Strike from the beginning, is beyond me. Doing so would clear the way for Nightfall matchmaking, which is still frequently requested. The absence of Raid matchmaking, on the other hand, I can get behind. Forum-found quitters are already a problem, and queueing into unfiltered teams would up the rate of dropouts exponentially. This isn’t a problem with Nightfalls, which can be completed in less than 20 minutes.

A Start

I realize this has been a fairly negative piece, and that’s not without reason. Destiny has more demons than any game should. Its progress has been slow and painful, in no way of the level you would expect from a developer as talented and established as Bungie. But the game is improving and evolving, and it has always been fun. Its variety of classes and equipment raises that classic Halo feel to new heights, and above all, it’s a delight to play with friends. Then again, in my experience moving 2,000 pounds of mulch on a hot summer’s day is fun with friends, so that might not be saying much. 

The sheer quantity of preventable issues in Destiny is reminiscent of the anti-vaccine debate. More thorough testing, reasonable deadlines, and involved quality assurance would have worked wonders, to be sure. One of my longtime fireteam friends often jokes that he'd like to join Destiny's QA team, because that would make him Destiny's entire QA team. It's surprisingly hard to argue with.

But the heart of the problem goes deeper: There has never before been a game like Destiny. Its blunders are excessive, but many of them necessary. We’re still riding that cutting edge, playing through a game’s formative years. And boy, have they been messy. But not pointless. Screwing up is the fastest way to learn, and I remain confident that when Bungie finally cracks the code, the result will be worth it, even if it's Destiny 2. Whether it's worth stomaching the process remains to be seen. If it’s not, the lessons Destiny has unintentionally taught will be worthwhile in their own right. There is still immense potential behind that enigmatic IP, but it has a ways to go.

Incidentally, so does this column. In the next installment, we’ll dive into The Dark Below expansion to root around its many, many flaws, and few but key contributions. If you’re wondering where the Crucible content is, know that a later piece will be dedicated to the mode’s many dalliances with weapon balance and more. Most of my 700-odd hours of Destiny were logged in the Crucible, so I’ve plenty to say. Until next week, stay cautious.

There has never before been a game like Destiny. A bizarre mix of MMORPG and FPS mechanics, Bungie’s latest was set up as the ceremonial gunshot for the current console generation. It promised to marry two largely divided genres and satisfy fans of both. It would set the standard for the now antiquated term “next-gen” and deliver an involved story on an epic scale. It had $500 million in marketing and the pedigree of Halo behind it. On paper, it had everything. We would be Guardians.

Those sentiments are nearly a year old. Today, Destiny is a very different game. Two expansions strong and a third on the way, it has gone from black to white to black again. Its metamorphosis has been nothing short of helter-skelter, an avalanche of game design, as much guess-and-check as innovation. It was doomed to ride the cutting edge, and regularly fell off to one side, often to the dismay of its millions of players. And it isn’t slowing down.

Now, in the calm before the launch of The Taken King, the air is nostalgic. As we learned in the recent Year Two reveal, TTK makes sweeping changes to Destiny’s core systems. Looting, leveling, grinding, customizing—everything is up in the air. There is once again immense potential behind the IP, and players can’t wait to see what’s next.

But the crowd is different. The blindly optimistic have become cautious, even bitter. The question is no longer “What will it do?” but “Will it fix it?” It’s a matter of necessity, not promise. Even if it does, even if TTK and future Year Two content can chart a new course, it will be bittersweet, like applauding an addict’s return to sobriety. Destiny’s first year was just that bad.

But it wasn’t totally awful. Destiny did and continues to do a lot of things right. There’s a reason millions of players continue to log in, why the mere sale of the Gjallarhorn set the Internet on fire, and why even the cautious and bitter are still optimistic. At its peak, Destiny is a thrilling experience both unique and shared, by individual fireteams of friends and by the community as a whole.

With things looking up, I’ve decided to look back, to chronicle the growing pains of this console generation’s biggest game. This column will explore and explain Destiny’s hurdles, from raid bugs to loot caving to weapon balancing, in an effort to illustrate its cumulative development. With any luck, it will become a cork board to which veterans can pin their experiences and opinions. For new Destiny players, it might serve as a record of what they were fortunate and unfortunate enough to miss. And for Destiny’s second year, may it be a reminder of the depths of what it needs to repair.

B.C. – Before Cryptarch

For most, biting off more than you can chew is just a cliché and minor choking hazard. Throughout Destiny, it has been Bungie’s mantra. Its greatest overestimation proved predictive of its greatest shortcoming: story.

“We like to tell big stories,” Bungie COO Pete Parsons told GamesIndustry in August 2013, “and we want people to put the Destiny universe on the same shelf they put Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars; we’ve already seen they do that with Halo.”

Now, an IP—any IP at all—being compared to time-honored classics like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings evokes an image of a Chihuahua picking fights with a Tyrannosaurus. That said, Parsons was technically in the right. What creator doesn’t want their story to be adored by hundreds of millions? But wanting and working toward are very different things, as Destiny’s threadbare narrative would go on to prove.

It’s no grand secret that Destiny’s story has a lot of holes and even more problems. It spends all of its time telling, but never really showing players the significance of their allegedly urgent mission. The Speaker is particularly guilty of that one. “I could tell you,” he says. Well, why don’t you?

Dialogue elicits reactions ranging from disgruntled groans to looks of genuine fascination that you might otherwise direct to a one-legged dragon. How did the line, “I don’t even have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain,” make it past drafting? Legends say it’s still ruining CGI moments to this day.

But that’s the obvious. Flak aside, the story’s biggest problem is its length. Rather than Harry Potter or Star Wars, Destiny is best likened to The Story of An Hour, a short story by Kate Chopin. Admittedly, you can’t actually beat the vanilla campaign in a single hour, but you won’t get more than an afternoon out of it either, which is problematic enough.

Neither MMOs nor FPSs are known for compelling storytelling. As a combination of the two, by all rights, we should have expected Destiny to have a flimsy narrative—though if it was pursuing that path, it’s a real overachiever. But its parent genres at least meet their quota. MMOs deliver a campaign long enough to carry players close to the maximum level, and FPSs are based entirely in story, multiplayer notwithstanding.

With Destiny, you burn through a handful of repetitive missions—track one, tell Ghost to do the thing, is set on repeat—and then fly off the rails. You reach the end-game in the blink of an eye, and are then tasked with replaying a motley crew of Strikes, missions and bounties. There’s no structure, no light at the end of the tunnel. Just do the thing so you can get better at doing the thing. Destiny didn’t need a great story; it just needed a story. But all it got was a vague premise, stiff characters and empty showboating.

The Second Story of Grimoire

This may not have been the case from the start. Unconfirmed rumors suggest that Destiny’s campaign and general scope were originally much more ambitious but were eventually gutted, perhaps to allow the game’s September 2014 launch. Others claim that content was cut from the original game to be repackaged as DLC. This theory is supported by the fact that content from The Dark Below and The House of Wolves expansions was included and viewable in the retail version of the game. Through clever jump glitching, players could even access some of these then-empty areas.

Several alleged insiders have offered an account of the events that led to this phantom downsizing. All agree that the game’s story bore the brunt of the culling. Shortly after launch, one whistleblower claiming to be an early tester for the game outlined a very different Destiny.

In the 2013 build, they said, the story was driven by the character Crow, who was replaced by the female Exo Stranger we’ve come to know. The gist of the “original” plot was that the Traveler, now known to be humanity’s final bastion, had in fact created the antagonistic Darkness and attacked mankind. Planet progression also differed: testers went from Earth, to Venus, to Mars and finally to the Moon.

The differences in mission structure and plot are significant, but it’s this Crow character that truly hikes up the red flags. Crow is another commonality among insider reports, and also appeared in the gameplay trailer shown at E3 2013. Near the end of the trailer, the character we now know as Uldren Sov, the Awoken Queen’s sharp-tongued confidant, appears in a cutscene which, like much of what’s seen in the trailer, never made it into the game.

Notably, Sov, or Crow, is sporting armor clad in black feathers in this early appearance. It’s thematically appropriate, but hardly evidence enough. More damning is Sov’s alias of “The Master of Crows.” What’s more, the Grimoire for Petra Venj, the Queen’s aide introduced in The House of Wolves, still refers to Awoken agents as “Crows.”

A self-proclaimed Bungie employee by the username of 404Architect corroborated this story long after it surfaced (and was swiftly deleted, but then reposted by many others).

“I can confirm that there were sudden and abrupt changes in the development of Destiny less than a year ago,” Architect said in September 2014. “There was tension between higher ups the entire time we were developing the title due to a lack of cohesion about the vision for the game.”

Allegedly, the development team was split between creating a grand space epic and a more “easily accessible” experience with minimal story elements. Architect attributed the project’s collapse to the departure of Lead Writer Joe Staten, which allegedly caused a domino line of corner cutting.

According to Staten’s LinkedIn entry for Destiny, he created “multi-season, serial stories and expanded universe fiction” for the game. His responsibilities also included ensuring “a consistent, compelling universe.” It’s hard to believe that Staten’s intentions were so far off the mark. More believable is the notion that his work was, indeed, cut from the project around the time he left. If nothing else, things clearly changed in his absence. This must have contributed to the creation of Destiny’s Grimoire Cards, a remarkably fruitless collection of contextual cliff notes. After all, if it’s not in the game, it doesn’t matter.

“We had a guy come in to write the grimoire cards who was given access to the original script with notations on what was cut and what needed to be revised in order to make this zombie of a game seem plausible,” Architect said.

Staten was only the first employee to abruptly leave the project. In April 2014, famed composer Martin O’Donnell, best known for his work on Halo, was fired from Bungie shortly after completing work on early trailers. In his lawsuit against the studio, O’Donnell maintained that the dismissal was completely devoid of reason. He eventually won nearly $100 thousand in compensation.

These theories have not, and likely never will be, confirmed, but their plausibility is undeniable. Destiny is guilty of plenty of fraudulent trailers, all of which point to significant rollbacks on the project. That the game’s story, handily its weakest element, would be affected by such cuts is only natural.

Read on for the history of the Vault of Glass, Destiny's sparse social elements and ample grinding, and the future of this column.