I wore my Destiny t-shirt to the local game store the other night. A co-worker asked “hey, is that a Destiny shirt?” I nodded and replied “Yeah, I got it from their E3 booth last year.”
“That game doesn’t look entirely great.”
“No, it just looks like Borderlands meets Halo.”
“Pretty much.”
Destiny is suffering from an image problem. In Bungie’s efforts to make a large scale and fully connected world, they’ve come across as showcasing a game that looks similar to things we’ve already played. Granted, this is due to the fact that it’s really, really difficult to showcase everything a persistently online game has to offer in small periods of time. In fact, it’s just downright impossible.
What’s interesting, though, is that a lot of people aren’t giving Bungie the benefit of the doubt and trusting that they’ll be able to deliver a winner with Destiny. Maybe it’s the sky-high expectations from the developer who helped define what a console shooter should be. It could be the fact that the game’s budget is astronomically high, clocking in at a rate that would make Dr. Evil jealous.
Perhaps it’s simply the fact that Destiny just isn’t meant to be shown off in glimpses.
Let’s look back at the pre-release hype for Borderlands, a game Destiny is often compared to:
That’s right: nothing. It was pretty much non-existent. Once people got Borderlands into their hands, however, things were different and a franchise was born.
It doesn’t matter what a game does before it’s released. The quality of a game is judged by what it does once it’s into our hands and in our consoles. Sure, it’s easy to get excited over videos and previews, but not every game can capture those “wow” moments. Destiny feels like it falls into that category: something that needs to be played for extended periods of time before an opinion can be formed.
Regardless, I’ll be rooting for Bungie to pull it off, if only because that Destiny shirt is incredibly comfortable.
