E3 2013 – Bungie’s Destiny Looks Like Halo: The RPG

Which brings me to…

Destiny is an online RPG, but everything that we saw in the demo was pure Bungie FPS gameplay, starting from the first few seconds of the live demo when the player is shown a seemingly vast and endless landscape, only to then be corralled directly to the place where they need to go by a bunch of unsubtly placed cars and other obstacles. Linear FPS gameplay, thy name is Bungie.

I also thought that the combat in Destiny shared the same tone and pace of Halo. Not too fast or frenetic. No use of cover, just guns, grenades and melee. Some baddies that sit still so you can shoot them (Grunts) and baddies that juke back and forth or rush you to melee (Elites). There’s even the big Wraith Tank-like boss that sits in the middle of the battlefield shooting in every direction.

And of course, Bungie’s excessive use of “drop ships” to bring in more enemies while keeping you restricted to one battlefield.

Okay, maybe these comparisons aren’t fair. It’s not like Bungie invented all of these sci-fi tropes and gameplay clichés. But they certainly honed them all to a fine point with everey successive Halo game that they made.

That said, Bungie is at least trying to do something totally new, and I applaud them for that. The Destiny demo looks slick and fun. I just can’t shake the feeling that it also looks a plays just a little too much like the Halo RPG that Bungie always wanted.