The summer before this year of college was marked by one thing in particular, it was the summer in which I began playing Destiny. Now, Destiny was something that I had been almost avoiding for some time, and given the fact it came out right when my girlfriend at the time had broken up with me, I wasn't exactly interested in trying anything new. And so I had spent the better part of a year rejecting people's claims that I should play it. That was until my 20th birthday.

Now this wasn't exactly some sort of passive-aggressive message that I should play it from a friend. In fact, I had actually been talking to my friend about giving it a try despite my initial judgments of the game when played at his house being quite poor. He finally told me that he would get me the game as a gift and when my birthday rolled around I would be able to buy all the expansion packs for it. This of course, was money that could have been better spent on just about anything else. So I played the game quite a bit in the weeks leading up to my birthday, it was fun albeit very repetitive.

Destiny on its own, that is to say without any expansion packs whatsoever, just plain vanilla Destiny, is a very boring game. The story is almost nonexistent. There is a story present but it's only there to refer to the massive world building they've done, which is magnificent. I only wish that all the world building could go into, you know, the story of the actual game which I am playing. But no, the actual fun parts of the story linger over the entire game but never show themselves anywhere. Destiny is a tease making me think I'd actually get some interesting science fiction.

Not only that, the game is incredibly sparse of things to do. The game is broken up into four planets and one player hub (two if you download the House of Wolves expansion, how fun). Each world is built with a collection of levels that take place there and an open world option where you can go around killing enemies that constantly re-spawn. That's the game; that's literally it. Sometimes there are random events but most of those tie into the expansions, other than that the story can be finished in a day with time for dinner. And so what every player finds themselves doing is wandering the painfully small open world maps without anything new to see or explore, just killing random enemies in the hopes that they will drop a cool new weapon. There are a few special levels you have to do with friends but trying to get a group that is always up to play and is on your level is about as fun as trying to form a reliable carpool.

And so after awhile I hit a realization, a moment of clarity in which I got up and believed I could be doing something better than playing this game. So I faded out of the picture with the game, my friends wondering why I was never online quite as much. It became that they had to drag me back to the game each time and eventually they just started to give up.

I came back briefly come my birthday, for the expansions, of course. They made the game slightly bearable but still left me with a sour taste in my mouth. But there was something happening among my friends, they were beginning to get bored as well. The lifespan of Destiny was painfully short for a developer that doesn't put a new game out for years after their last one. The people that made Destiny are the same who put the first Halo's out the door and they put time into their projects. Now here Destiny was, dying before our eyes less than a year after it came out. Come September we all hated the game and they were just now putting out their final expansion.

And this was the same story many other players had as well. Destiny was like a haze of poor financial choices and odd daily habits. When leaving Destiny we all felt like we were abandoning something we put honest work into only to find that the endgame we strove for was more boring than the beginning. There was no moment of the game in which I felt was worth the money I sank into it, even though it was a gift to begin with. I can't tell you why I stayed on after I finished all the missions, what even happened after that? I rode a hover bike on the moon and zipped past the same rocks five hundred times before doing the same thing but on Venus this time. I shot the same faceless aliens with terrible names (the Fallen, seriously guys?) before finally giving up and starting the chain reaction with my friends.

Now when I sit late at night with my friends and ask the question "What ever happened to Destiny?" the question receives a resounding yet unenthusiastic "Yeah..." This is of course followed by a brief exchange about why it was bad before finally deciding to just do literally anything else and forget about it.

But why Destiny is so bad is the most interesting part of the game itself. However, first you have to understand what the game exactly was. Destiny was the planned follow-up to the gaming legend that was Halo. The developers of Halo, a company called Bungie, were signed on with Microsoft to make about four, maybe five games before they could go and make something else. They met the contract and afterwards, everyone waited eagerly for the game they would make without Microsoft breathing down their neck. Finally, they announced a new game with an incredibly vague idea called Destiny. The idea was that Destiny would be a game in which you would be walking around an open world and then find another player doing the same thing you were doing. You could help each other out and then move on to the next section in a fluid, almost wordless exchange of actions.

This idea of a fluid online world had been done before. One in which you weren't left with a group of players in a large crowd but instead you found them randomly and as naturally as you found the enemies the two of you were now fighting. Games like Journey and Dark Souls had done this same thing and it worked very well. Somewhere down the line Destiny just became an MMO, like World of Warcraft. Bungie's lead writer also left half way through leaving them with a half-baked concept featuring 98 percent ideas and 2 percent plot so maybe that's where all the story went.

But the game's publisher, Activision, still fed the beast of a game five hundred million dollars...seriously. I hate Destiny even today because it was like a picture of a vast mountain range painted onto a flat board. Once you get too close to it you realize it doesn't go any farther. It had all of the components for a good game with none of the passion or actual scale to make it worth anyone's time. And so what had been one of the most exciting announcements during my time in high school became a topic of conversation met only by hollow stares and sighs of disappointment.

This isn't to say there weren't good points, of course, the game was smooth and when the game was good it was good. I can still remember the time my friends and I took on a boss and I protected them by distracting the enemy with well timed teleportation. It was just a shame that a game with so much potential ended up being a game with so little to do and only the best parts were kept for those with the largest social circles.