Of course. It's Bungie's new IP, (short for Intellectual Property, not Internet Protocol). And of course it's going to be a big deal because Bungie hasn't made a non-Halo game since the 90's. There was Halo, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo ODST, Halo Reach, spanning from 2001 to 2010. There's been more Halo games since (and I'm not even including the mobile games and the RTS spin offs), and there will be more to come because they've handed off the rights to a new studio owned by Microsoft. I forget the name (it's some Halo reference), and they'll be taking over from now until the year 2052.
Everyone's excited what they're going to do next. It'd be like George Lucas doing a completely new movie set in a new universe after 38 years... which makes "Destiny" Bungie's "Redtails" and sure enough it looks like it's going to be equally disappointing. At least for me that is. I'm sure it'll be a commercial success because the type of game they're making is nothing risky. It's a dungeon crawl basically. They've just made a shinier version of 20 year old idea. Nothing ground breaking or novel. Nothing brave or different. A video game studio that could do whatever the hell they want and they're going to make a dungeon crawler. Which is this:
Originally, you would walk around a 2D dungeon with a bird's eye view. You slay monsters and you gain XP. Basically "Gauntlet", except you gradually get more and more powerful (called "grinding"). Combined with the fact that you also loot treasure chests that have random items that could either be one of the best weapons of the game, or garbage (there's also a term for this, like trash, or dregs, or something), and people are hooked.
In other words, Bungie is making Video Game heroin, because people LOVE this kind of gameplay. It's the most addictive thing in the world and some people just can't walk away. Entire business models rest on the reliable nature of man to always want to play a dungeon crawl. They exploit human nature. I mean, don't get me wrong. The collective number of hours spent on the Halo series is probably astronomical. In fact, you can probably get the number somewhere, but I don't want to because it would make me sad. But at least those hours were spent for mostly good reasons! Because Bungie put out a game that was trying something new, ambitious, different, compelling, insanely fun! Addictive maybe, but inherently fun, good fun like jumping in the back of your teammate's jeep and mowing down aliens with the gatling gun on back. To a non-gamer, that last phrase may sound rather prosaic, but believe it or not, there weren't and still aren't too many games where you can do that kind of thing, and generally not half as well as Halo pulled it off.
But I'm sure Destiny is going to be fine. It's backed by a competent studio with plenty of budget basing their game on a tried and true mechanism: Gambling. And that's what pisses me off though. It's so safe.
Then again, it could surprise me, although most of the hope I had for the game evaporated when I was listening to a behind the scenes video of one of the developers talking about making the sound of opening treasure chests really good. Quite literally saying something like, "We really wanted it to sound good when you open up loot chests. We really want people to enjoy finding loot!'.
It's Pavlov's dog experiments 100 years later. We've switched test subjects and replaced the kibble with the possibility of a BATTLE RIFLE +10 FIRE DAMAGE. Just makes me want to throw up all over my shoes, but just as soon as I buy my pre-order copy. |