LO1- Game Analysis: Destiny

Destiny

Tested on Playstation 4

76/100 - Metacritic

This is my analysis of the game Destiny, the information compiled in this analysis is taken from testing the game myself and doing some research in to the gam.

Destiny is a first-person shooter, which is made obvious by the typical conventions of a first person shooter. It is in a first-person perspective and you shoot things, it couldn't really be a more straightforward genre. To some extent the game is also an MMO (Massive multiplayer online), in fact you can't even play the game if you are not connected to the internet. And though you are not required to interact with other players, you often share an online server. However, Bungie (the producers) themselves call the game a 'shared world shooter', which doesn't really matter because it still means the same thing.  

In Destiny you play as a 'guardian' who is defending the last city of earth from various alien races. You are also attempting to revive the celestial being called 'The Traveller' which is supposedly keeping the city alive. As the campaign is only short (approximately 10 hours long), the game is centered more around cooperative play. And the cooperative play is great; With three worlds and a moon to choose from, the playfield is pretty big. But 'turn back' do seem to be lurking around each and every corner. 

The first thing you do in Destiny is choose a class, here you have three choices which are Hunter Warlock and Titan After choosing your class you choose your character type, this is again between three choices which are Humans, The Awoken (blue humans) and Exo (robot humans). And here is where I feel the game falls short because it has massive potential to give separate and more individualised stories to these character types and it just doesn't. However, if the campaign doesn't bore you the first time around then it does give you a secondary and tertiary opportunity to conquer the game with a different character type.

The game does also feature lots of non-playable characters, most notably your 'Ghost'. This is a small flying robot who comes from the traveller to bring you to life at the beginning of the game. It also works as a sort of control panel, allowing you to see your objectives, ride the 'sparrow' and various other little helpful actions. Another notable character is 'The Speaker' who represents the Traveler, he's essentially there to say "Thanks" at the end of the mission but he is important in terms of developing the narrative. Besides these two characters there are various others which are either part of the game's narrative or own shops and other helpful stalls in the city.

Another important part of Destiny is DLC (downloadable content), this essentially means that if you were not quite satisfied with the campaign and got bored of the cooperative play then you can pay more money for the game you already bought. So far three DLC packs have been released; The Dark Below, House of Wolves and The Taken King. The latter was particularly praised for changing the core-gameplay which was done to mark 'Year two' of the games lifecycle. Platforms Destiny is currently available on both the Playstation 3 and 4, and on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One. 

To develop the Destiny, Bungie decided to create a new proprietary engine called the 'Tiger Engine' which was made to replace the 'blam! engine' used for the Halo franchise. This information can be found here http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022106/Lessons-from-the-Core-Engine.
Destiny is well known for the excellent level of detail of everything in the world, though the game may not have the most excellent story players will find an enormous amount of enjoyment just from exploring the various worlds. For the graphics in Destiny, Bungie used Donya Labs' Simplygon tool. Simplygon themselves say that they are the "leading solution for automatic optimization of 3-D game content and Level of Detial creation", as anyone would when promoting their own product, but it becomes evident that this is true 5 minutes in to playing the game.
The PEGI rating for my game is 16, and I think this is possibly the lowest end of its target audience. I think the game is more aimed at people in their mid-20's. This is because of the fact that Bungie were most well known for creating the Halo series (now a billion dollar franchise). And as this began in 2001, Halo's core audience are likely to be in this age range and as the game employs many of the same core elements such as an AI companion, FPS, large key object, angelic type music etc. It is likely that they are bringing in a similar, if not the same, audience.

Destiny is currently available on both the Playstation 3 and 4, and is also available on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One.

Image courtesy of Dualshockers.com