The ‘Destiny’ Sequel Needs to Actually Reward Our Curiosity

When first I learned of Bungie's Destiny, it was like receiving a signal from another planet. My editor at the time had flown to Seattle to see the game—or, at least, various lavish concept artworks—up close, and I was handed the job of transcribing all the audio. With the online coverage embargo looming, I laid into emergency supplies of caffeine and Cheerios, sat up into the night and chewed my way through three or four hours of stagey, meandering disquisition about gameplay "pillars" and technical "breakthroughs," sprinkled with hushed allusions to the plot and setting. Voices in the dark, enthusing, hinting, against a celestial background hum of jet-lagged editors burning holes into their keyboards.

It was a typical reveal event in that very little was revealed. A flying squad of Bungie and Activision execs talked us through the broad strokes of the project—persistent online worlds, character classes, co-op focus, the idea of reclaiming the solar system from alien invaders—but there was no playable build, not even one of those much-derided CGI "target gameplay" demos to reassure attendees that Destiny existed anywhere save the inside of a PowerPoint presentation. As I listened, however, I became fascinated by the names of certain weapons, or rather, the cryptic, meme-ish turns of phrase that had somehow adhered to those weapons during the long journey from concept to implementation. "Pocket Infinity," "The Fate of All Fools," "Super Good Advice"—an arsenal of musty ciphers, spiraling around the unseen game like planets wobbling along the event horizon of an enormous black hole.

Where guns in most games are the most unromantic of objects, instruments of a player's bloodlust distinguished from one another by brittle questions of range, damage, and aiming speed, these felt like crystalized histories, pungent with tales of strife and tragedy. I wanted not simply to wield but to understand them, to know about the people who had once owned them, to solve the riddle of each gun's moniker.

At that stage in Destiny's publicity cycle, this was very much the point of the experience. An online shooter that has come to be celebrated for the cunning ways it persuades players to care about well-judged but unadventurous class variables and gear upgrades was hailed initially for its sheer mystique. Anything, we were told, could be waiting out there on the dunes of Mars or in the dripping, partly-terraformed foliage of Venus: the ruin of a starship scuttled during humanity's Golden Age, when many of the game's Exotic and Legendary items were forged; a party of fellow Guardians, locked in combat with some hectic starfish of a Vex war machine; a delectable firearm or two, propped in a corner for centuries.

While par for the course in the fantasy role-playing genre, this promise of discovery—true discovery, rather than a grubby, workmanlike process of "unlocking"—was an intoxicating contribution to the landscape of the first-person shooter. It got the blood flowing in ways no ever-so-grown-up reference to contemporary politics or roaring, over-compensatory fist-bump of a Call of Duty firearm could hope to rival. An entry from the Grimoire, Destiny's internet lore bible, sums Bungie's achievement up very nicely: "We have found new ways to weaponize curiosity—pathways into the darkness." Destiny manages this in part by turning weapons into curiosities.

If Destiny is a game that elicits curiosity, however, it isn't an enterprise that rewards it. This is, it turns out, very much a game about unlocking and upgrading, about punching enemies until the desired flavor of loot falls at your feet. Beyond your first tour of each planet, enjoyment is to be derived from the internal journey of the character under your hand, from the slender gratifications of a loadout tuned to perfection after a dozen hours of repetitive graft. There's nothing wrong with this sort of slow-burn, acquisitive thrill, but for me it represents a betrayal of the pioneer ethic I heard expressed back in winter 2013.

On top of this, Bungie has piled timed activities that have the effect of creating a bizarre sort of in-game commute, as players traipse between the time-limited activities that lead to the most valuable upgrades and the NPCs who convert encrypted Engrams into treasures. Here's another bit from the Grimoire that encapsulates the tension between this quotidian trudge and the soaring language of the supporting fiction. "This wargear demands Ascendant Energy and Ascendant Shards—burning fragments of the universal fundament, earned through mighty acts of heroism," it bellows. And then, a touch apologetically: "Look for them in daily Story challenges and Raids."

In an odd way, I'm also saddened by the care with which Bungie has ironed out exploits and chinks as the community has uncovered them. This is standard practice for an FPS developer, and for good reason—it's hard to preserve a balance of power in competitive multiplayer if players are free to shortcut your progression system. But Destiny is primarily a cooperative game, which means that artificial gulfs between one loadout and the next are less of a bother, and "cheesing" a mission or foe (that's to say, beating it by seizing on a technical issue or design flaw) is often an activity that takes real teamwork and skill.

An effect of Bungie's fixes, well-meant though they doubtless are, is to remind us that the developer doesn't want players to delve too deep into the environments they're given, however loudly the narrative trappings bang on about the can-do spirit of life on the frontier. Exploration and investigation are encouraged only inasmuch as they follow in the footsteps of the designers. You're only allowed to probe so far.

Another and more straightforward criticism is that, up close, the fiction feels more evocative than elaborate. There's the suspicion that Bungie has merely cooked up a few crazy terms by slamming together bits of cultural baggage, tossing the resulting, sticky mess into the game in the confidence that nerdier diehards will do the donkey-work of putting two and two together (i.e. the actual process of composition). This might be less annoying if the tone weren't one of self-congratulation. There's something desperately smug about far too much of Destiny's writing—its pseudo-philosophical exhortations, its swaggering cult of warrior-heroism, its oily sense of its own grandiosity. It keeps reaching for crescendos it hasn't earned.

I think the critical issue, though, is that the lore doesn't form part of the play experience in any tangible way. The game's Grimoire is home to some nicely compact, stirring slices of context—an inventory carried out by a Fallen Dreg that ends in an outbreak of religious ecstasy; academic disputes over the origins of the Traveller, the Big Dumb Object responsible (well, if you believe the stories) for humanity's continuing existence; a dialogue between researchers who've realized that they may, in fact, exist as simulations within the Vex AI core they're studying. But you can't dip into any of that while you're out and about in the game, and the consequence is a series of undeniably beautiful landscapes that are as warm and smelly with secrets as a clockwork railway.

There are any number of ways, many familiar from other releases, that the Grimoire might have formed part of the game. Bungie could have turned Grimoire entries into simple vidocs or audio diaries, perhaps played back on holographic displays as you tour the Tower, Destiny's social and customization hub. It could have made it so that viewing a Grimoire entry unlocks a secondary objective, like visiting a particular planet at a certain time to duel a high-level foe, as with Skyrim's prodigious library of skill and quest tomes.

One thinks of the witty environmental asides of a corridor adventure like Portal, or Metroid Prime's first-person scanner—a tool that tells you things about the planet's past, even as it teaches you how to negotiate it in the present. Bungie could have at least capitalized on the example of its very own Halo 3: ODST, in which a city's AI overseer tries to communicate with you by setting off car alarms and traffic signals as you search for the rest of your squad. The developer's failure to do any of this lends credibility to the rumor that the Grimoire was a last-minute addition, dropped in to prop up a storyline that consists of jumping through tedious hoops proffered by a world-weary Peter Dinklage.

The annoying thing about all this is that I suspect Destiny wouldn't have sold any better for engineering a more compelling relationship between the act of cranking out upgrades and the mouth-watering idea of reclaiming a dead civilization, planet by planet. While many were underwhelmed by the game's story and the reliance on repetition, a sizable core of players is firmly hooked. And if Destiny is fundamentally the same old grind, the art does a brilliant job of representing it as something nobler. The map screen, for instance, remains one of the most inspiring examples of UI design that I've laid eyes on, a sheath of ornamental cartography that transforms the interplanetary void into a delicately contoured, frozen ocean.

Still, if none of the above has proven crippling, these are obvious areas for improvement as regards the inevitable sequel—or even, an especially ambitious DLC pack. When I first heard Bungie talk about Destiny, I thought it sounded like a classic in the making. The reality isn't quite as captivating, but perhaps the developer's next communiqué from the abyss will remedy that.

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