#on top of my new dream sequence i still wanna write (and will focus on first)

[aza-trash-can]

Hehe

Hehehe

A fic idea has grown

[games-benedict]

Destiny 2 Is As Beautiful As Ever

Destiny 2 is out. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to find there. At this point, it’s pretty clear Bungie’s never going to make the Destiny game I want. But I’m going back nonetheless because 1) the guns still feel great and 2) there’s some damn pretty stuff to see.

After getting to spend a fair bit of time with the game last night I ended up with quite a few screenshots, so rather than go on a long rant about how this series is still a mess, I’ll try to keep my list of grievances to a minimum and focus instead on some of the cool world building that happens in the game despite itself.

There are all different types of science fiction, but I think Destiny’s version tends to come off as inconsistent and off the wall. But really it just reminds me of the illustrations artists would do for old sci-fi paper backs or even astronomy coffee table books. It’s not built around a particular technological question, or hypotheticals about life in the future. Instead, the game’s approach is to simply take the Wikipedia page for a planet or astronomical phenomenon, dream about it, and then start throwing lines and colors on a page. On the surface, Mass Effect Andromeda seemed to be doing the same thing, but in reality the results ended up feeling much more engineered and modular; the difference between scanning a planet from above and painting it from below.

Destiny’s backgrounds are great. Especially because they’re always balanced with a middle ground you can actually get to and nearby objects that contrast in volume and help frame the vista ahead.

The early part of Destiny 2 veers heavily into Lord of the Rings and I sort of dig that.

Bungie knows how to take good looking scenes and really make them pop by adding dramatic lighting effects. The Sleeping Beauty bramble cave below a pedestrian looking aluminum silo is also cool.

Whatever you wanna call it--instagramification, neon-drenching, etc.--I think it works and helps give Destiny 2 a visual identity apart from the first game. Fighting uphill in the woods below a pink and teal sky against camping aliens is better than a lot of the alternatives. 

I've really missed this series’ skyboxes.

Titan is definitely my favorite location to date. Even if it was giving me hard Gears of War 3 flashbacks, and most of the fights weren’t as good as Gears of War 3, trading empty expanses for narrow corridors and ledges was a nice change of pace. 

Destiny is also at its best when there’s extreme terraforming involved. In this case, Titan basically functions as a combination of Star Wars’ Cloud City and Minos.

More teal! But also lemon yellows and sun baked sheet metal. There’s been a subtle shift in Destiny 2 toward big industrial equipment which, intentional or not, helps give some actual shape to some of the backstory about what civilization was up to before the fall. Giant turbines, hydro-pistons, and big alien drills draw a nice contrast with the sleek space ships and magic armor; more Alien than Star Trek.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about the designs on Titan, but felt very IKEA to me. Maybe it was just the yellow, or the rain at sea on a rig (all of which I weirdly associate with Scandinavia). Between the first game’s old Russia Cosmodrone and Destiny 2′s European Dead Zone, it all feels a bit eurocentric.

This is my favorite tunnel in the game so far. And there are a lot of tunnels.

Skyboxes with giant planets in them are even better.

Seriously though, Titan’s the best.

The giant biodome has a very Logan’s Run feels to it and, assuming there are some interesting side missions, strikes, or (fingers crossed) and eventual raid there, it will immediately jump toward the top of my list of best post-apocalyptic malls.

7066 Nessus is a small Vex rock, and as such, looked equal parts beautiful and re-used assets from Venus. The hazy teals and electric blues are once again in full effect, but I’m down with it. While the rest of the game seems content to double down on the “log on and shoot shit with your bros” appeal, the art direction in Destiny 2 commits much more strongly to the series’ trippy sci-fi vibes.

The eye motif that follows the Vex around is one of my favorites, even if it makes Nessus look like the GLaDOS home world. 

Otherwise, here are some quick thoughts so far, in no particular order:

The writing is bad. Destiny’s writing was mostly silly nonsense, but Destiny 2 tries to invoke this feeling of being under siege, especially in the beginning, that makes it feel like you’re supposed to be taking it all totally seriously

I’m not the only one to point this out, but anytime you tell the player not to die and then let them respawn seconds away the first time they die after that, there’s probably some holes in your design.

To that point, why even bother to Metroid the player if you’re going to re-introduce the bulk of their powers a few moments later with no interesting obstacles in-between? Not being able to run, jump, or throw grenades is a very jarring thing in Destiny, and yet that brief survival-horror sequence is played mostly as a walking sim. Normally that’s something I’d encourage, but in this particular type of situation, it seems to completely miss the point.

I’m so tired of loot boxes. Overwatch and PUBG have ruined us. Especially since most of the loot boxes that appear in Destiny 2 are full of tedious junk.

The environments are big and beautiful but still mostly empty. 99% of interactions boil down to “Hold square to spawn monster closets.”

You can tell Bungie really wanted to go for it this time in terms of the linear narrative, but it feels completely uneconomical given the dearth of plot throughout the rest of the game. Too many of the cutscenes don’t advance the story or tell me something I couldn’t have guessed before. More importantly, they don’t introduce more questions. This was a problem in the first game, but it feels even more acute in the second given its apparent emphasis on getting us to care about these characters and their struggle. Basically, every time Bungie has a chance to build out a mystery it chooses to make a bad joke instead.

It’s a sequel, so stuff is bound to be different, but I got the sneaking suspicion on more than one occasion that stuff was changed from the first game to the second simply to make the second feel like more of an upgrade. I don’t see the point of the new skill tree look, for instance. At bottom it’s still asking you to make the same trade-offs as before and not allowing you any greater degree of customization. While there are plenty of small graphical and quality of life improvements, there’s also an awful lot of crap that looks like it was given a fresh coat of paint just cause. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it feels hollow and overly conservative on Bungie’s part.

Finally, what’s up with Zavala and his crew scattering to the four corners of the solar system? Shaxx is on Earth still? Nathan Fillion (sorry, Cayde-6 literally doesn’t exist as a character) crash lands on a jumble of No Man’s Sky assets to look for a teleporter? One thing Destiny 2 has done a good (read: slightly better) job of is introducing a certain amount of skepticism and dissension within the ranks. The three principal Guardians all have slightly different priorities and interpretations of the game’s central premise (is that big ball in the sky good, bad, or indifferent?), and there are some regular old humans who think the City (run by the Guardians) was kind of a sham. It would have been easy to explore that tension more explicitly and then send Zavala et al scattering on account of those divisions. Instead, Destiny’s just like, yea they all ended up on random planets, guess you need to go track’em down *wink* *wink*.