Back in June I wrote an article saying why Halo was my destiny and not ‘Destiny’ the game.

In that article I shared my thoughts on another blog, being part of another gaming community, and was that game worth the effort.

I write this article not in any angry mindset but rather from a calm standpoint looking at some of the facts of and my 7 week experience with Destiny versus more than a decade of Halo fandom.

When I got my XBOX One back in September, I got it with a deal from Gamestop that if I buy a console, I get a new game free. Destiny was out the same week as the deal, so I went ahead and got Destiny. I gave this game a fair shake, having played it from release date up until this past Saturday (11/1/14). What I found was a mixed bag of things.

The rest of the article is going to be a relative comparison between aspects of Halo and Destiny. You’re free to disagree of course. I’m just relating my personal experience with each game.

Story
Unlike Halo which is STEEPED in lore, Destiny has a somewhat frail story to lean on. I found myself at first a bit confused as to what the whole just of the story was and how that played out in the game. One HUGE detractor is how we learn about the story. Instead of the majority of the story being played out through the ‘campaign’, we have to find out more via Bungie’s website. You earn ‘Grimiore’ points which unlock virtual cards that you then read on Bungie’s site.

Now I can hear those of you saying, ‘well what about Halo 4’s terminals?’ You’d be right to say that too. What I comparing though is the overall Halo experience with Destiny. Before Halo 4, you could learn just about everything you wanted to about the games from the games themselves without having to go to an outside source. In this respect Destiny failed, just as much as Halo 4 did in having fans go elsewhere to find out what was really going on. Again though, I want to point out that Im’ comparing the Halo franchise as a whole to Destiny which Bungie touts as a 10 year project. There is MORE than enough info about the lore in Halo versus Destiny.

Now, is it unfair that I use more than a decades worth of games against a new game? Perhaps. However, Bungie has been well versed in story telling up to this point. SO I can’t really give them a pass on this. I get that they likely wanted a more ‘immersive’ experience by having gamers go to other sources for material about their game and it’s lore. I found that to be an annoyance, much as I did with Halo 4.

At the end of my 7 weeks of playing Destiny, I still didn’t know much at all about what happened before to know why the world of Destiny is the way it is. I read some of the Grimiore cards. Even then, I found some of those to be a little hard to grasp the story behind, while others having down right boring reads to them.

Advantage clearly goes to Halo.

Graphics
While the XBOX One itself clearly is a graphical improvement over the 360, and I was at first awed by it when I popped in Destiny for the first time, there was nothing truly groundbreaking with Destiny’s graphics. Now, that doesn’t mean the graphics were bad. No, it just means that it was more of the same, with better fidelity.

Halo 4’s graphics hold up to Destiny relatively well considering it’s on the previous gen console. I have high hopes for not only the Halo Master Chief Collection, but future Halo titles to come.

Yes, there were some NPCs in Destiny that looked pretty cool, but again, nothing ground breaking as they seemed to have touted. What I keep wondering about this game then is, if it’s to be a 10-year project and the graphics are what I see as standard for next ten, how will this game hold up then, 10 years from now in comparison to games that are being newly developed? I doubt Bungie will go back in and improve graphics. Not only will that take time away from developing NEW content, but would require gamers to download yet more for Destiny. Over the course of 10 years, I can easily so those who remain faithful to Destiny having trouble with having enough memory one their XBOX Ones (or PS4s for that matter).

Slight advantage to Destiny ONLY because it’s on next gen platforms.

Multiplatform
Whew, this one may likely tick some people off some way or another. I definitely understand the reasoning behind taking Destiny multiplat. It brings their game to more potential gamers. Where as Halo is a XBOX exclusive title. Here’s the thing…Halo IS what defined the XBOX and brought it to prominence. Had Destiny been a Playstation only title, you might have seen even more people leave XBOX (albeit temporarily) for Playstation. Activision/Bungie chose not to do that and Microsoft was right to have the title on it’s consoles as well. See, that decision keeps many people playing on their XBOX’s rather than jumping ship to the PS4.

What I did find that was VERY annoying was PS/Destiny owners have exclusive areas within Destiny that XBOX gamers don’t have. Yes, I know that’s to draw in PS gamers to a Destiny title. Still, as I said in the original article, it’s as if XBOX gamers have been given the middle finger. With the new DLC coming in December, PS will get yet more exclusives that XBOX gamers won’t. Okay, yes, it’s a timed exclusive this time, however that time is ONE FULL YEAR.

Not to mention XBOX gamers will be paying the SAME amount for this new DLC that PS gamers will yet getting much less content for it.

I had already figured on trading in my copy of Destiny. When this information came to light for me, well, that was the final nail in the coffin.

advantage PS4/Destiny gamers. Destiny the game/franchise will neither win or lose big with this decision. Or maybe they will…time will tell.

Gameplay
This is where we get to the REALLY important part, IMO. Bungie again had touted how Destiny would revolutionize gameplay for next gen. This simply is NOT true. I’ve heard form both FPS and RPG/MMO players alike that Destiny only partly fulfills both aspect. Destiny is kind of a ‘jack or all trades, master of none’ in this way. It does give you FPS and it does give you RPG/MMO aspect, but doesn’t compare to a pursy FPS game, like Halo, nor a MMO game like Wolrd of Warcraft.

The FPS is fairly straight up. Not unlike Halo in that respect. But it’s NOT revolutionary as we kept hearing from Bungie. So did they lie to us? That’s up to you to decide. Personally, I was let down.

The RPS/MMO aspect of Destiny is fairly weak. I expected a robust RPG portion of the game. Instead we got a mediocre RPG set. Not to mention some of the gawd awful randomness that comes with “engram” drops. Maybe that’s a part of MMO, but that didn’t fly well with me and MANY other gamers. That can be noted on Bungie’s own forums if you take a dare at reading those forum posts. With limitations and a fair amount of grinding, this game started to fall flat for me after about the first 3 weeks into playing it. That doesn’t speak well for a game that was supposedly FIVE years in development. Honestly, it never felt like a 5-year developed game to me. Maybe the first couple years of that were spent in concept mode and not actual programming. I don’t know.

What I expected was stark differences in the three character classes. We only get minor differences. One class doesn’t really stand out from another and any class can be nearly equally as good as another with their guns. The subclasses are the supposed difference makers. Only one of those, IMO makes that distinction. The other two being fairly the same. In other words, bland.

With Halo, you have ONE class, Spartan. And you know exactly what you’re going to get with that. Does that make it boring? Not to me. It means I can concentrate on actually becoming GOOD at gameplay, rather than relying on some crutch from a specific class.

Speaking of crutches, let me make mention of the weapons. Destiny does field a nice array of weapons. However, when in multiplayer, it makes gameplay VERY unbalanced. You have no clue what each enemy has, you have to quickly try and figure out what class they are and arm yourself accordingly. In 6v6 games, that’s WAY too much for me to figure out and be successful in the game. Perhaps if I played the game for more than 7 weeks, that would have changed.

But I’m not about to change. I’m SO used to Halo’s gameplay and having to know the maps, weapons spawns, strategy, that Destiny failed for me in all of those accounts.

Talking about multiplayer, Destiny’s is VERY weak at this point. Just a few meager choices of playlists. It’s nothing compared to Halo. Halo 2, 3, Reach and 4 all offered much more playlists from which to choose than Destiny. Again, yes, I know Destiny is NEW, but man, you’d think Bungie would have known from it’s past successes that diversity in playlists would have been better.

advantage: CLEARLY Halo!

Extras
Bungie had said that we’d be able to build our own ship. That wasn’t the case from the onset of the game and that is WHOLLY what I expected. I’ve since found out that the next patch of expansion is to address this. That doesn’t cut it with me though. Saying the game will have one thing, eluding to that being at launch, only to have it come later and possibly with an added cost….VERY BAD MOVE.

That I recall, Halo in any iteration never did that. Yes, future DLC would offer new things, but Bungie back in the day and 343 now didn’t touts Halo to have those things when in fact it didn’t at launch.

Trust me there is more I could say about this topic, but I’ll leave it at that…

advantage HALO

Now there is so much more I could write about and detail. However, I think this article has given enough to show what I think about Destiny. It’s not a bad game, but it is NOT the game Bungie touted or what I feel many of us expected. Was I sad to trade it in on Saturday? No. For one, it gave me a good week and a half to get fully back into Halo and used to the controls. But more than that, I just wasn’t impressed with Destiny. It was a slightly less than standard FPS game as well as a less than standard RPG game.

Will I ever get Destiny again in the future? Maybe, ONLY if it’s cheap AND I’ve heard great reviews of the DLC from not online sites such as IGN, but from my friends who I game with regularly or those sites that I know are run by fellow gamers that do not have business interest. (I’m one of those that does not have a business interest in either Halo or Destiny. As I state, HFFL is a site for Halo fans by a Halo fan.)

So here I sit on a Monday evening with just slightly over a week from the HMCC release. I’m getting more and more excited for it. I’ll be jumping right into those campaigns again and trying to get all of those 450 achievements before Halo 5 Guardians comes out. I’ll play some multiplayer of course and will Forge like mad in Halo 2 Anniversary’s maps.

This will most certainly tide me over until Halo 5 Guardians, upon which I’ll start into the next chapter that is the epic franchise of Halo!

ADVANTAGE HALO! FTW!!!

-Sal