Destiny is not my destiny
How a prison for the elderly ruined a game.
Hi, my name is Jim, and I’m an addict. A Destiny addict. I’ve played a lot of Destiny, just over 530 hours between the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game. I played the Beta, and I’ve played since launch day last September. I know 530 hours may not seem like a lot to some people out there, but to me it’s been about as much time as I could spare between work, girlfriend, cat, bills, and all other requirements of an adult life.
For those who haven’t played Destiny, please bear with me as I go through some details.
On the Xbox One I’ve got two characters at the current level cap of 34 and another at 33. On the PS4 I’ve got a 31 and two level 6–8 characters. You can check my Bungie.net Profile for more details if you’re curious.
Before the second expansion, House of Wolves was released, I had pretty much all of the hardest to come by Exotic grade weapons the game had to offer. All but Gjallarhorn of course, but the cruelty of Destiny’s RNG is a topic for another day.
In short, I’d like to think I’ve played enough Destiny that my opinion of the game and it’s various mechanics and changes over time holds at least some merit. And chances are that I’m not alone in these opinions.
When Bungie announced that the House of Wolves expansion would feature both PvP and PvE oriented end-game content I was quite hopeful. By adding Trials of Osiris, the first PvP end-game content, Bungie proved they were listening to and cared about their players. PvP players would no longer be forced to play the PvE raids in order get the best gear and reach the level cap. Instead they could do so doing what they love the most, competing against other human players.
As I’m not a fan of PvP myself, I hoped Bungie had taken similar care with the PvE counter-part for House of Wolves, the Prison of Elders. Sure it wasn’t a raid, they called it an “arena”, but I hoped they had made it fun and challenging in it’s own way. Unfortunately I was wrong. The Prison of Elders takes everything good and fun about the existing raids and completely ignores it. However it’s not really fair to compare it to a raid, so instead, let’s compare it Destiny’s PvE in general.
Pretty much every PvE encounter in Destiny takes place in well designed maps allowing for various gameplay styles. Do you prefer engaging enemies from a distance with a medium to long range weapon? There’s ample space to do so with lots of good cover to hide behind when needed. Or do you prefer running in guns blazing with a shotgun blowing away foes at eye-poking range? There’s nothing stopping you aside from the limits of your own health bar.
When it comes to the Prison of Elders though, the whole experience is designed around close quarters combat. You’re dropped into a small round room with four doors, each leading to a larger, but still quite small and compact room by Destiny’s standards. Those four rooms are combat zones where all the fighting takes place. You need to get through four rounds and a final fifth boss round to complete Prison of Elders. Each round takes place in one of the four combat rooms. Each room is specifically designed to force you into close to medium range combat with a few decent hiding spots to take cover. However, every hiding spot is designed to allow enemies to easily flank you, generally with less than a couple of seconds warning at best.
Being forced into close quarters combat isn’t necessarily a problem, it’s good to be pushed out of your comfort zone sometimes. But as this is the only PvE end-game content, and it’s soley intended for close quarters combat it becomes a bit of a problem. Then factor in that it’s way too easy to die in Destiny when you’re up close and personal with enemies. Specially when the enemies in question are high-level Majors which have way more health than normal enemies. And Prison of Elders has a seemingly endless supply of Majors that it throws it you.
There’s a difference between a game being challenging and being punishing. I don’t consider Prison of Elders challenging, I consider it punishing. When I die in Prison of Elders, it’s rarely because we’re doing things the wrong way or using the wrong tactic, but simply because shit hit the fan. There’s generally no obvious way to go about things in a better way to avoid catastrophe, so you just try again and hope for the best. Good examples of this is when I’ve spent over two hours repeatedly trying just to take down a boss following the best tactics available on the Internet. Sure when the boss finally dies on the 35th or so try it feels great, but every time I hated pretty much the whole 3–6 hours leading up to the victory. I sure as hell don’t want to put myself through that pain again.
The Extra Credits Youtube channel made an excellent video about how difficult games can be fun by getting the balance between challenging and punishing difficulty right. I suggest you watch it before continuing.
What makes Prison of Elders even more punishing than it already is, is the fact that there’s no checkpoint system. Meaning you can spend 6 hours at a Prison of Elders run, only to have to leave for one reason or another, and you’re left with zero rewards and no ability to resume from where you left off. You’re just back to Round 1 no matter what. If Prison of Elders was designed to be a 1-1.5 hour long activity, that would be fine. It is after all supposed to be the hardest thing in the game. But a level 34 Prison of Elders run can be anywhere from 1–6 hours depending on your team and luck. And even if you’ve got a really skilled team, shit can and most of the time does hit the fan repeatedly like a broken record player.
During the second week of House of Wolves when Qodron was the boss of the level 34 Prison of Elders, I spent about 2 hours getting to the boss and another 3 hours of endless failures trying to kill him before I gave up at 1am. We were a well organized team, each doing their specific role, but it didn’t matter due to things randomly just going horribly wrong. Did I try it again? Hell no. It took 2 hours just to get to the boss, I’m not going to spend 2 hours doing something I’ve already done to get another chance at just maybe killing the boss, which probably won’t happen before I need to log off again anyway. I didn’t finish the level 34 on any character that week.
Third week Qodron was back again, but on the level 32 Prison of Elders run instead of 34. As Bungie had made changes to the boss encounter which made it possible to survive a specific mechanic which previously pretty much guaranteed your death 1 out of 5 times, I decided to give it a try. And this time we did kill Qodron. As for the level 34 Prison of Elders run that week, I didn’t even try after my experience the previous week.
This week, the fourth week, I’ve yet again only tried the level 32 run. This week called “Machine Wrath”. It took about an hour to get to the boss. And the boss encounter quickly felt about as hopeless as Qodron did at level 34 before Bungie made their adjustments. So after 1.5 hours and about 10 or so total team deaths, I gave up. Prison of Elders is not fun, and the more I play it the more I hate it.
For the past 2–3 months I’ve had three high-level characters on Xbox One, and every week I’ve made a point of completing at least the Nightfall Strike, the Weekly Heroic Strike, and both raids. Between all my characters I found enjoyment in being able to collect all possible 27 strange coins each week, and hit the 21 potential exotic weapon drops (1 in Nightfall, 3 in each raid) which would on average net me 0–6 exotic drops per week. I have a bit of a completionist mindset as you might imagine.
Completing all weekly challenges was possible with a reasonable amount of time sunk into Destiny before the House of Wolves came out. But Prison of Elders makes it pretty much impossible. As a single run can take anywhere from 1–6 hours, the time and effort needed to complete the level 32, 34, and 35 Prison of Elders each week can be staggering. Then multiply by three characters, and factor in that there’s no checkpoints to resume from, and I just can’t be bothered to even try. And that’s not even factoring in that I don’t actually find Prison of Elders fun.
I still find both raids quite fun, despite having done them more times than I care to count. But the only loot I can get from the raids is more of the same stuff I already have. The new Etheric Light material used to upgrade weapons and armor to the new max level is pretty much exclusive to Prison of Elders and Trials of Osiris. There is a chance you might get one from the Nightfall Strike, but relying on Destiny’s RNG to make progress is a sure way to drive yourself insane. On top of having no useful loot, the raids have been getting hard to run in general, as there’s now fewer people looking to do raids on LFG sites. A couple of times it nearly took me more time to get a team together than it took to run through Crota’s End with said team.
So with no reason to do Destiny’s end-game content, the raids feeling a bit useless despite still being overall fun, I’m just starting to feel extremely discouraged from Destiny in general. I can’t really see the point in playing anymore.
I think the best answer I can come up with right now as to why I should keep playing is “to get Gjallarhorn”. But that seems about as likely as winning the lottery. And even if I do get it, then what? Then I really don’t have an answer anymore.
Destiny is Bungie’s little baby, and they are well within their right to change it however they see fit. I might not agree with, or like some of their changes, but ultimately that’s my problem, and my choice if I should continue playing.
I hope Bungie know and/or realize the massive shift that Prison of Elders has caused. A few hours invested in Destiny yields lots of fun across the whole game, except Prison of Elders.
As for me, will I ever play Destiny again? Probably, at some point. I have some friends that still play on a semi-regular basis, and we tend to often socialize via co-op sessions in Destiny. Will I ever go back to seriously playing Destiny, getting all characters to the level cap, completing all weekly challenges, hoarding rare materials and currencies, and many other things I’ve been doing up until now? Probably not.
My poor Titan might just forever remain a level 33.
