Destiny is/was perhaps my favorite video game, ever.
When the original teaser gameplay was shared online, I was immediately captivated by its atmosphere. I simply had to play it, and I would go back to watch it several times before I finally got a console able to run it. I began playing Destiny 1 just around the release of its third DLC, The Taken King. Between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2, across multiple platforms, I have played nearly 3000 hours of the game.
For a first-person shooter game, the gunplay in this series was—and still is—unparalleled. However, that was simply the most tangible form of the player’s interaction. The actual draw for me was the setting. I cannot praise enough the music, the art and design, or the graphics.
And, above all, the story. This is not everyone’s preference, but an enormous amount of the world and its story is developed in collectible lore. Most of these were one-page short stories, but, as the series grew, miniature novellas became commonplace. I love the complexity of mythologies, and studying their development and intertextual nature, so of course I was obsessed with the story of Destiny, and became active on its dedicated subreddit as a ‘Lore Scholar’. For a little while, I had a hobby packaging up the written stories into PDFs designed to print as books. I like to imagine that my sharing of these on Reddit caught the eye of Destiny’s creators. The timing works out that, roughly a year after I began doing this, they released their first official equivalent.
This is not to say that Destiny did not have its ups and downs. Although it had occasional dips in the quality of the narrative, most of them were excusable as storytelling which just didn’t quite work. It happens, not a big deal. Rather, most of Destiny’s problems came from the developer’s executives attempting to nickle and dime every facet of the game. While The Final Shape managed to stick the landing, providing a very satisfying ending to a decade-long story, the rampant greed of the execs became harder to avoid as it overshadowed the game’s development and execution.
The most egregious example …
… came with the DLC titled Lightfall. The game’s developers had previously announced that Lightfall would be the title of the conclusion to the previous ten years-worth of narrative. As the date of its release approached, the devs then revealed the story for Lightfall had gotten so large, they needed to break it into two DLCs. The first would keep the Lightfall name, with the second receiving the title The Final Shape. When Lightfall released, most players quickly realized the real reason behind the split. Lightfall opens with a cutscene, then follows the player’s actions over several in-story days, then concludes with another cutscene. It was immediately obvious that these two cutscenes were originally a single video which was intended to be the opening cutscene for (what became) The Final Shape. The video was awkwardly split in half, and the first half was slightly extended to lead into the intervening Lightfall story, which was a confusing mess, hastily thrown together to pad out the franchise another year.
My plan in the months leading up to The Final Shape was to complete the story, then emotionally detach myself from the franchise so that, if whatever followed next was unenjoyable, I would have no reservations about ‘retiring’ from Destiny.
Leaving this game which I utterly loved, which I played multiple nights every week for nearly a decade, opened up a lot of time to explore my backlog. I played old games I had been wanting to revisit, and discovered a lot of new ones.
After almost two years of not touching the game, I was suddenly hit by an incredible amount of nostalgia for Destiny. I found myself listening to the music daily, rereading the lore, and looking for memorabilia. There was no conscious decision behind this. I simply missed it, and couldn’t help myself. About a month ago, it was announced that Destiny 2 was ending all development. Future content was being scrapped entirely, or trimmed way down to fit into a single, final update. Despite not even playing the game anymore, the news deepened the feeling, enough so that She took notice and secretly commissioned a custom 3D print of my in-game character.
I’m not generally sentimental for physical objects, but this is probably the most personal gift I have ever received, and I will hold onto it as long as I can.