About three worlds into Destiny 2, you journey to a planetoid infested with a robotic species known as the Vex. They ensnared your Nathan Fillion-voiced machine buddy Cayde-6 in a looping teleporter entice, which you could save him from. It appears like an thrilling journey, proper? Well… not fairly.
The mission design is not the one place the sport may enhance – Destiny 2’s mute protagonist could do with finding a voice.
Nessus itself sports activities a few of the trippiest-looking locales within the recreation, with floating, glowing platforms juxtaposing neon blue-green vegetation. By all rights, this portion of the sport ought to make for a few of the most fascinating mission design within the recreation. So what do you do? You shoot a bunch of Vex, stroll to the following waypoint, then shoot some extra. Sometimes you’ll stroll via a teleporter, but it surely would possibly as effectively be a static hallway on the way in which to the following killing area.
Nessus is emblematic of a higher drawback with Destiny as a complete, and it’s one which hits on the coronary heart of the design philosophy of the sequence. Bungie designer Jaime Griesemer famously talked about Halo as repeating the identical 30 seconds of enjoyable throughout a whole recreation with various environments and weapons, and that philosophy carries over to Destiny. You observe the identical gameplay loops of getting into kill bins and wiping out all of the enemies inside, whereas taking cowl among the many debris-filled battlefield.
On its personal, this design trajectory shouldn’t be inherently an issue. It is a formulation that MMOs have efficiently used for years now. But when you think about all of the sci-fi bombast of the story of Destiny, what you might be truly doing within the recreation usually doesn’t match up with the promised grandeur. Nessus suffers notably.
When you hear that Cayde-6 is trapped in a teleporter loop, it might be cheap to anticipate stage design that makes intelligent use of teleporters. The actuality is that they’re little greater than jumped-up doorways. Likewise, the way in which you free Cayde-6 is by beating a boss enemy – extra senseless killing that has little to do with the setup. You barely want to control something within the atmosphere, not to mention in good methods. You simply need to shoot at a goal, as at all times.
It shouldn’t be like Bungie would have wanted to do lots to boost Destiny 2’s story missions. They got here shut with the Titan missions, which occur on a lunar base ravaged by a tumultuous ocean, lending itself to a various construction not like another stage. The base itself is torn to items, forcing you to leap throughout platforms to traverse the realm. As a consequence, Titan marries story with gameplay in a manner that the remainder of the sport lacks.
That is the rub in Destiny: you play it to immerse your self within the hypnotic loop of killing groupings of enemies, and hoover up the loot that spills out of them – your quest to cease Dominus Ghaul by no means threatens to interrupt this cycle. Destiny’s story desires to instill a grandiose sense of heroic surprise and reverence, however you might be more likely to miss it as you might be funneled ever onwards to the following kill field.
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