This won’t be a long tirade, I promise. Destiny, for all its faults at launch, became a much better game as patches released, DLC came out, and by the time The Taken King was released, Destiny 2.0 was exactly what most people hoped Desinty 1.0 would have been. But for me, there was something still missing… a cohesive social UI. I’m hoping that if there’s any big change in presentation with Destiny 2: Electric Boogaloo, it’s in its social management functions.
If you haven’t played the original Destiny because it wasn’t on PC, let me paint you a picture. An online game revolving around social play in both PVP and its hardest PVE content. People are a necessity to make the most of your time, but the only way you can really play with others is to join random groups or go outside the game to look for clans and guilds. You then have to manually add these people to your PSN or XBL friends lists to make it easy to find them in game.
Oh there are clan/guild functions, but you have to use the Destiny mobile phone app to add and manage members and content. There’s no in-game functionality for a clan or friends. Destiny was a game that wanted you to play with others as often as you could, but kept you from doing so by not offering the proper tools.
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That’s what I want to see, probably more than the PC release itself, from Destiny 2 – I want real, honest to god clan and guild hosting functions. Chat, roster, ranks, custom tabards or logos – the PC version doesn’t even need VOIP, as most everyone that plays on PC uses their own VOIP service anyway. Just give us a way to engage with each other that’s inside the game.
Oh, and a final point – that reminds me that we also really need the awesome Grimoire, the equivalent of WAR’s Tome of Knowledge, added to the game menus itself too. So much awesome lore and background, again kept outside of the game. Bungie learned a lot with Destiny – the company’s first shot at an MMO. They made a fun as hell game that enthralled and addicted millions. But those of us who’ve been playing these sorts of games for years knew that it was just backwards to make people leave your game to get the most out of playing the thing.
In a little over a month we’ll know more about the gameplay of Destiny 2 and how it differs or improves upon Destiny 1. I hope we’ll also be getting some idea of the myriad systems in Destiny 2, and how the game seeks to enlarge the overall game and its features. That, to me, is possibly even more important than the PC release.
