Destiny has received mixed reviews for a number of reasons: a forced story, repetitive action, and a plenitude of other, often-contradictory, statements. Rather than spending the last week playing through the story (I’ve only made it halfway through), I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time in the player versus player (PVP) arena, The Crucible.
The Crucible is made up of several different game modes. There’s Clash, a game mode where two teams of six compete against one another to rack up the most amount of kills the fastest. There’s Control, where those two teams fight to control three points on a map. Rumble is a free-for-all where everyone is trying to kill everyone else as fast as possible. Skirmish takes team combat down to two teams of three attempting to tactically eliminate each other. All of these are bog-standard, no-risk game modes. Salvage is the only outlier, being a map with rotating zones that teams fight over in a combination of Control and Skirmish, but its outlier status only comes from when it is playable. It only appears on the weekends.
Destiny’s PVP is strange in contemporary multiplayer shooters because of how safe it plays it. Each iteration of Call of Duty ships with several strange objective-based modes. They fall in and out of each game, but the experimentation is a guaranteed part of those games.
The very construction of The Crucible lacks any kind of experimentation. You queue up for the playlist and you play the same game modes that have existed in every shooter since 2005. This is, I assume, in the interest of creating an incredibly specialized and enclosed player versus player ecology. The game modes themselves are extremely predictable, which allows for a swerve to come in the form of the classes, subclasses and unique weapons.
Destiny’s three classes are the Warlock, the Hunter and the Titan. Respectively, they are Squishy McShooty, Cutterling Knifethrow and Punch Jumpfist. What I mean by that is that the Warlock excels at range, the Hunter excels at guerilla in-and-out combat, and the Titan is your tank that rushes in and gets things done. Their subclasses allow them to dive even further into those niches, taking them further away from general capability and driving them deeper into territory that requires the player to wait for very specific conditions. For example, I play as a Hunter, and one subclass that I could specialize in is the Blade Dancer. This subclass is fast, but lacks the resilience of the standard Hunter build. However, when the Blade Dancer uses her special move, she becomes a melee genius, hacking through enemy after enemy during the time that the ability is active.
Predictability, however, still reigns supreme within these different classes and subclasses. There are only six sub/classes that you can compete against. That means that if you can identify the class you’re fighting against, you can figure out what abilities they might unleash on you (however, it is worth mentioning that Destiny’s homogenous visual style doesn’t lend to easy class parsing at the outset).
For the most part, combat plays out in the same way that it did in Bungie’s previous franchise, the Halo series. Jumping is a little floaty. You can stealth around the map by crouching. A close-range shotgun will destroy any enemy who gets too close. You carry two weapons at once. The only interesting thing about this, or the only thing that actually differentiates this from the basic skeleton of that former franchise, is the introduction of single-player weapons into the PVP environment.
In past iterations of the Halo style of multiplayer, everyone was using the same weapons to achieve the same goals. In Destiny, there are a finite number of weapon types with an incredibly large set of traits that they can possess. For example, everyone on your team might have a shotgun, a Special Weapon with its own ammo type distinct from a player’s Primary Weapon. However, Player A might have a shotgun that excels at medium range. Player B’s shotgun might be specialized for less recoil. Player C’s is decked out for fast reload and high attack power. This phenomenon continues on down the line for all players and all of their weapons.
What this means in actual play is that you have very little information about what an enemy player is doing at any given time. It becomes difficult to avoid “the shotgun player” or “the sniper” when each player has the opportunity to expand their play style in a way that makes it competitive with all other play styles. Historically, if you could figure out how to make the default sniper rifle work for you, then you could excel with that weapon, ending up on the high, thin edge of the bell curve. Destiny’s customization means that me, a person who is awful with the standard sniper rifle, can shorten the scope zoom, reduce the recoil, and increase the reload speed. This means that I end up feeling really cool as a player, but my ability to deal with other players and their play styles becomes severely limited, and I end up playing reactively more than proactively. I spend as much time trying to figure out which enemy has which weapon as I do actively pursuing objectives. It weighs on me.
