My week of frustration with Destiny.

Well, it’s been a long week. I luckily requested off work the entire week to exclusively spend time with Bungie’s new baby Destiny. It was released exactly six days ago, and I woke up the UPS guy dropping off my $200 Ghost Edition. Without bragging too much, hopefully you’ve been become aware of my preparation and excitement for such an amazing product. It’s Bungie after all. I owe them so much for years of entertainment between Halo, Oni, and the Marathon series. With this much excitement building up for so long (it’s been 4 years since Bungie’s last game; Halo: Reach).

The week started off excellent. Running through the story line took a whole of two days, mostly because we spent nights playing Diablo 3 (since Destiny doesn’t off co-op of any sort – much unlike Halo). The actual campaign is pretty short but if you don’t have any friends like me you’ll be spending time leveling up and trying to farm better gear. This made it feel a lot like a freemium MMO which was quite a drag because I would have dropped some in-game purchases to pick up a legendary auto-rifle.
Seriously, let’s talk about these legendary weapons. After completing the campaign, and handfuls of PVP matches; you’re left to find a full set of purple end-game equipment to further your leveling. 20’s the max, until you find some decent equipment and it can easily be boosted to 23 or 24 with the help of a farm run or two. At first I envied the level 25’s (max) running around, thinking they must have the best equipment out there. Turns out, it can get even better. So I began farming for legendary / exotic weapons on the third day. 3 days later, guess what? I still don’t have one piece of legendary equipment. Go figure. Bungie still hates me. After all we’ve done for each other.
I actually got a fireteam going Saturday morning which made the game so much more enjoyable. What’s the point of spending an hour grinding down a strike’s boss without the enjoyment of friends and nonsense to keep you entertained? Although the game is obviously made to be played with friends, or even strangers with mics; I could not find one person willing to talk the entire week. Even during matchmaking and strike missions with strangers, I raised the question “who has mics?”. Nothing. Although the gaming community has become the most unsocial trend in existence, I digress because I’ve been fighting that fight for years and no one listens.
Although the game has many great features, Bungie still has some kinks to work out. Seriously, someone needs to tell them to quit putting shotguns in games. Whatever coding they’ve been recycling since Halo: Combat Evolved has been glitched to shit and it’s time for them to stop.
So besides the entire universe being a very lonely place, and matchmaking not being anything incredible to rant about (it’s good, but it made me miss Halo), my only real complaint about Destiny is still the amount of luck it takes to finish the game. By “finish” I mean get achievements and / or fully stock your character with legendary equipment.  Finish in no way means “finish the campaign” because guess what (and I don’t care if this is a spoiler) IT DOESN’T END. I actually like how the campaign is done, but it was the most under dramatic “ending” I have ever seen. Every week a new campaign mission pops up and it’s supposed to keep you busy, playing the never ending story line. BUT if you need a conclusion, you’re crap out of luck until a DLC pack is released.