The Future Of Destiny Is In Other Genres (And Other Management)
The IP carries the potential for rich, textured experiences — if it can leave its FPS Looter-Shooter roots behind.
The world of Destiny is a rich one, with lore reaching back eons and stretching across the breadth of the universe. It’s a science-fantasy setting that frequently has questions to ask about the nature of power, the role of heroes, and the malleability of one’s own fate. It’s an IP where Light and Darkness clash in archetypal struggles — and also blend together to question those very archetypes’ validity.
It is a rich setting, one full of potential stories and gameplay experiences each gnawing at the bars of their FPSMMO, Looter-Shooter genre prison. A prison built and maintained by an executive suite more focused on their car collection than the game, the developers who make it, or the people that pay for that useless collection through the art’s success.
Where We Are
The state of Destiny 2 currently is, frankly, dire. In the wake of the universally beloved and critically acclaimed expansion The Final Shape, where the series’ first 10 year saga came to a dramatic and emotionally satisfying conclusion, Bungie made the decision to axe swathes of their development team. The ripples of consequence are felt both in-game and outside of it.
In-game, following the loss of many senior developers and especially several senior narrative designers, the game’s Episodes — a series of three long “seasons” before the game’s new direction crystallizes this year — have been narratively rocky at best, full of recycled content, and a growing disinterest in the eternal rat-race of the looter-shooter grind. The build crafting introduced in The Final Shape with Prismatic subclasses infused new options and new life, but long-running balancing issues, years-long frustrations with the rotting corpse of Crucible PvP, and the lack of ambitious peaks to climb leaves players with little to aspire to. When many of us log in to play Destiny 2, we’re just going through the motions.
Out of game, reports of inappropriate workplace conduct and poor hiring practices have blended with residual outrage regarding the layoffs to dissuade people from getting involved with anything the company currently manages. The game’s negative reputation for vaulting content and not respecting their players has reached a similar threshold of cultural saturation as League of Legends’ famed toxicity, rightfully stifling any curious new players. Content creators who have spent a decade creating dungeon and build guides, lore videos, and challenge runs for Destiny and Destiny 2 are publicly shifting away from the game, embracing new single-game foci for their channels or embracing a variety streaming approach. In the wake of the game’s highest high, Destiny 2 is rotting, and most people are holding their nose and passing it by.
Where We Could Go
With Sony now having financial hooks in Bungie, and the Destiny IP, the future of the developer and the series is somewhat unknown. If Marathon, Bungie’s current in-development extraction shooter game (a baffling genre choice, considering the history of Marathon) fails, there’s no telling what will happen to the studio. There’s a world where Bungie collapses, consumed and digested by the larger corporate entity, leaving the Destiny IP in a state of limbo. I’m not going to hope that happens — it’d be inevitably job-destructive and hurt the livelihoods of many hardworking, passionate developers still working at Bungie — but one of the consequences of that world is worth exploring.
If Destiny is freed from the prison of its current management, there is a world where it is similarly freed from the strictures of the FPS-MMO-Looter Shooter it is today. There’s a world where the Destiny world is allowed to exist in other genres of game (or media in general). Video games are one of the most flexible and varied forms of art to ever exist, and different genres could allow the strengths and fantasies of Destiny to shine in novel and compelling ways.
An Example: Computer RPGs
In the wake of Baldur’s Gate 3, a CRPG that captured the hearts and attention of over 15 million people, judging by sales numbers, it’s clear that there is demand for rich, nuanced, story-forward single-player experiences. Destiny 2 regularly, especially in its dealings with the domineering Hive and fickle Ahamkara wish-dragons, raises questions of universal ontology, dreams, wishes, and the power inherent in all of those. Currently, these questions and conflicts are heavily abstracted to fit into the limitations of First Person Shooters, but in a CRPG like Baldur’s Gate 3, or Tyranny, or Warhammer 4000: Rogue Trader those questions could be explored with more nuance, specific mechanics, and tailored encounters.
As a dragon-obsessed man since childhood, the Ahamkara specifically call out to me as a particularly compelling antagonist for a Destiny CRPG. These creatures feed on wishes — specifically the gap between what the wish-maker wants, and what twisted version of it the Ahamkara grants. There is, bluntly, not a good way to play with those ideas in the FPS format.
In the lore there was the Great Hunt, a genocidal campaign to wipe out these fickle, dangerous creatures. In some of those lore entries, the Ahamkara grant twisted wishes held in their killer’s hearts in the last moment, playing on the open desire of the Guardians and Warlords hunting them even to the end. But in an encounter with the Ahamkara named Riven, the final boss and antagonist of Destiny 2’s raid titled “Last Wish,” there is no emulation of that. The narrative of the game tells the players that their desire to beat the raid, their desire to get rare loot from its completion, and their desire to defeat Riven to save the city takes the form of a wish that Riven grants — the city is locked forever in a looping 3-week temporal curse on the Dreaming City, cursed to sit on the edge of reality and the Ascendant plane. The lore mechanics are present, but there is no way for the player to meaningfully interact with them. It is just a thing that happens, and a lot of players might not even catch the significance.
In the context of a CRPG, however, the nuance, the strange and hostile mischievousness of the Ahamkara and their wishes can be brought to the fore and really played with. I’ll use D&D terminology here because, at this point, it’s well known enough to be a functional stand-in. In combat against an Ahamkara, perhaps it periodically requires the party to make a Wisdom saving throw as it hunts for wishes to grant and feed on in this life-or-death encounter. On a failure, combat is paused while the player is given a choice: they’ve failed to discipline their mind, and have thus made a wish. But you still choose what wish you made, selecting your minor benefit and major demerit that could affect anything from just the fight to the story at hand. Novel consequences and experiences can branch out from this simple moment of player-expressive failure.
Salvation In Genre Expansion
That’s just one example of how specific mechanics already discussed and shown in the game’s various lore entries and story arcs can be gamified to create unique experiences and memorable moments, if given the opportunity. There are other moments that could be experienced best in other genres. The Battle of Six Fronts or Twilight Gap played out in the unforgiving turn-based tactical style of XCOM 2, or perhaps changing perspectives and playing out the Hive’s millennia of conquest in a real-time strategy game, or perhaps we embrace a long-form, epic single-player RPG like The Banner Saga games built around survival, family, and faith as we follow the journey of a single Eliksni/Fallen ketch in the midst of the Whirlwind, fleeing the destruction of their home.
Those are ideas just off the top of my head, following my genre preferences — if you have others of your own, feel free to drop them in the comments. I’d love to see what other people can think of.
One thing is certain: if Destiny doesn’t change, doesn’t evolve, doesn’t free itself of its shackles of incompetent management and loot-grind FPSMMO genre conventions, this fascinating, multifaceted IP will follow other intriguing worlds into the icebox, and from there the dustbin of history. If it can do those things, however, I see potential for this world to rival the likes of Mass Effect and Star Wars in the gaming cultural landscape. It just needs the chance to stretch its wings and fly.
