A Few Things ‘Destiny 2’ Could Surprisingly Learn From ‘Destiny Rising’

I am still immensely skeptical about the long-term appeal of Destiny Rising, where the main thing I can praise it for is decent enough gunplay for mobile. But, the more I play the more I notice a few things that I think even Destiny 2 could learn from. Certainly not its awful gacha model and ludicrously stereotypical microtransaction store, but a few other gameplay-related things. So, what am I talking about?

NPCs In Missions

This isn’t every mission, certainly, but Destiny Rising does sometimes give you an NPC companion that runs through missions, or parts of them, with you, doing actual damage to enemies in a way that is frankly pretty standard for most other games. But Destiny simply doesn’t do this. At best, it has Saint or Zavala throwing up a stationary bubble shield, or we get an army of slow-moving bots that assist in a room or two. I think campaign missions would be far more interesting with actual characters running them with us and actively participating in fights, which simply doesn’t happen.

Backfill Bots Exist

Related to the above, Destiny Rising has the ability to throw in bots to activities that do not fill up enough. I definitely don’t think this should happen in PvP as that would likely just lead to even more stacked farming, but Destiny could really use some at least basic bot functionality with AI Guardians in PvE that can contribute in some way to some activities when needed. Hell, I’d even take one that just runs over and revives you when you’re dead, I don’t need them to be doing max boss DPS or anything. But something is better than nothing in many of those instances.

Xur’s New Activity

There are a couple decent activities in Destiny Rising, but one that I find to be a standout is a game from Xur that has you progress through increasingly hard rounds of combat, each time picking up a modifier “card” that changes something about you or enemies, like for instance, casting a homing meteor every time you use a skill. Then an upgrade after the next round may increase that meteor’s damage or add two of them at a time. It’s essentially a mini-roguelike type idea where you build power over time through these kinds of stacking upgrades, but of course if you die too many times it’s all over. This is something fun I could see really working in the main game.

Heroes Are…Fun?

Again, the gacha model sucks, and that is the core of the hero concept. With that said, I do fundamentally like the idea of using different, legendary heroes in a Destiny game. I guess this is not a lesson for Destiny 2 specifically, but it does feel like the type of expansion I would love to see from the series outside a gacha mobile…thing. Sadly this sort of sounds like the killed-off adventure game that Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy were making, but I do think this concept could fundamentally work.

There is still plenty I dislike about Destiny Rising. The entire monetization model, though expected for a mobile game, still feels gross. The dialogue and script is truly embarrassing on every level. But it gets some things right and has at least a couple things even Destiny 2 doesn’t have. I’m curious if Bungie will take anything away from this.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.