I played Destiny for about a month after it came out and made it up to about level 26. In that month’s time I never came across a Legendary or Exotic drop, so yeah, I’m unlucky. Being unlucky in a game doesn’t mean that the game is bad though, having most EVERYTHING in the game be reliant upon a random number generator makes it a bad game.
Destiny is an MMORPG shooter produced by Bungie, the developers of Halo. It has great shooting mechanics and feel, but unfortunately 90% of the feel and shooting mechanics, including enemy reactions, behaviors and weapon types are ripped almost 1:1 from Halo. The shooting feels good, but it’s almost EXACTLY what they gave us in their last series.
The MMO aspects are poorly implemented at best. There are random events for people to join in together, but there is a severe lack of interactability between players. There are only a handful of emotes, and those largely boil down to dancing, no text support (except possibly on PC) and NO VOICE SUPPORT AT ALL unless you are in a party with others in your clan. There is no trading. There is no player economy. There is no vastness as the entire game is broken down into 4 maps that make themselves out to feel large but are largely recycled. There are only a handful of NPCs in the entire game, and only a couple of those have lines of any form while the others act as half-assed merchants that do not sell anything of worth for actual currency, and items worth buying for credits earned in multiplayer.
The RPG mechanics are terribly implemented with each class doing largely the same things in the same ways, and this is exacerbated by the subclasses making the differences even more minor. Compare the character customization in Destiny, which is only visible at the Tower and has NO impact on ANYTHING in the game, despite allowing the player a choice of 3 “races” that again add NOTHING but aesthetics. Grinding makes up 99% of the game, yet add virtually nothing, as even the lowest level enemies will do the same damage to you whether you wear level 3 armor or 30 armor, and take the same damage with little variation whether you use a level 2 common weapon or 27 Exotic. The only difference between a level 4 Dreg and a level 24 Dreg is that you CANNOT do damage AT ALL to the latter unless you’re within a couple levels.
The game is a grinder’s wet dream. Pure and simple. That does not make a good game. That makes a repetitive game that rewards heavy time investment with next to nothing unless you happen to roll a good number when you toss the dice. When a game encourages you to grind in multiplayer to get better it should either reward you for doing well, or help you out after you’ve done poorly. Destiny does NEITHER and instead randomly gives out loot and gear to random people. I played matches where one person received a Legendary and Rare drop and everyone else got nothing, and I’ve had matches where everyone received something, yet it was the person who stood in the corner and stared at the wall that received an Exotic.
Coming from a company like Bungie, which has shown with explicit proof that it can tie in a very solid and immersive world into the hectic action of a shooter the game has no story or world in game. It does have lore, but it has ABSOLUTELY NO WAY of accessing the lore in game. You unlock lore in game, but it is only available to view on Bungie’s site when the Tower is largely barren and open. Acting from the few speaking roles is flat and pointless when it actually comes up, but that’s largely the synopsis of the story as a whole. Enemies come in 4 factions, who sometimes interact, but the variety is negligible at best and they are so often recycled that it borders on JRPG in repetitiveness. When your big, epic, end game boss is an earlier and oft repeated enemy, but bigger, you have a problem.
Destiny has fun gameplay, and for those that live for the grind it has some stuff to offer in the long run. However, the fun gameplay it has can be found in Halo, especially with the Master Chief collection having just come out. The presentation is very good, but pretty much comparable to many other games of this generation. In every aspect except for presentation and raw shooting mechanics the game is lackluster at best, and piss poor at worst.
For all the hype that led up to the game, for all the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that went into developing the game (or marketing, mostly marketing) the game is a horrible disappointment that masks its mediocrity with repetitious gameplay that instills in SOME a sense of addiction akin to a narcotic. Just because it’s addicting doesn’t make it good. Destiny is like crack. If you’re on it you’ll think it’s great. If you kicked it you see it for the polished turd it is and you wouldn’t wish it on anyone.