Destiny

I started playing Destiny when it was hot off the press in 2014. It’s not really been a game I’ve put down and stopped playing like others and it’s definitely one of the most frustrating completions I’ve endured. That said, the game itself is not bad and I will have some fond memories of my time playing it.

Destiny has a story mode where you are one of the many, many guardians in the solar system who is blessed with the light of the Traveller – a celestial entity that has settled on earth. You are accompanied by a ghost which is a small robot-like thing that is basically brought to life by the Traveller to work as a Deus Ex to explain why it’s okay if you continuously die. The ghost will revive you. Unless he can’t. But more on that later.

Completing the story mode basically serves as the tutorial for the game. Along the way you will shot loads of bad guys in the shapes of the Fallen, the Hive, the Vex and the Cabal. The storyline for the main game focuses on the Vex who are murderous robots that are essentially the root of all evil. You must travel to the black guardian to destroy the source of their power.

Once you’ve done that, you can then start loot grinding your way up the power tree until you are badass enough to take part in raids which are six man player versus the computer in some of the most elaborate shit I’ve seen in video games. Destiny does not allow matchmaking for raids and when you do one, you will understand why. If you want to do one of these, you will need to build the team yourself and it will need to consist of capable players who have both skill and the ability to follow instructions.

When you are not risking your neck trying to keep humanity alive, you can also take part in the Crucible which is essentially a player versus player smash fest. In terms of the story it supposedly makes sense that guardians are training but other than that, it’s fairly difficult to explain why guardians will take part in deathmatches when there are four alien races hell bent on mankind’s destruction.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 60 Achievements

So why did it take me three years to complete Destiny? Two words. Other people. It’s impossible to do a lot of the game by yourself and having the energy to put together a team of six people for the harder stuff without any solid grounding to know if said team will be good to complete the task at hand, is something I really struggled with.

You unlock the first achievement for completing the first story mission so that locks in the first time you play and it starts off really easy too. By the end of completing the main story missions you will have about 6 or 7 achievements unlocked. A lot of the other stuff isn’t too hard either but it does get very time consuming early on. Especially when I played as updates for the game have made a lot of stuff easier. It’s only really when you get to the raid stuff that it becomes difficult but first a note on clans.

In Destiny you can set up clans by not actually logging into the game but by going to the Destiny website and setting this up. Luckily when I started, I had a couple of friends I was playing with. There are two achievements associated with being in a clan – one for completing strike with just your clan members and another for completing a raid with just your clan members. The first one is easy as the strikes are basically hard versions of missions from the campaign and you don’t need to do anything special to finish them. The raid, however we were very creative with as we actually managed to do the second raid from the first DLC as a three man team - not an easy task when we did it.

There were some achievements I have problems with though and some that involved some major luck. Triple Play is the first one which is for killing a Warlock, Hunter and Titan without dying in PvP. However, what this doesn’t tell you, is that you need to do all three within about 4 seconds of each other. Not to mention the fact that it’s total luck as to whether or not the three characters in the same place at the same time are the classes that you need to kill.

The second one for completing a raid on hard mode was where the luck came in. You don’t need to do the whole raid, only the last boss and by chance one of my friends invited me in to the raid to finish it off. I think I was under-levelled at the time and was essentially carried to victory but this pales in comparison to the next one

You also need to complete a raid without anyone in your fire team dying. This is insanely hard as all six of you have to survive from start to finish with no deaths. I mentioned before that the raid mechanics are a bitch but getting a group with 5 decent people for this is impossible. Getting raid experience is hard enough as most group want you to have either a set of specific weapons or have completed the raid before and know what you are doing. That’s for people just completing raids without trying this.

Anyway, I lucked out again. The first DLC raid can actually be completed solo with a little bit of ingenuity and I know what you’re thinking. After weeks and weeks of practice I finally managed to nail this one? That’s not true and I won’t even pretend to be capable of such a thing. A guy was actually advertising runs at this achievement where he solos the whole thing and you sit back and watch. The only thing you have to do is jump to the top of a tower after the first section of the raid and then stay out of the way. Cheap, I know but this is how I completed the main game. But then...

Downloadable Content

There are two of these – The Taken King and The Rise of Iron both of which caused me to nearly quit the game. Most of my friends were quick on the uptake and had these completed almost as soon as possible when they came out which meant I was left behind. I’m not even sure why I picked up the controller for these again, especially to address the new raids, but I’m fairly pleased I did.

The Taken King sees you face off against Oryx, a Hive God, after you kill his son Crota. The DLC introduces s three new sub classes for your characters, each of which you need to master for an achievement a piece. You also get an achievement for completing the new set of story missions.

The Taken King introduces quests which are a series of tasks you need to complete and keep coming up after the story missions. They add a new dynamic to the game play which is good for keeping things fresh.

You have to complete certain quests for some other achievements and the one that takes the biscuit is the Hunger Pangs quest. For this one, you have to collect 45 calcified fragments which are collectibles spread throughout the universe. There are 50 in total but some of the shit you have to do to get them all is ridiculous. This is where I stopped playing as you need to complete the raid and I couldn’t get a team together for the life of me. Eventually I managed to do the raid and get the fragments but then stopped again when I needed some other people to do some of the other stuff.

I picked it up again in September 2017, with renewed vigour and jumped straight in to trying to get the Hunger Pangs achievement. I actually managed to do this fairly easily after a week or two of playing and this tied in nicely with a session for completing the new raid on Heroic. Gone are the requests for people to have certain shit or completed the raid 500 times. We battled through to Oryx and this is where I got lucky again. I died at after the first phase of the fight but the other five guys managed to finish him off and get me the achievement.

The Rise of Iron I was not so lucky with. There are three basic quests which need completing and these are easy. After that though it gets a bit weird. You have to do some Crucible grinding on the new game type Supremacy. This wasn’t hard, just time consuming. You have to ring bells in a certain order in the new social area. This last one actually requires a team of people such is the layout of the bells and I chanced this with a group of guys, got lucky again as I forgot about it and tagged in last minute to get it.

That left me with four achievements. Completing an encounter in Archon’s forge was easy enough but finding the fucking start point for this was a nightmare. Most interact points come up with the X button prompt on the screen but it’s really fussy when it comes to the prompt to start this.

Then came the one where the effort was required. The new raid. I had never done the raid before or even attempted it and it took me two attempts to get this done. The first ended in failure when we managed to skip to the last fight of the raid but after hours of trying it just wasn’t happening. The next attempt was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done for achievements.

We started the raid at 2000 in the evening on Sunday night. After the four hour session was up, we were only on the third encounter out of five. We did not stop. We kept going until 0600 in the morning with us poised on the last boss and only a day left before Destiny’s reset on Tuesday. We picked it up again at midnight with one replacement from the original team (one of my friends who graciously gave up his time to help.) The achievement time stamp reads 0526 in the morning for both normal and hard mode achievements. A total of nearly sixteen hours of concentration and team work. Not to mention I worked on both Monday and Tuesday for 8 hours. Needless to say I slept well on Tuesday night.

The very last achievement is for collecting Iron Artefacts which are essentially rewards for a quest that resets every week. There are eight of them so this will take eight weeks if you have one character, which is where I was at this point - only having one character strong enough to do the quests. What was really annoying was that I only needed one more artefact after the raid... but the specific item wasn’t a reward after the reset so I had to wait another week before I could finally add Destiny to the completed games pile after 3 years.

Completing the Wrath of the Machine raid is the highlight of my time with Destiny and I would have said it was enough to discourage me from playing these games... but I’ve already dived in to Warframe... and Destiny 2 so clearly I haven’t had enough punishment yet!