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Games

What Did You Think of Destiny When It First Came Out?

There’s plenty of praise for ‘Destiny 2,’ but it wasn’t always this way.
Image courtesy of Activision Blizzard

As a kid, there were three shooters that made a huge impact on me: Doom, GoldenEye, and Halo. Each one of those took up hundreds of hours, often with my friends and I huddled around a screen, trying to keep our swears down, hoping our parents wouldn't pick up on it. You can imagine, then, how hyped I was for Destiny, whose pitch was to take everything I loved about Halo and mash it up with a bunch of friends. Who'd need another game after that?

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Turns out, I needed all the games after that. For someone looking for a Halo-like experience, Destiny was a massive failure. When I finished whatever the game labeled its "campaign," I turned it off and didn't look back for a full year. Here's what I wrote about the game for Giant Bomb in 2014:

It's why I'm of two minds when I play Destiny. In one world, we have the traditional way I approach games. It's me vs. the world, a solo journey. In that case, it feels weird to play a game that seems as though it's meant for you, but it's not. It's an illusion. This looks like Halo, it plays like Halo, but, oh boy, this is definitely not Halo. Your ingrained Halo skills may transfer over, but any idea it's designed to be played by yourself are quickly washed away.

In Halo, it's a great singleplayer experience greatly complimented by its co-op and multiplayer. It doesn't feel like one is sacrificed for the other. In Destiny, it's a great multiplayer experience that just so happens to include a single player experience, even it's not really recommended.

That was my response to Destiny, but it wasn't everyone's. The game took massive strides with 2015's The Taken King expansion, but that was a full year after the original game, once many had dumped hundreds of hours into it.

During our game of the year podcasts at Giant Bomb that year, some of my favorite memories were the unbelievably tortured arguments from my colleague, Brad Shoemaker, trying to explain why he was in love with a game that he readily admitted to being deeply flawed. (If I remember correctly, the only reason it managed to hang on to our staff top 10 list was because Jeff Gerstmann, who similarly loved and loathed the game, backed up Shoemaker's premise.)

Those are the people I'm curious to hear from. What attracted you to Destiny, before they started ticking off the biggest problems? What did you see in Destiny that so much of is didn't? (Or, at least, weren't willing to put up with.)

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