“Is it bedtime?” I hear over the headset. Glancing at my watch, I realise it’s been a few hours since we started playing.
“It is. Let’s head back to the Tower and hand everything in”.
Destiny 2 is a game that’s easy to drop into for a quick run about and somehow lose an entire evening. The sequel to Bungie’s original massively multiplayer online first-person shooter, Destiny 2 allows you to play as one of 3 character classes, each able to follow 3 different paths to specialised abilities. Set on post-apocalyptic earth, you play a guardian, protector of the remains of humanity. Your task is to fight off 3 other species intent on… well, it’s complicated, but they’re here and they’re not friendly.
Given the effort put into character development and storylines in modern games, it would be easy to assume that the idea is to tell a compelling story with a satisfying resolution; one where the hero (you) and friends deliver the world from evil. But while narrative can drive a game’s success, it’s not really a game’s purpose. Games are about letting a player immerse themselves in another reality for a brief time and do something they ordinarily can’t, whether that’s leading armies across a chessboard or eating dots in a ghost-filled maze. Destiny 2 provides this immersion from the outset with the main campaign storyline; the civilisation stabilised in the first game is under threat of extinction from a megalomaniacal warlord who wants to capture your hero’s powers for himself and who will destroy the sun if he doesn’t get his way. Your task is to complete a series of missions to reconnect the scattered leaders of humanity, disable the sun-destroying weapon and lead an uprising to drive out the invaders.
This sense of place within the world flows through into the struggle ahead and provides the context you need to suspend disbelief while you’re fighting your way through fantastical landscapes. Once you’ve defeated the encroaching evil, the adventure continues as you help the world’s inhabitants recover from the conflict by helping them find lost items and clear areas of hostile aliens, with a central area known as ‘The Tower’ acting as a hub where you can socialise with other players, collect rewards and pick up new missions.
However, while the flow of the entry sequence smoothly draws the player into a believable unreality, the game does have flaws that threaten to break the immersion. The main campaign is short, and the transition from a continuous storyline to picking up ad-hoc tasks is abrupt and jarring. And, like many persistent online games, the world resets itself after every encounter – fresh waves of troops arrive to replace those you’ve defeated, doors opened reseal themselves, and problems you untangled magically reappear – which threatens to pull you out of the imaginary world by reminding you that you’re in a commercial product with other customers queuing up behind you.
The lack of variety within mission formats also eventually becomes repetitive – go to the specified location, pick a fight with whatever’s there and occasionally bring something back – and in some cases they can be frustratingly difficult. The hook for doing these is usually better equipment, but the results are often disappointingly similar to the gear you already have.
Despite these faults, it’s the fact that you can make the transition from couch-slumping nobody to gun-toting hero in seconds and have that feeling prolonged for hours that makes Destiny 2 a success. It’s a game that’s easy to step into and lose yourself in a different world and for me, that’s what makes a good game. If I want a deep storyline, I’ll read a book. But when what you need is an hour or two of fast-paced collaborative entertainment, Destiny 2 is hard to beat.
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