Bungie, by presenting a narrative paint-job for Destiny’s multiplayer, takes a departure from its previous first-person shooters. It marries its main storyline – about a humanity overwhelmed by darkness, staring down the end of its own existence – with a plotless and irreverent multiplayer mode. By doing so, it reveals the game’s wider thematic confusion.
Why are we supposed to care about the fate of humanity (the definition of which is shaken by the seeming immortality of its guardians) while spending all this time shooting other players for glory and random loot drops? Can a game’s multiplayer mode subvert its larger themes to such an extent that to play it erodes whatever goodwill I have toward its narrative?
Competitive multiplayer is usually designed to be an activity that players get to partake in after finishing a game’s single-player storyline. Sometimes, in the case of games like Call of Duty, the single-player campaign takes a backseat to the multiplayer in terms of prominence. Destiny, however, prides itself on being an always-online experience. With improvements to console and PC hardware as well as more stable internet connectivity, online play has become far more ubiquitously applied to what were previously single-player focused experiences. Shooters like Borderlands and MMO’s like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 2 allow players to interact with dozens of friends and strangers alike in vibrant, connected ways, and are clearly inspirations behind Destiny’s design.
Where things begin to break down is where that sense of teamwork inverts and becomes competitive in nature. It represents a tonal shift that jars me out of the positive feeling of cooperation that the rest of the game does such a good job at reinforcing. In both Marathon and Halo, you are a solitary unit, navigating through lonely spaces -there is no one else like you. But in Destiny, each world is crammed with players and enemies alike. You rarely have to go it alone, as very few aspects of the gameplay truly support solo play. As a result, turning the guns around and killing your fellow guardians, even if they come back afterwards, winds up feeling pointless and brutal. It also serves to remove the pathos from characters which barely contained any to begin with. …continue reading on Paste