As I toil away at Diablo 3 and Dishonored, working towards an end goal that seems no closer than it did two weeks ago, I've been unable to escape the Internet Hype Machine and what it says about Destiny. I've never been a huge Halo fan and, now that I have this achievement hunting OCD, I've become even less of one. Bungie has never had what I would call 'good' achievements. There are some that are genuinely interesting and worthwhile, like beating the game on Legendary by yourself, for instance. That requires skill and effectively tells people that you've willingly accepted the fact that you've given many hours of your life to overcoming a difficult obstacle.
That said, the majority of Halo achievements are just the worst, most boring slogs imaginable. From what I've seen about Destiny, it seems no different. If anything, it actually seems worse than anything a Halo game ever did. The reason I feel this way is simple, and I hope I can convey exactly why I have such an intense dislike for Destiny, despite never playing it or even seeing that much footage of it.
I played World of Warcraft for many years. I started in the twilight of the Burning Crusade and went up through most of Cataclysm. I started as a way to distract myself initially from the recent death of my grandfather and the miserable winter that had followed that event. I'm not sure why I played as long as I did, though. The only reason I didn't go into Mists was because my PC simply got too old to deal with the engine improvements. It kept hard-locking my system. The day I purged my system of WoW was a very cathartic day. I knew my characters would still be there if I ever wanted to return. But the cost of the subscription combined with the worry it would keep freezing my system meant that such a day wouldn't be soon.
But that wasn't what drove me away initially. I kept my WoW subscription going about a year beyond when I actually stopped playing. I thought Wrath of the Lich King was interesting, even though it got a bit grindy towards the end. There's nothing inherently wrong with a game being grindy. I like grindy Korean MMOs just fine, after all. Then Cataclysm came and with it, a complete change in mindset at Blizzard. See, I know that the second M is for Multiplayer. But to me, that extended as far as seeing other people running around and making cities populated areas. I was in several guilds over the years, across many characters, but they all ended with me either leaving or getting kicked. Why?
Raiding.
To me, that word is 100% synonymous with the word 'Suffering.' That is what raiding is to me. That is always what raiding was to me. Raiding is a second job, and your coworkers are the most inept people you could ever hope to run across. I can tell you the exact moment when I finally gave up on the dream of being in a good raiding guild, too. It was very distinct and is something I remember vividly to this day.
We were in Ulduar, as we often were back then. I saw the back half of that instance once, and it was only for a Mimiron encounter that we could not overcome. Mostly, we'd sit and wipe somewhere in the first half of the raid. Our guild leader wanted a full sweep of it, too. That meant clearing out every boss, including the optional ones. Including Auriaya. Auriaya is a stone giant that patrols around a ring-shaped room with large panther adds. She can be easily avoided and has a fairly short aggro range. I couldn't tell you what the ability was anymore, even when staring at the wiki, but she has an attack that absolutely had to be interrupted. Before staring, the GL would give the order we'd interrupt in and, over Vent, would call out whose job it was to go next.
Unfortunately, the attack had a very short cast time, and people don't always have the best connections. But even with good connections - something the GL actually required in order to be thrust into interrupt duty - people would not pay attention. Over the course of three sessions, each easily three hours apiece, we would wipe to Auriaya because no one could do their jobs. We would lose huge amounts of gold on repairs, we would fly back in, and we would run head-first into that brick wall once again. I got fed up with wiping on the first night, but I wanted to keep my place in the raid, so I stuck it out. I wasn't on interrupt duty because I didn't have the abilities required. My job was just to burn things down and, if needed, to push back enemies if they were chasing after the healers.
When I feel like I'm not making progress in something, despite sinking multiple hours into it, I get incredibly frustrated and drop into a foul mood. And if the people causing those feelings are joking around on Vent chat and yucking it up right after blowing up the raid, those feelings are going to find a target very quickly. By the end of the final night (that I was with, anyway. Presumably they kept on beating their heads against it) I had had enough. I let the tanks know they were awful for being thoroughly incapable of keeping a grand total of three mobs off of the casters. I let the healers know that they were being completely inept at actually focusing their heals on the people that needed it, often spamming heals on tanks who didn't need it. And I let the other DPS classes know exactly what I thought about them using 'joke' skills and abilities on day three of a boss we weren't able to put down when everyone was actually trying.
Later, I'd join a slightly better guild around when the final raid of the expansion came out (I think). The one that opened up Icecrown. I saw the lower half and I saw a lot of the upper half of that place, but we never reached Arthas. Despite being better, it was still filled with stoners and idiots and there's only so much of that I can take, especially with a five minute runback and a twenty minute pre-fight prep and speech by the GL. I dropped out of that one willingly and it basically was the end of my adventures in raiding. I never got into the Raid Finder when it was introduced because the only thing worse than guilds was dealing with randoms. The raids you got via the Finder were nerfed to oblivion and back, and people still couldn't beat them.
So I went into Cataclysm solo, and solo is not something Blizzard accepted at that point. In Wrath, you could get tiered gear by doing daily heroics and such, getting tokens and saving them up for your armor. You had to raid in Cataclysm to get anywhere near that gear. Cataclysm was savagely overtuned for most of its life, as well. Most guilds couldn't get better armor because there was only one avenue for it, and you had to be in a competent guild. Anyone who's played World of Warcraft can tell you that 'competent guild' is an alien term. The problem extended to random dungeons, though. Even standard, non-Heroic dungeons were overtuned to the point where you would be lucky to get even halfway through them. Forget about the Heroics themselves. Those often required raiding gear to stand a ghost of a chance.
The gear and content was gated in such a way as to actively punish anyone who didn't want to spend two to five hours a night, multiple nights a week, dealing with a bunch of dipshits over voice chat. That's when I bowed out.
This brings us back to the present, to Destiny, and to Destiny's Raiding.
There is no matchmaking in Destiny. You cannot group with randoms to do its raid content. Don't have enough people who A) play the game and B) want to spend multiple hours dying to bosses? Then sorry, you just don't get to experience that content. What reason would they do this? The raid content has been described as being 'too difficult' to do with randoms. It's Cataclysm all over again. The content is overtuned to where only a fraction of the playerbase will ever get to fully experience it. Bungie thinks this is actually an intelligent thing to do.
I don't know anyone who bought Destiny. My friends list is completely devoid of Destiny popups. But even if I did know a handful of people who wanted to raid, no one wants to spend hours trying to make progress, only to be stymied by shit that's often out of their control. That brings us back to getting frustrated at not making progress, which leads to not wanting to play at all.
Raiding is a dirty word to me, worse than any swear you can think up. I cuss like a sailor and I don't like to say the word, because to me it represents everything wrong in games. Especially when it goes out of its way to block content - something you paid to get to see and experience - due to difficulty and a lack of competent players. And, in Destiny's case, it's also locked behind a friends-only barrier. If you don't know enough people who play and aren't the type to go on forums just to seek out people who join you, then you don't get to see it. Full stop. And let's say you do seek out randoms via boards. That only shows that the concept is fucking stupid, because it's easy to get around! And that's still no guarantee you'll make it through the raiding content because you're dealing with randoms!
You don't know these people! You don't know their commitment level or how good they are at the game! You're playing with them because they're in the same boat you are - they don't know anyone who plays and, instead of using an in-game matchmaking system to find random people, they've gone online to find random people! There's literally no god damn difference in these things except for the fact that you have to go outside the game, wait for replies (which could take hours or days), manually add them to your friends lists, and then you can take a stab at the content you wanted to play two days ago!
Destiny has raiding achievements, and that's really where the source of all of this anger lies. Beating a raid. Beating a raid with only clan members, which I'm assuming is just another layer of bullshit you go through on top of requiring them to be on your Friends List. Beating a raid without anyone dying. Beating a raid on Hard. These are 'achievements' in the sense that they would require effort to get. But do you really want to try getting them? Do you want to go through the tedious process of hunting down people outside of the game to get around Bungie's systems? Do you want to devote hours and hours and hours, dying to the same thing? Do you really want to try getting everyone in the group through a raid without anyone dying? Above all else, that's an achievement that's 100% dependent on other people. That's something you may never get, and there's nothing you can do to help that fact.
Like I said - I don't know a whole lot about Destiny. Maybe the raids were overhyped in regards to difficulty. Maybe these achievements are easy to get! Or maybe they'll get nerfed ten DLC packs down the line! That doesn't matter to me. The annoyance involved in getting a good group together, and depending on them to perfect the game is the kind of thing I cannot stand in games. I would hate this system even if I didn't achievement hunt. Even with fans doing things like this to try and coordinate out-of-game matchmaking, that's a step that should not fucking exist.
In doing this, Bungie is also insulting the intelligence of every single person playing their game. They are actively saying "No, you and this ragtag group of players you've assembled are too stupid to beat this overtuned content we've developed."
But then you add them to your friends list and magically, you become smart enough to go raiding?
All this is doing is adding extra steps to an already tedious process. Raiding is not fun under any circumstances. I have never had a raid experience that was fun in any way, across any of the games that have such a thing. I know that isn't the same for everyone, I admit I'm probably in the minority, and I know some people get hard-ons for content that very, very few people will ever complete. It's like they let TotalBiscuit decide how raids should go. Back during the Cataclysm beta, the videos he uploaded made his stance on difficult content very apparent. To him, randoms shouldn't be allowed to beat content. If you didn't spend days grinding for gear, you shouldn't even be allowed to enter dungeons. Heroics were overtuned to the point where you'd wipe nonstop and he found that delicious. He thought it was good game design and saw nothing wrong with the fact that it meant most players would never ever get to complete the content.
That's the kind of stuck-up attitude I'm seeing with Destiny's raiding system. There's nothing stopping you from adding people you find in town (or whatever) just to circumvent the idiotic lack of a matchmaking system. You're manually matchmaking by adding people, and that's not going to get you any closer to completing the raid than an actual matchmaking system would have. It's exactly the same, they just want to make you jump through hoops.
I can't speak for most of Destiny's achievements. But this is the reason I will never lay a finger on the game myself. As someone who has to perfect games in order to satisfy her OCD, I would never be able to put up with other players not knowing what they need to do, or actively trolling players they've grouped with. I simply do not have the patience to go outside the game for a group, coordinate when to do a raid, and then spend hours wiping over and over. That is not fun. That is, in fact, the very opposite of fun.
Difficult achievements will always exist. And when these achievements are not dependent on someone else not fucking up, then that's fine. I've beaten games on the hardest difficulties, I've ground out Challenges for weeks in Borderlands 2 and Colonial Marines, I've beat my head against the nigh impossible Extreme Campaigns in Arkham City. I've gone through a lot of tedious, frustrating, maddening achievements and I will not get anywhere near Destiny purely from the raiding content.
I apologize for this rather lengthy rant on the subject and, with any luck, will get back to normal discussions on achievements shortly. But the blog is titled Achievement Reviews, and I suppose this is just another method of reviewing. It's not the typical kind of post I'd make, but seeing raiding content gated in such a stupid way just sets off long-buried hatred of how MMOs work, I guess. I think certain things in gaming need to die out and raiding will forever be at the top of that list.
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