What keeps you coming back to Destiny 2, year in, year out? Is it the best-in-class gunplay? The labyrinthine lore? A sense of Stockholm Syndrome for a game that’s already eaten away at a decade of your life? A bit of all of the above? It’s nebulous, isn’t it, this game – this strange hybrid of MMO and FPS. From the moment I took up the mantle of Guardian, blinking to life in the plaid light of the Cosmodrome with Peter Dinklage’s tired voice beckoning me to fight, I knew Destiny was special – the sort of game I’d be playing for years.
Those heady days of the first beta, way back in 2014, felt formative for me as a gamer. As someone that had (mostly) only played PvP with other players, I was dubious about the largely co-op nature of a ‘Halo-like’ shooter. Could Bungie really attain its lifelong dream and make the intergalactic space opera stand on its own two legs, separate from the scaffold of Xbox’s most iconic mascot? Could it really provide the sort of experience I’d heard World of Warcraft players harp on about for generations; give me a platform to graze on for months, years, decades? Yes, it could.
Its Arc-powered grip on my cortex was fuelled, in no small part, by the sound of this peculiar universe. Every single gun had a telltale call that seemed to bake itself into your frontal lobe; whether it was the satisfying ‘ka-ching’ of the Monte Carlo imbuing your fists with a deadlier punch, or the dreaded hum of a Sweet Business spinning into life around a blind corner in the Crucible, the sound design of Destiny proved to me that – yes – sound was as important in establishing tone and mood as anything else in a developer’s toolbox.