Just a quick warning, this is long, and there will be no TL;DR. Keep in mind that I love playing Destiny. My criticism stems from a desire for Destiny to become the game it could have been, and hopefully can still be. As those people close to me can attest to, I complain quite a bit about Destiny, and it’s not because I think it’s a bad game. It’s easily my favorite thing to play on a console, which is why I’m all the more disappointed by how abysmal the story is. There is not a single character I feel connected to, and there is nothing that makes me feel as though even my own character is significant in any way. Every mission you complete feels like some sort of tedious busy work—a task so minor and inconsequential that it can be taken care of in under 15 minutes. I can accept the gaping holes in the plot, like being told at the start of the game that I’ve been dead a long time but not to worry about it as there is danger near so we have to escape, and then that little tidbit about having been dead a long time never really coming up in conversation again. Maybe it will be addressed later, but in the end, it doesn’t take away from the game experience as a whole. What gets to me are the plot lines that sound significant, but take place in recycled environments and are concluded in the course of a single mission. Take the Sword of Crota mission for example. You are given a bit of lore about some massively powerful weapon the Hive used to slaughter countless numbers of Guardians—so many that your Ghost is able to track the sword by the light of the Guardians it has killed. The only way to destroy this sword is to slay its makers, the Hive princes. This plot line could have easily filled multiple missions, figuring out how to destroy the sword, where it might be hidden, tracking down each prince, and finally claiming the sword and finishing off the final prince. Instead of recycling the same location you visit for a half dozen other missions, there could have been some really cool areas to explore in your search for the sword. There was real promise of feeling like a true Guardian—that your efforts had some impact on the world. Instead, after heading directly to the ritual site where your Ghost just happens to know one of the princes can be found, you follow the light of fallen Guardians down to a room you’ve already visited at least once or twice, claim the sword (sitting out in the open for anyone to pick up), and slay each of the remaining princes as they waltz in to their deaths like they are a part of a conga line at the world’s worst party. The whole thing is over in about 10 minutes. If the sword was so dangerous and powerful, how is it a Guardian fresh from the grave, on one of his first visits to the Moon, can destroy it with such minimal effort? Once it is destroyed, your ghost remarks that “the Cryptarchs will never believe this.” Just what is it they won’t believe, that you managed to track down the sword with absolutely no trouble or delay, that the Hive princes were equally easy to track down and kill, or that the sword just sort of vanishes at the end of the mission, offering absolutely nothing in the way of closure or advancement of plot? Good work, you just killed some more generic Hive, have no notion of the impact your apparently unbelievable feat has for what remains of humanity, and without pomp or even acknowledgment, you are given a choice of either doing another—completely unrelated—mission, or, well, that’s sort of your only option. No one mentions the sword’s destruction in the tower, and it doesn’t come up again in any other story mission. You can remove this mission from the game and absolutely nothing is lost. I am aware that, as a side mission, it is not necessary to complete The Sword of Crota in order to finish the main quest line. Still, rather than supplement the main story, the mission only leaves players with a lingering sense of apathy. It’s a fun mission; you get to run around with a sword, and it’s awesome, but that’s the only reason it’s memorable. This total lack of context and greater purpose is, unfortunately, mirrored in every other mission. The gameplay is fun without a doubt, but what constitutes a story is nothing more than a disjointed collection of good ideas with little form and less substance. However, the poor execution of story missions, while unfortunate, is only a symptom of a larger problem: the absence of a larger over-arcing story. In their attempt to shroud the story in mystery, Bungie has left our experience empty. As players, we are thrown into a game with no idea who why are or why we are there—these facts are even acknowledged by our ghost companion! The first thing he explains is that you were dead, but because “it worked,” you are now alive again. You’ve been dead a long time though, so “expect to see some things you don’t understand.” This would be an excellent way to open the game, if maybe we had some notion of what to expect in the first place. As it is, we have just fired up a game for the first time, so as players, our understanding of the world is completely based on the way that world is presented to us. There is no point of reference for us to point to and say, “Hey, this is what things used to be like, and the way things are now don’t make sense.” Lacking this, we can not share the state of confusion we are told our character should expect to find himself in. This is a huge problem. If we can’t connect with the emotions our character should be feeling, how can we expect to connect with the story? It doesn’t help that at no point over the course of the game does your character seem to not understand any of what is going on. Your ghost seems to always have answers, and yet your character never seems to have any questions, despite being risen from the dead in a completely foreign environment. Without a connection to your character, and without a connection to the world or its history, everything that follows over the course of the game feels as though it has been cut and pasted from some larger narrative, of which we lose both the epic scope and indubitable poignancy Bungie originally set out to provide. The only sense of urgency comes from the occasional ejaculation of “Look out!” or “It’s the Vex! Better find some cover,” or any number of similar phrases that, in a story devoid of emotion, comes across as comical rather than feeding any sort of apprehension the player might be feeling. I love the game, but whenever I’m forced to replay a story mission as either the daily heroic or to complete a bounty, I fear that with such a hollow foundation, any future plot will fall flat for all the same reasons as the current story missions. It’s too late to change what is, but I sincerely hope that somehow, with time, the story might eventually become the masterpiece it was intended to be.