PaigeFTW: Skipping my date with ‘Destiny’
Destiny has always felt a little dead to me, a little sterile.
Don’t get me wrong: It’s a beautiful game, and the controls are smooth as butter. I never get frustrated with actually playing it.
It’s just that I never want to play it, either.
I get that the players are cast in the role of small cogs in the larger machine, that over time all these kills and campaigns will lead to a big, overarching sci-fi masterpiece of a story. I get that the appeal is supposed to be the multiplayer competition and cooperation. I get that Bungie has been going through great strides to make the game better, even going so far as to cut Peter Dinklage from the game and replace him with a more emotive Nolan North. I also get that The Taken King was supposedly badass and awesome.
And yet there is absolutely no appeal for me in being generic Guardian No. 198,089.
I can only explain it as that the game lacks intimacy. It’s not the silent protagonist — because Link, after all, rarely utters a word in Legend of Zelda games, and yet we still feel connected to him — nor is it the one-among-many conceit, per say.
I would judge that much of Destiny‘s action feels futile because the player’s particular Guardian feels absolutely insignificant in the grander picture. There’s nothing this particular Guardian can do that no one else can. And there’s not even a witty personality to find endearing. The player exists as a (literal) shell of a person, a reanimated corpse.
While gaming messiahs and chosen ones are a dime a dozen, a game can’t help but feel a little empty when every task undertaken could literally have been done by anyone else’s character with exactly the same results.
Anyone can be an explorer, but there’s only one Lara Croft or Nathan Drake.
But who are you in Destiny? I don’t see an answer coming anytime soon.
