Someone asked with the Help tag at Bungie’s Destiny site where one can get etheric light. Since the Trials of Osiris started today, we found that there is NO way of getting etheric light – a requirement for upgrading new game gear – if you don’t have your own play team. In other words, you can’t get it as a single player and there is no in-game matchmaking for the activities where etheric light can be found. Regulation of the gaming industry is needed at this point. Consumers should not be deceived into buying a product that they have little or no chance of getting a refund for.
We preordered the game and the season pass, based on what we knew of the game pre-release. Well, the game has changed a lot since then. The amount of play time a single player can get out of the game is less and less, and the latest dlc makes single player useless. With the House of Wolves you CAN get new gear that is as high or higher than the previous gear, but if you don’t have your own teams to play the meat of the dlc, what’s the point? To just play the old stuff that happens to have matchmaking over and over again?
If any of you have read my various Destiny articles, you might have guessed that I have a love-hate relationship with the game. Well, you might walk away with more of the hate side of my feelings, but, I do LOVE the feel of the game. I stopped playing it for a while because I had nothing else to do in it. I don’t play the Crucible, and my son got tired of that part of the game, too, and I don’t do my own match-making in order to play the harder aspects of the game, so . . . there’s nothing to do in Destiny after a certain point for players like me. And guess what, despite what the trailer may have said or implied, House of Wolves only makes matters worse. You cannot level up without doing your own match making/team gathering. At least that’s what is known right now.
I had recently started playing again (and my son followed suit), gearing up for the new House of Wolves dlc that was to come out. I started a new character, too, leveling her up to 29. We stopped leveling gear up since we didn’t want to waste our materials prior to the dlc. So, my son has played today’s Destiny dlc a while this morning, checking out the new social area in The Reef, and doing a number of the dlc’s missions and strikes. The new crucible matches, called the Trials of Osiris, are only available Friday through Monday, basically, so he has to wait for those. He was able to get through the whole new story in a matter of hours.
“I don’t have time to explain why I don’t have time to explain.”
The Exo Stranger, unwittingly (or jestingly) explaining Destiny’s lack of in-game story
Destiny (2014), the wildly successful multi-player shooter video game made by Bungie, hints at having a story behind it, but so far it’s pretty much a mystery. Sure, as you go through the short-lived “story” missions in order to open all the game maps, you hear some people speak,[1] but you are forced to come to the sad conclusion that you’re being kept in the dark as to the meaning behind all the fighting you’re doing. I think it’s safe to say that most people, even professional game reviewers, were shocked and disappointed by the real absence of a story in Destiny.
Based on the Beta, which I played, I thought there’d be more of a story and perhaps it would even have more of a recognizably Christian basis. My hopes were deflated after playing the released game, however. Bungie’s own activities jaded me more to the idea of any Christian basis to Destiny, like: insulting XBOX users online and going out of their way to give Playstation users more product for the same cost, and celebrating Halloween but ignoring Christmas (EA’s Garden Warfare, in contrast, was a virtual Advent Calendar that freely gave players fun stuff every day before Christmas during December).[2] My point is, I was biased toward an anti-Christian story before researching Destiny’s lore more, so I found myself surprised at some of what I found.
Most story information, or lore, is found in virtual Grimoire cards that are unlocked, but not readable, as the game progresses. If you want to know what’s on the card, you must read it online. Most, if not all, of these cards’ texts are online so you don’t have to unlock them in-game to read them (but as many fans reasonably complain, who wants to take all the time to go somewhere else and read them?).
These Grimoire cards, in-game dialogue, and other sources were used to construct the story information here, but a note on “lore” language and quality–not much of it is written in a straight-forward kind-of way. Instead, there is poetic and mystery religion sort of texts, official reports, cryptic messages, and broken up conversations. The wide variety of information styles, considered alongside the absence of dates and characterizations, make deciphering the story difficult and very time consuming. The excuse for the dearth of relevant information is that humanity lost it between the Collapse and the present time. However, humans are flying around in little space ships at warp drive, tiny flying robots called Ghosts in-game can reflesh humans and materialize and dematerialize things, Ghosts can access centuries old data, etc. . . . never mind, Bungie, never mind.
A bit about the game itself before getting to the story. Destiny is a shooter, not an RPG or adventure game, so shooting enemies as well as other players is what this game is about. And showing off rare gear—especially, it’s about showing off. But, why does everything in the game attack you? Why does no one ever try to dialogue with you? Why is it that everyone on “your side” is so mum about the history and meaning of it all? It doesn’t much matter, apparently, as long as you’re a good soldier who is willing to get his or her own gear. When it comes down to it, the in-game story seems to be nothing more than a loose construct to name enemies; but, considering the religio-philosophical web content and that at least one more sequel is coming out, maybe it’s worth trying to figure out the Destiny universe. “The Story of Things: The Basic Story” is followed by “The Story of Ideas: The Philosophical and Religious Underpinnings of Destiny’s Lore.”
With Christian Eyes 