Being down on Destiny is almost a requirement by now. You can’t even call yourself a true fan unless you can rattle off a number of times or things or people, and particular people at Bungie, that bother you in ways no human should suffer. And you quit. Aaand you’re back.
A lot of what sucks about Destiny is in the details, revealed after untold hours of exposure to a convoluted economy and progression system, and interminable gameplay bug troubles. They’ll litter your Twitter feed every now and then. However, today we wanted to highlight some of the greatest missteps in Destiny since time. Those occasions that, while playing, the voice in your head was sobbing: "This. Just. Sucks." For it did. But thankfully now does not.
1. Original Loot Cave, window to your soul
In November 2014, Bungie may as well have stuck a flag in its sandbox saying, "Work in Progress. Proceed at Your Own Risk." Which it couldn’t have done, because it would’ve required forethought and planning. Folk got to know about the Loot Cave, a particular location in the Cosmodrome in Destiny 1, within days of the game being launched.
Self-deprecating Bungie swooped to put an end to the virulent practice of engram farming that spread almost overnight. Bungie later transformed the Loot Cave into a jovial shrine, a virtual tourist spot with an interactive feature. But the true horror of the Loot Cave is how it highlighted what many players were happy to just go and do: shooting mindless stuff, for stuff.
2. Master Rahool and the dark days of decryption
In Early Destiny, you grabbed all your stuff, called engrams, possibly from the Loot Cave, returned to orbit (minor chore) before heading to the Tower for an audience with Master Rahool, the Cryptarch. Nothing at all had been regulated, and the decryption process seemed truly random, erring on the side of trolling.
Guardians would hand over a rare (blue) engram and receive an uncommon (green) item in return. Similarly, legendary (purple) engrams would decrypt into rares. And sometimes, the item shown on the engram, e.g. boots, chest, helm, would not even be that. You could receive a Mote of Light, or a couple of Ascendant Shards, because everybody needed more Ascendant Shards. Oh, that’s right, they did not.
3. Leveling gear before it became useful
From vanilla Destiny through Rise of Iron, it wasn’t enough to acquire a particular weapon or piece of armor - it needed to be leveled up before it would perform as advertised.
In Year 1, the process was painfully slow, requiring all manner of supplementary items plus the knowhow to unlock perks such as Wolfpack Rounds on Gjallarhorn, or Oracle Disruptors on Vault of Glass weapons. Savvy Guardians would reserve specific Telemetry consumables to boost the progress, completing Bounties for Xander 99-40 in the Tower, being careful to have the appropriate item equipped before cashing everything in.
While this system was intriguing, it weighed heavily on the grind, and was a superficial layer to endgame opportunities. It was just as irritating to amass unwanted Shards and Materials.
4. Quantum King’s Fall Ogres
The King’s Fall Raid, from The Taken King, is a colossal, mechanics-laden challenge that climaxes with the most regimented and refined encounter Destiny has ever seen. Over time it became wonderful, after people figured out that sprinting in circles was no longer, or even ever was, a helpful idea, and that a good aim with a sniper rifle was worth practicing.
However, with every last step of the choreography memorized, the game itself could still send a curve ball in the form of teleporting Light-Eater Ogres, the precision felling of which was central to the defeating of final boss, Oryx. They would suddenly jump to another point of the map, wasting time and messing up the whole routine. Bungie introduced the Oryx Challenge mode before this bug got fixed, which was even more agonizing.
5. Festival of the Cost
Destiny’s in-game, real-money retail booth could claim a section of its own in this article, but the feature still exists and is evolving. Although widely despised, Eververse avoids scrutiny. Festival of the Lost 2016 (October 25 – November 8), however, is a horror show that should be held up as a thing that should not be. Likewise, the recent The Dawning event in Destiny 2 (December 19, 2017 – January 9, 2018), for similar reasons, but ‘Festival of the Cost’, as it became known, soured many Guardians’ year by promising loot that had unfair drop rates.
Although similar in format to the previous year’s inaugural Festival of the Lost, the loot pool, which included masks, ghosts and ornaments, had such a low RNG yield that the purchase of Mystery Bags using Silver was the only realistic chance of acquiring all the attractive goods.
6. A true token gesture
The plague of Destiny 2 right now is the token system, a form of currency that has also crept into the endgame loot pool, and is almost entirely unappealing. Where it relates to various planet vendors, tokens are just about okay. It’s fine that we scrounge a token here or there to trade in for gear, especially during the early Power Levels.
However, to be handed a bag of tokens during a Raid or at the end of a Strike, when another Guardian walks away with a terrific gun or armor piece, this just doesn’t feel right at all. Tokens tempered the thrill of the Iron Banner also, adding an unwanted layer of RNG to the PvP tournament’s rewards.
7. Prometheus Lens
The Curse of Osiris DLC brought with it an Exotic Trace Rifle with the most ridiculous DPS, requiring the bare minimum of skill to aim. It was horrible enough facing one Guardian in Crucible, whom everybody else could complain about while hoping they would disappear. The tipping point, more like an avalanche of displeasure and threats of quitting, was when exotic weapons and armor merchant Xur had Prometheus Lens for sale in December 2017.
Crucible became a one-gun show, which was hilarious for maybe a week, but with an entire game mode being mocked into oblivion, Bungie made the choice of nerfing the Lens to kingdom come, announcing, “As ‘Laser Tag’ weekend comes to a close, we’re making good on our promise to address the fact that Prometheus Lens is way too powerful. Sure it’s fun, but it breaks the Crucible for anyone who wants to use a different weapon. Given the short window we had to make an emergency fix, it will be adjusted to be way too weak. In January, this new Exotic will receive a proper, play-tested design pass.”
No sign of that yet, though…