Let’s Talk About Destiny

Like most of the gaming world, I have spent the last two weeks of my life transfixed by Bungie’s Destiny. Since its release on September 9th, I have travelled the solar system, danced with strangers on the moon, mastered exotic weapons, and blasted well over 7 thousand aliens in the face.

Enough debate has been made over whether or not Destiny is any good, though I’d argue that’s irrelevant at this point. Is it fun? Yes. Is it addictive? Yes. Is it packed solid with content and love? Hell yes. Is it what everyone wanted it to be? I dunno. Whatever. Robot space wizards.

I’m not interested in posting yet another Destiny review. I play almost daily, it’s always fun, and I’m never bored. Good job, Bungie.

In my day job, though, I’m a designer. Heck, I even run a company that makes games. Just like everything I play, I can’t help but look at Destiny through that lens. So I’d like to talk about design critique. This is not a mark for or against the game’s subjective total quality. Wherever you stand on liking it or not, Destiny is a live product that can always get better with time. In a post-launch world, where can it go next?

The Name Game

I remember sitting in on Bungie’s GDC talk back in 2013, where they described the creative vision for what they hoped Destiny would be. Chief among their ideas was the concept of a “shared world”. There was talk of wanting to rekindle the joy of playing with strangers, of wanting each person you encounter to feel like a special moment. It sounded awesome, a far cry from the stereotypically toxic relationships that can occur in online games. At best, most games make me feel indifferent about the strangers I play with. At worst, they make me feel resentful, offended, and frustrated.

This sounded like a step towards true online immersion; Bungie was setting out to create a game world where players really became their character, and where meeting a player in-game felt like meeting up with another hero on an epic adventure. I was sold.

Playing it now, it’s stunning how close they’ve gotten to achieving that goal. Bungie has done a lot of things right that other developers should take note of. The most obvious: making players silent. Outside of your fire team, no one in Destiny can voice chat with each other. You might assume this would prohibit communication, but in reality the biggest change is that they’ve removed the most popular tool for harassment in online gaming. You don’t have to worry about meeting a random player on patrol only to have them make dick jokes at you. Sure, they might be cursing you out at home on their couch, but you’d never know. You can’t hear them. All you see is another hero with a cool gun helping you fight. It’s both more inclusive and more immersive. In practice, it works.

So where’s the critique? For everything Bungie did right, they left in one critical flaw: everyone’s gamer tag is displayed above their head, always, even through walls. If another player is in the same instance as you, you’re going to see their name on your screen. At all times.

This is a problem because it directly conflicts with the game’s core design goals. Bungie wants to bring people together, to make the act of meeting new people special. This isn’t happening for two reasons:

• Player names are immersion-breaking. Running around a gorgeous alien planet and meeting a random person along the way almost works — until you see that their name is “xXx_UndeadWarlord67”. No one I’ve ever met or imagined has a name like that. That’s just the name of their Playstation or Xbox profile. In the critical first moments of meeting another “hero”, the game is immediately reminding you that they’re not a space adventurer, none of this is real, they’re a player and this is a game. The illusion is shattered. I spend more time thinking about the words floating in front of me than I do admiring the character itself. It’s a practice carried over from online competitive games like Halo, where immersion in the fiction is not one of the main goals of online play. This is Destiny, though. This is a game about becoming a hero and feeling like you’re on an adventure. Don’t remind me that we’re all just normal people sitting on couches with funny internet names.
• Player names are clutter, and clutter is annoying. This is the big one. Having player names on the screen at all times adds more visual noise to the UI. It takes up space, competes with other UI elements in the hierarchy, and can get in the way of seeing what you’re doing. It’s especially annoying when a player isn’t even within visual range. Why do I need to see someone’s name when I can’t even see their body? This creates a relationship with other players that is the direct opposite of Bungie’s intent: when I see a player’s name pop up on my screen, my first reaction is to immediately want them to go away. It’s not that I don’t want to play with them, but I’m either shooting something, riding around on my speeder, or trying to look at one of the game’s gorgeous vistas. I don’t want or need more UI clutter getting in the way of that. I want players to leave because I want the clutter to be gone. In a game that’s mostly about twitch shooting and accomplishing objectives, this need often overrides my desire to play with new people. As such, I rarely make a point of meeting up with strangers in Destiny’s social hubs. This is especially true in the main social area: the Tower. The level of visual clutter is so intense that I avoid the Tower like the plague, only visiting when I absolutely have to.

The solution to this problem is a simple one: give players the option to turn off names and player markers in the UI. This is standard practice in many online games. While it’s true that Destiny is not quite an MMO, it’s important to note that games like World of Warcraft make UI options available to players to great effect. It doesn’t have to be just “on/off” either. I understand that certain gameplay scenarios may be best served with player UI callouts. Maybe give players a “contextual only” option that only shows the names of people in your fire team, and only puts markers on your UI when another player is both within visual range and requires help (like someone who needs a respawn). Maybe in the Tower players should only see names once they get within a few feet of someone. These are the kind of scenarios that can be optimized for, and can drive better immersion in the game’s world.

To really capture what Bungie is trying to accomplish with Destiny’s social gameplay, perhaps the best example is thatgamecompany’s Journey. Journey’s design execution is nearly flawless. I form a genuine emotional bond with complete strangers almost every time I play it. This is because Journey knows how to get out of my way. Besides a very subtle glow effect at the edge of the screen, there is no UI callout indicating another player is nearby. Meeting someone happens naturally: you see their avatar moving in the 3D space and you choose to walk over to meet them. They have no name, no voice, nothing to remind you that they are just a player with a controller. Everything about seeing and interacting with them is done with in-fiction visual cues and simple play mechanics. If there was ever a template Destiny could learn from, it’s Journey.

Give Me the Good Stuff

Destiny’s core gameplay loop is all about loot. Even after you hit the “soft cap” of level 20, the thing that keeps most people coming back is the constant search for new, cooler, better gear. For the most part, this is expertly delivered. Destiny’s loot pace is just right, avoiding the “item overload” of games like Diablo and Borderlands without feeling too stingy. Rare weapons and armor always feel special, and seeing the “ability unlocked” callout on your UI is always exciting. Even with everything the game gives, though, I still find myself perplexed by the things it does not.

For one thing, I feel like Destiny doesn’t quite understand how to handle cosmetics. I really like and appreciate that the ability to dye your character’s armor is locked until you hit level 20, but I was incredibly disappointed to find that once I unlocked the ability to equip “shaders” I still had to earn them from rare loot drops. This is muddying Destiny’s highly-refined loot focus, and it creates frustration in the player.

Cosmetic customization is important to many players, and it’s critical in creating the sense of personalization and ownership Bungie wants players to have over their characters. The problem here is that earning cosmetic options feels like a chore. In a game where you’re already spending dozens of hours grinding just to have better weapons and abilities, tacking on grinding for cosmetic options feels like a cheap way to extend the game’s life. Cosmetics are supposed to be “just for fun”, and knowing that they have no impact on actual gameplay makes it hard to justify grinding for them. There are at least 3 reasons they should be rethought:

• It’s way too much work. It’s a long road to get to level 20. While I’m all for dangling that carrot in front of players, the ability to equip shaders at 20 proves to be a huge let-down. The entire time I worked my way up to using them, I was expecting to have access to tons of shader options once I got there. Instead, Destiny only gives you 1 free shader and has only 4 available from the cosmetics merchant in the Tower. Unlike the other items in merchant shops, these 4 shader choices never change when the merchant refreshes. The only way to earn more shaders is through random loot drops. The problem begins to break down like this:

There are over 50 possible shaders that can drop.

Drop frequency for shaders is extremely low. (In about 15 hours of play time past level 20, I have only seen 1 shader drop.)

Shader drops are always random. There is no way to choose/influence what shader you want to receive if it is not one of the shaders sold by the Tower merchant. You could finally get a shader drop, only to have it be colors you didn’t want.

The game does not take shaders you already have out of the possible drop rotation. It is likely that you will receive duplicates.

Combined, this creates the very real possibility of an infinite time-sink. As a player, the numbers just don’t add up. The odds are stacked in such a way that most people may never get lucky enough or have enough time to get the color options they want. It’s so much work that it quickly feels impossible.

• Nothing is clearly communicated. Shaders are never explained to the player. As such, players are free to develop their own expectations as to how they will eventually work. This would be ok, except that it opens people up for disappointment. Seeing that shaders unlock at level 20, I assumed that their availability would be exactly like every other cosmetic item in the game. Space ships, speeders, and emblems all have a decent-sized selection at their respective merchants, and they refresh on a regular basis. As I’ve already stated, this proves to not be the case with shaders. You get 4 options to buy, and that’s it. It feels like a huge let-down, not just because it’s a tiny selection, but because it defies the logic the game has already taught players. Why does this cosmetic item not refresh, even though everything else does? There’s also the problem of cost and value. Unlike every other item in the game, shaders do not have a “preview” option when viewed in the store. They cost as much as a new speeder or space ship, but you won’t know how they look on you until you’ve already spent the money. If you don’t like how it looks, too bad. It’s such a significant problem that fans have already made a tool to compensate for it. The entire thing is a negative feedback loop, defying the rules the player has already been taught to expect from the game.
• Cosmetics are a wasted opportunity to create more short-term engagement. As with many online games, the late-game upgrade loop in Destiny gets longer and longer as you play. The long hunt for legendary weapons and armor is the bread and butter of online role playing. To help pad out those long hours it’s important to give the player “little wins”, breadcrumbs of engagement that generate that essential endorphin hit to keep a player feeling good about the time they are spending. Destiny’s late game could use more “little wins”, and cosmetic options would have been the perfect way to make that happen. Oddly enough, it’s Bungie’s past that proves the best example here. The later Halo games had a huge list of unlockable gear for your online avatar, and getting those last few pieces of armor was a very long road indeed. Being able to modify your character’s colors freely helped pad that time. It’s easier to feel good about a multi-hour play session when you can still play with your appearance. The ability to be creative and change up your character’s look goes a long way towards fighting boredom while chasing the bigger goals. In Destiny, it feels odd that I get to spend so much time customizing my character’s face at the start, only to have the game get so stingy about cosmetic options later on. Things like custom colors feel like they should be the low-hanging-fruit of character upgrades. Instead, they’re treated as one of the rarest. To the player, this isn’t driving engagement, it’s creating a feeling of frustration. It feels like the game is artificially making the simple joys harder to reach.

Again, the solution here could be simple: give the appearance merchant more shaders for players to buy. It should work exactly like the shipwright’s shop does. Give players at least 6 options to buy instead of 4, and change them out with every refresh. Further, give players the option to preview shaders before they buy. These are all gameplay lessons the player has already been taught. In the late-game, the main currency (Glimmer) becomes increasingly useless at shops, as most vendors with high-end gear require special currency to purchase it. Giving players more places to sink their glimmer into is something Destiny needs to do. Right now, I have bought 8 space ships with my glimmer. I don’t even use most of them, and all they do is change what your ship looks like on loading screens. Shaders are a perfect place to get players spending their excess glimmer, and the ability to buy a new shader once every few play sessions will provide the “little wins” that help keep the game fresh. Bottom line: shaders should be mainly a shop item, not a rare loot drop.

While we’re on the subject of spending glimmer, I’d like to make one more suggestion: I’d love to see a vendor in the tower that allows me to “transfer” the appearance of a piece of armor to a more powerful piece that I’ve collected. Guild Wars 2 does something similar to this, and it’s great. Even if it costs a few thousand glimmer, I’d gladly pay to keep the appearance of my favorite coat while gaining the stats of a new one I found in a drop. There’s nothing more painful in Destiny than finding a helmet with significantly better stats, only to find out that it doesn’t look as cool as the one you were wearing before. It’s one more way Bungie could give players control over their character’s appearance, and it provides another place to sink excess glimmer in the late-game.

Oh, and I want my own Pike. I don’t care if I have to buy it for 100 Motes of Light, just let me have one. Don’t tease me like that!

Checkpoints, Bro

This one is simple, so I’ll keep it short. In Destiny, checkpoints respawn you with the ammo and power cooldown levels you had when you died, not the levels you had when you last passed that checkpoint. This is frustrating. I’ve never seen any game do that before, for good reason. When fighting a hard group of enemies, players should feel encouraged to try different strategies. Currently, I find myself saving my super power and my heavy weapon until I’m absolutely sure I need it. I’m not encouraged to use my powers, because if I make a mistake and die I won’t respawn with them back at the same full charge. This is needlessly frustrating, especially in hard fights. It also goes directly against Bungie’s design goals: they want players to use their weapons and powers as often as possible. That’s kind of the whole point of having them. Give players the same standard checkpoint respawn rules as every other game.

Bonus: Everyone’s Invited

I want to end this by talking about something Destiny does so so so right: diversity. As the game industry grows and matures, it’s becoming more and more apparent how rampant the problem of exclusion and misrepresentation has been in the medium. In a time when we’re talking about Call of Duty finally adding women, or when games like Watch Dogs get critiqued for having racist undertones, it’s immensely refreshing to see Destiny handle diversity so seamlessly.

Destiny’s world is full of people of different ethnicities and genders. It can even be argued that there are more important female characters than men in the game, which is something rarely said about AAA games (much less shooters). It’s gratifying to see how natural it all feels, and it makes you wonder why certain people rally so hard against it. Little things like male and female characters having the same armor designs (no magical cleavage windows!) are the kind of “duh” design decisions that more developers should be making. It speaks to Bungie’s desire to make Destiny a truly shared world, a place that people of all backgrounds can share and enjoy together.

I love a lot of things about Destiny, but its commitment to being a fantasy where everyone is represented is what I love most of all.

This article was originally published on Kulture Keeper in September 2014. It is part 1 of 2. Check out Part 2 here.