I’m Going To Destinyland!
We ran reviews of two high-profile games this week. The first was Destiny, the new multiplayer first-person shooter thing from Bungie, the creators of Halo. Our critic, Ryan Smith, found some thrills among its mélange of sci-fi clichés but didn’t think they held up to the extended play the game is hoping you’ll invest. Armin Tamzarian felt similarly and put together a nice little metaphor:
Destiny is basically a Disneyland ride of a shooter. It’s impeccably curated and designed, but hollow if you look closely at the things the ride is taking you past. If you enjoy it the first time and go back through, you’ll find it exactly the same. This is not a living, breathing universe; it’s a tourist attraction. And that’s okay. I’ve had a real blast in the past week playing through various missions with friends, messing around with my gear, and staring longingly at useless ships I can’t afford, like a kid who wants Mickey Mouse ears in an overpriced gift shop. Like that kid, eventually it’ll all prove too much for me, and I’ll get sleepy and want to go home, and those ears will probably be discarded on the floor of the car. But it’s good fun while it lasts.
Ryan was also critical of Destiny’s storytelling—or lack thereof, as it were. When talking about Bungie’s past work, Ryan made it clear that he preferred the characterizations in Halo 4, which was developed at a different studio, to anything the series had brought prior. QoheletTzadak felt the same way and elaborated:
All it took to fix Halo was something remarkably basic, and it’s amazing it took anyone 10 years to figure it out: Give the main character a voice, a point of view, and agency (it doesn’t even have to be anything dramatic!), and expand on the series’ one key relationship. Why does this soldier guy do stuff? Well, he’s an emotionally stunted human superweapon, manipulated and exploited since early childhood by the military, navigating feelings he doesn’t really understand for a girl who’s essentially a voice in his head. There’s the germ of a compelling story in there for someone whose understanding of story work is deeper than, “But what if we made the jeep physics really bouncy?”
What’s weird is that Bungie took a stab at creating a player character with a voice and an actual arc with the Arbiter, and it was the best part of Halo 2, but they completely discarded it. I assume it was due to player backlash. Then there was Reach, which seemed to be a response to the criticism that Halo focused entirely on a nearly mute lead character with no traits to speak of. The result was a team of nearly mute lead characters, some of whom had accents. So much wasted potential. That game could have been a legitimately compelling story of collective sacrifice in the face of insurmountable odds if they had just given two shits about creating three-dimensional characters. Or even two-dimensional ones.
I’m tired of games telling me I can’t empathize with a character who has a defined point of view, or even a personality at all. If I’m controlling someone’s actions, I’m going to identify with them on some level whether I want to or not.
And TheLastMariachi offered both a suggestion for a “blank slate” character done right (the hero in question starts as a mostly blank slate, at least) and an observation regarding a tidy coincidence with Halo’s Master Chief: