This article originally written by Jon Bois for sbnation is the best characterization of Destiny, why and how it fails, and why it still is a huge commercial success I have ever read: [b][i][quote] I was about 10 hours through Destiny when I let out a big, long, "holy shit," tossed my controller on the floor, shut off my Xbox, and never played the game again. It wasn't out of frustration over dying at the hands of some boss. It happened on the middle of the Whatever Planet, while I was trotting from one loitering committee of dumb, easily killable aliens to the next in order to rack up points and level up. I'm in my 30s now, when I am more acutely aware of the value and finitude of time than I used to be, and a waste of time this thorough -- make-believe grunt work -- is a legitimately depressing experience. Destiny both represents and precipitates a slow death of the heart. Ostensibly presented, as is every video game, as a refuge from our work and obligations, it instead re-packages that work and those obligations, rejoicing in them, blissfully conflating "doing stuff" with "fun." It doesn't want to say anything, nor does it want you to express yourself or see your handiwork or fingerprints in anything. It is a profoundly shitty video game better suited for the idle subroutines of a dreaming, hibernating console than any human being. Since you, the player, are in this dream, you must make sense to the soulless automaton having this dream, and so you are assigned Roomba-like objectives: get a better gun! Get a better better gun! Get a scarf that stops bullets (?)! We don't hear much from stamp collectors anymore, and as it turns out, this is where they went. They are all playing Destiny, heaping the dead livestock of time upon the pyre in tribute to The Collection Of Things. This has worked fine in plenty of games through the years, from Deus Ex to some of the Rainbow Six games to Far Cry, the crucial difference being that those games let me feel some element of ownership of what happened. They did this via challenging me to strategize, think, prepare and learn something whenever I died. When I beat a boss in Destiny on the fifth try, it wasn't because I had gotten better or figured anything out. It was because I went back to a level I had already played, pushed a button at a gaggle of dumb aliens until they died, accumulated more of Destiny's various currencies, and came back to the boss with some slightly more effective weapons. In other words, I clocked the hours and got my paycheck. To play Destiny is to be patched from department to department until you end up with the person who can fix your Verizon bill. The story, of course, is barely present. (When we finish a level, our little Flight of the Navigator-lookin'-ass sidekick remarks, on multiple occasions, "We have to tell the others! They won't believe this!" What "others" could you possibly be talking about? The NPC merchants who just mutter and grunt at you? There are no "others," Dinklage. The people who made this game forgot to add them.) I'm usually fine with this in a video game, because I take it as a cue to tell my own story, however big or small, meaningful or trivial. Hey, just let me tell a story about flanking these guys, finding a hill, picking them off with a rifle, employing a strategy that mattered. That counts as a story. Destiny clearly can't or won't tell one itself, so damn it, just -- here. Here. Let me do it. Nope. It does try to fake like it's giving you choices: would you like to play this level you can't beat yet, or go replay this world you've already been to, full of the exact same shit, and this is honestly your only real option? Would you like to equip the gun rated 65, or the gun rated 57? More compelling dilemmas are found in the tabletop games at the dang Cracker Barrel. There are people who will tell you that 10 hours aren't enough, that "the game gets good at level 20." These are the people who felt the first dozen-plus hours were worth their time, so I do not believe them. And strangely, there are so many of those people not to believe. Destiny is an immensely popular game. It's a boring game that asks you to wander through the cockles of its boring little heart, and incentivizes you to keep doing it with the promise of ... more of the same shit. It doesn't want you to think or plan or improve, it just wants its literal buttons literally pushed. It's a game of bean-counting and thing-collecting and checklist-filling. Y'all dummies did this at work all day, and now you come home and play this what-you-did-all-day-you-goofus simulator. There should be games coming out all the time like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or Civilization, or Silent Service, or Red Dead Redemption, or Portal -- works of gaming that challenge you, make you feel something, make you obsess over strategy, let you tell your own story. Those games are rare, and spiritually sterile games like Destiny are common, because y'alls' bad tastes and badly-spent money are feeding that monster. Y'all suckers are fouling this up for the rest of us, showing up in the millions to buy a $60 cup-and-ball toy. Please stop it. [/quote][/i][/b]