Post by Applelight Limited on Jan 31, 2015 3:43:16 GMT
I figured it's about time I talked about this game I've been playing like mad for the best part of two months now.
Destiny is a FPS set in a 'mythical science fiction world', with elements of an RPG and MMO thrown in. It's set in the far distant future, after the end of Humanity's golden age following a massive cataclysmal upheaval called 'The Collapse'. In the 2060's, when mankind first landed on Mars, they discovered a giant...thing...hovering close to the surface which came to be called The Traveler. And when I say giant I mean giant....it's the size of a small moon! It's not known if it's an alien, a group of aliens, a robot, a spaceship or whatever. All we know is, it's a giant moon sized pearl white ball with god like reality warping powers. An example of this...to demonstrate it's power to humanity it turned the planet Mercury into a garden world...Mercury! From there it bestowed it's power and knowledge onto humanity, giving them faster than light travel, medical cures, and all the stuff needed to colonize the solar system and beyond.
But then after a few centuries the Traveler's great and ancient enemy, known only as 'The Darkness', came. If what the Traveler is is ambiguous, then the Darkness is even more so. All we know is, it's pure evil, it follows the Traveler...and it's much more powerful. It came in and destroyed Humanity's empire, killing billions and pushing them back until the only safe area was the ground beneath the Traveler. The Traveler made a final last stand; it unleashed it's full power and banished the Darkness out of the galaxy, in the process creating 'The Ghosts', tiny little flying AIs imbued with a fraction of it's power (if the Traveler is 'God', then these are now it's angels, or the Holy Ghost/Spirit) and slipping into what can only be described as a coma. It now hovers above The City, the last safe bastion of humanity. The former empire is now in ruins, and aliens have moved in to take over.
The most prolithic of these is The Fallen, a nomadic race of four armed insect like humanoids with weird mandibles like the Elites of Halo. They are basically space barbarians, pirates and raiders. They live in separate factions (called Houses) lead by a Kell (Duke/King) in their Ketches (giant space ships) but come down to loot or squat on the surfaces of humanity's former empire. They see themselves as superior to humans, who are now nothing but play things to them to be hunted. Like humans, they too once belong to an advanced civilization which collapsed (hence the name, and advanced tech obviously) but unlike the humans their collapse was self inflicted. The strangest thing about them is that, thanks to either evolution or genetic engineering, they can now survive purely on a substance called 'Ether', a mysterious white gas heavily implied to be a product of the Darkness (if so, this could explain why they went bad). They administer it via respirators. Killing them results in the either in their bodies dissolving into the air, especially if you remove their heads, which leads to an old legend that it's their souls escaping. They have advanced tech like energy weapons, space travel and anti gravity, but as it's made from scavenged parts it looks ramshackle. All this makes them like a strange combo of the Eldar and Orks from 40k. The most dangerous of them are the 'Servitors', floating robots left over from their past advanced age that look like magic 8 balls which create the either they need to live. These are worshiped by them...Kells are their political leaders but the Servitors are their Gods, and the worship is lead by the Archons (high priests). It's unknown what the Servitors make of this.
The second most immediate threat to humanity is The Hive, a very sinister race which directly worship the Darkness. They actually look like the living dead...living eyeless skeleton monsters that screech horribly. They are threatening The City on Earth, but their main base of operations is the Moon, which they conquered during the collapse and have been hollowing out ever since. They use weird bio mechanical tech powered by the Darkness that's hard to tell apart from magic...including big swords 'forged in Darkness' and armor made of fused bone, but their main weapons are strange energy guns. They are hatched from pods in their millions, grown by 'The Wizards', their flying sorcerer scientists. Which are actually females...which makes me wonder why they didn't call them Witches but...whatever. They also posses advanced teleportation tech that allows them to appear out of nowhere and even make their space ships appear underground. They are the antagonists of the game's first DLC expansion, The Dark Below.
The third enemy introduced, and the most dangerous overall, are the Vex, a race of alien cyborgs. While The Hive only worship the Darkness (which gives them powers in return but probably just sees them as dumb muscle and useful idiots), the Vex are directly controlled by it, making them the main extension of it's will. They took over Mercury the garden world and turned it into a giant machine, and where in the process of doing the same to Venus before the Traveler laid the smack down. But now that the Darkness is returning, they're becoming more active again. They have tech unlike anything else, even beyond the Traveler, including Time Travel. At first they where thought to be robots but studies of their remains revealed an organic element. This exists in their abdomens, which is their weak point...shooting their heads off only makes them go berserk and crazy. Are said to be unbelievably ancient, a race which past their singularity a long time ago. They had the whole universe figured out until they meet the Darkness...which baffled them so much they felt no option but to worship it and had the remote over to it. They are bending reality to make their dominance, and thus the Darkness's too, a scientific law of the universe. Examples of this include their terraforming of planets and messing with time to erase enemies from existence.
The last enemy introduced are the Cabal, a highly militarized and industrial alien empire who are actually the least evil overall, although they're still no angels. They are a race of eight foot tall, 800 pound 'space turtles/rhinos' (imagine their faces as a turtle's head with a rhinos face without the horn) who harbor no real grudge against humanity...it's just a case of 'finders keepers' and 'if one of us has to go down it's not going to be us'. They have a huge interstellar empire ruled by an Emperor and defended by his legions. They're fighting against the Darkness (it's implied they're losing badly, and that some think that they should ally with the humans, but those ones are denounced as traitors). They currently occupy Mars, and are heavily fortifying it against Vex and Human attacks (the Fallen seem wise enough to stay away as they're no match for them). In fact their military is a lot like the Roman's, in that they're also engineers. When they aren't fighting, they're fortifying the area, building forts, defense lines and space ports. They have an exclusion zone round Mars...nothing is allowed in or out and anything that does come in is shot on sight by their navy and planetary defense guns. They are thus a lot like the Imperium Of Man from 40k...hell, they are even armed with 'Cabal Slug Throwers' which are bolt guns in all but name, thus making their Legioneers in their bright rounded armor a lot like the Space Marines in appearance.
Speaking of man...what are the Humans to do about all this? Remember those Ghosts I mentioned? One of their powers is the ability to create 'Guardians'. What a Guardian is...is a resurrected corpse infused with the Travelers powers (called it's 'Light') thus granting them powers of their own. These guys have no memory of their past life, but have all of mankind's military experience in her heads, so no matter what they where they are now like super powered navy seals. They come in three classes equivalent to the classic mage/fighter/rouge archetypes. Titans (the fighters; power armored soldiers who took charge of the defense of the city, primarily creating the defensive wall), Warlocks (the mages, scholar soldiers interested in studying mankind's past and the Traveler) and Hunters (my class, the rouge, space cowboys who explore, help refugees, undertake raids and other commando type stuff). These guys are like Knights, sworn in the service of The Speaker (the priest scientist now acting on behalf of the Traveler) and they operate out of their own Camelot called the Tower, fighting mankind's enemies in any way they can accompanied by their own Ghost who resurrected. They're vastly outnumbered but since a Guardian is worth an entire Legion of Cabal troops and and be resurrected by their ghost or another Guardian in seconds 99% of the time it's not one sided.
And that's that...you play as a Guardian. I'm currently playing as a Hunter, with the gunslinger subclass. Gunslingers are, well, gunslingers, and snipers. They also have Boba Fett style jump packs and can also throw knives...which are magically on fire. Their superpower is the ability to summon The Golden Gun...a flaming pistol that fires flaming rounds which vaporize the target. A note about Guardian equipment...it's not too different to modern real life gear except for minor details. They're like what our gear might be like in a few decades. They use bullet firing guns, but these guns use electric or magnetic pulses to fire case less ammunition. They do have energy weapons, Fusion rifles, which are slow firing and unwieldy but very powerful. What makes this gear equal to or even greater than the alien gear out there is that it's all infused in the Travelers Light, making them more powerful than what should be physically possible. Basic guardian gear used by low level, newly created guardians isn't infused with this Light and thus is very weak. But then uncommon or rare gear gets more light from their more powerful Guardians and thus gets more powerful. Legendary gear wielded by high level Guardians is ridiculously powerful...handguns that can take out tanks and armor that can shrug off direct hits from missiles etc.
Destiny is a FPS set in a 'mythical science fiction world', with elements of an RPG and MMO thrown in. It's set in the far distant future, after the end of Humanity's golden age following a massive cataclysmal upheaval called 'The Collapse'. In the 2060's, when mankind first landed on Mars, they discovered a giant...thing...hovering close to the surface which came to be called The Traveler. And when I say giant I mean giant....it's the size of a small moon! It's not known if it's an alien, a group of aliens, a robot, a spaceship or whatever. All we know is, it's a giant moon sized pearl white ball with god like reality warping powers. An example of this...to demonstrate it's power to humanity it turned the planet Mercury into a garden world...Mercury! From there it bestowed it's power and knowledge onto humanity, giving them faster than light travel, medical cures, and all the stuff needed to colonize the solar system and beyond.
But then after a few centuries the Traveler's great and ancient enemy, known only as 'The Darkness', came. If what the Traveler is is ambiguous, then the Darkness is even more so. All we know is, it's pure evil, it follows the Traveler...and it's much more powerful. It came in and destroyed Humanity's empire, killing billions and pushing them back until the only safe area was the ground beneath the Traveler. The Traveler made a final last stand; it unleashed it's full power and banished the Darkness out of the galaxy, in the process creating 'The Ghosts', tiny little flying AIs imbued with a fraction of it's power (if the Traveler is 'God', then these are now it's angels, or the Holy Ghost/Spirit) and slipping into what can only be described as a coma. It now hovers above The City, the last safe bastion of humanity. The former empire is now in ruins, and aliens have moved in to take over.
The most prolithic of these is The Fallen, a nomadic race of four armed insect like humanoids with weird mandibles like the Elites of Halo. They are basically space barbarians, pirates and raiders. They live in separate factions (called Houses) lead by a Kell (Duke/King) in their Ketches (giant space ships) but come down to loot or squat on the surfaces of humanity's former empire. They see themselves as superior to humans, who are now nothing but play things to them to be hunted. Like humans, they too once belong to an advanced civilization which collapsed (hence the name, and advanced tech obviously) but unlike the humans their collapse was self inflicted. The strangest thing about them is that, thanks to either evolution or genetic engineering, they can now survive purely on a substance called 'Ether', a mysterious white gas heavily implied to be a product of the Darkness (if so, this could explain why they went bad). They administer it via respirators. Killing them results in the either in their bodies dissolving into the air, especially if you remove their heads, which leads to an old legend that it's their souls escaping. They have advanced tech like energy weapons, space travel and anti gravity, but as it's made from scavenged parts it looks ramshackle. All this makes them like a strange combo of the Eldar and Orks from 40k. The most dangerous of them are the 'Servitors', floating robots left over from their past advanced age that look like magic 8 balls which create the either they need to live. These are worshiped by them...Kells are their political leaders but the Servitors are their Gods, and the worship is lead by the Archons (high priests). It's unknown what the Servitors make of this.
The second most immediate threat to humanity is The Hive, a very sinister race which directly worship the Darkness. They actually look like the living dead...living eyeless skeleton monsters that screech horribly. They are threatening The City on Earth, but their main base of operations is the Moon, which they conquered during the collapse and have been hollowing out ever since. They use weird bio mechanical tech powered by the Darkness that's hard to tell apart from magic...including big swords 'forged in Darkness' and armor made of fused bone, but their main weapons are strange energy guns. They are hatched from pods in their millions, grown by 'The Wizards', their flying sorcerer scientists. Which are actually females...which makes me wonder why they didn't call them Witches but...whatever. They also posses advanced teleportation tech that allows them to appear out of nowhere and even make their space ships appear underground. They are the antagonists of the game's first DLC expansion, The Dark Below.
The third enemy introduced, and the most dangerous overall, are the Vex, a race of alien cyborgs. While The Hive only worship the Darkness (which gives them powers in return but probably just sees them as dumb muscle and useful idiots), the Vex are directly controlled by it, making them the main extension of it's will. They took over Mercury the garden world and turned it into a giant machine, and where in the process of doing the same to Venus before the Traveler laid the smack down. But now that the Darkness is returning, they're becoming more active again. They have tech unlike anything else, even beyond the Traveler, including Time Travel. At first they where thought to be robots but studies of their remains revealed an organic element. This exists in their abdomens, which is their weak point...shooting their heads off only makes them go berserk and crazy. Are said to be unbelievably ancient, a race which past their singularity a long time ago. They had the whole universe figured out until they meet the Darkness...which baffled them so much they felt no option but to worship it and had the remote over to it. They are bending reality to make their dominance, and thus the Darkness's too, a scientific law of the universe. Examples of this include their terraforming of planets and messing with time to erase enemies from existence.
The last enemy introduced are the Cabal, a highly militarized and industrial alien empire who are actually the least evil overall, although they're still no angels. They are a race of eight foot tall, 800 pound 'space turtles/rhinos' (imagine their faces as a turtle's head with a rhinos face without the horn) who harbor no real grudge against humanity...it's just a case of 'finders keepers' and 'if one of us has to go down it's not going to be us'. They have a huge interstellar empire ruled by an Emperor and defended by his legions. They're fighting against the Darkness (it's implied they're losing badly, and that some think that they should ally with the humans, but those ones are denounced as traitors). They currently occupy Mars, and are heavily fortifying it against Vex and Human attacks (the Fallen seem wise enough to stay away as they're no match for them). In fact their military is a lot like the Roman's, in that they're also engineers. When they aren't fighting, they're fortifying the area, building forts, defense lines and space ports. They have an exclusion zone round Mars...nothing is allowed in or out and anything that does come in is shot on sight by their navy and planetary defense guns. They are thus a lot like the Imperium Of Man from 40k...hell, they are even armed with 'Cabal Slug Throwers' which are bolt guns in all but name, thus making their Legioneers in their bright rounded armor a lot like the Space Marines in appearance.
Speaking of man...what are the Humans to do about all this? Remember those Ghosts I mentioned? One of their powers is the ability to create 'Guardians'. What a Guardian is...is a resurrected corpse infused with the Travelers powers (called it's 'Light') thus granting them powers of their own. These guys have no memory of their past life, but have all of mankind's military experience in her heads, so no matter what they where they are now like super powered navy seals. They come in three classes equivalent to the classic mage/fighter/rouge archetypes. Titans (the fighters; power armored soldiers who took charge of the defense of the city, primarily creating the defensive wall), Warlocks (the mages, scholar soldiers interested in studying mankind's past and the Traveler) and Hunters (my class, the rouge, space cowboys who explore, help refugees, undertake raids and other commando type stuff). These guys are like Knights, sworn in the service of The Speaker (the priest scientist now acting on behalf of the Traveler) and they operate out of their own Camelot called the Tower, fighting mankind's enemies in any way they can accompanied by their own Ghost who resurrected. They're vastly outnumbered but since a Guardian is worth an entire Legion of Cabal troops and and be resurrected by their ghost or another Guardian in seconds 99% of the time it's not one sided.
And that's that...you play as a Guardian. I'm currently playing as a Hunter, with the gunslinger subclass. Gunslingers are, well, gunslingers, and snipers. They also have Boba Fett style jump packs and can also throw knives...which are magically on fire. Their superpower is the ability to summon The Golden Gun...a flaming pistol that fires flaming rounds which vaporize the target. A note about Guardian equipment...it's not too different to modern real life gear except for minor details. They're like what our gear might be like in a few decades. They use bullet firing guns, but these guns use electric or magnetic pulses to fire case less ammunition. They do have energy weapons, Fusion rifles, which are slow firing and unwieldy but very powerful. What makes this gear equal to or even greater than the alien gear out there is that it's all infused in the Travelers Light, making them more powerful than what should be physically possible. Basic guardian gear used by low level, newly created guardians isn't infused with this Light and thus is very weak. But then uncommon or rare gear gets more light from their more powerful Guardians and thus gets more powerful. Legendary gear wielded by high level Guardians is ridiculously powerful...handguns that can take out tanks and armor that can shrug off direct hits from missiles etc.