Destiny at 10: the forever game that is also a forever conversation

Destiny is 10 years old, which is an aeon in video game terms. It’s also one of the most fascinating games of the last decade, sometimes for unlikely reasons. On the surface, this is a lavish online prog-rock space shooter made by Bungie, the creators of the Xbox classic Halo. You bundle together with friends, deploy somewhere amid the glittering vistas of a futuristic version of our solar system, and then shoot people/aliens/robots to get better loot.

None of this is exactly unprecedented, and that’s maybe the point. You could argue that Destiny’s touchstones are games like Halo, for its gunplay, World of Warcraft, for its persistent online spaces, and – this is where it gets a bit odd, granted – the deathless British retailer Marks & Spencer. This last point is because, above all else, Destiny is a game of fluctuating fortunes, and those fortunes seem to fascinate everyone close to video games, regardless of whether they actually play Destiny or not. Just as a lot of people in the UK seem to have a secret sense for whether M&S is currently on an upward or downward trajectory – there is no middle ground – everyone in games knows whether Destiny is in boom or bust mode. Is it now better than it’s been in ages? Or is it a shadow of the game it was two, five, seven years back? Destiny is our ever-reliable topic of fretful conversation.

Astonishingly, it’s been like this since the very start. In fact, it’s been like this from just before the start. Destiny had the great bad luck to be revealed as a business enterprise well before it was announced as a fictional universe. This means that it was presented as SKUs and Q1 financial prospects rather than a world of fun and firefights dreamed up by some of the best combat designers in the business. When the first game finally arrived, it was viewed as a beautiful core of action surrounded by stuff that felt a bit rushed. It was an early star whose dust and gases hadn’t entirely clumped together yet. Sure, the right shotgun made the whole world sing along with you as you went into battle, but the story stuff, the lore, was scattered across the surface of the game in a series of trading cards, as if Homer had chosen to release the Iliad on a collection of beer mats and hidden them on various battlefields.

Here’s the thing, though: people couldn’t stop playing Destiny. From the start it was an evening online with friends that simply couldn’t be beaten. Drop in, blast stuff, earn stuff, and then compare what you’ve got. Levelling up felt consequential here. New loot had genuine character. Set pieces played out beneath skyboxes so vast and turbulent that they served as reminders that, spaceships aside, Bungie’s soul had always been deeply Romantic.

Part of the game’s enduring appeal is as a series of striking images: the funereal bulk of the Traveller, an artificial moon, hovering over the world’s last city. The claw-like eruptions of Martian rock picked out by sunlight turned to a Valium haze through all the airborne dust. But from the start, Bungie’s game bled into the real world, too. Players could look at their builds outside the game, millions of raid party WhatsApp groups blinked into life overnight, and websites and YouTube channels were devoted to everything from levelling tips to putting the Frankenstein’s soap opera of a narrative back together.

All of which means that, for the last 10 years, playing Destiny has also meant arguing about it, getting cross about it and uninstalling it, then reinstalling it and being delighted by it again as it eats your evenings once more. You can tell the game is meaningful to people because it has conspiracy theories. A cave that spawned easy loot and almost broke the in-game economy during the early months: bug or intentional piece of broken design? Raid areas with cheesing spots where players could lay on massive damage unimperiled: sign of a wonky map or of a canny developer creating a different kind of word of mouth?

Inevitably, by the time Destiny 2 came around in 2017, people even missed those grimoire lore cards. Since then, it’s been up and down. The death of a major character had everyone talking, but so did the price of an expansion. People tire of the grind or feel like a raid is unfair. They complain – rightly – about the store but they’ll also – rightly – buy Destiny: The Official Cookbook. Complicating things is the fact that, since the start, Destiny has been filled with nostalgia for itself. There’s another final point of connection with M&S for you: Destiny is an institution.

Few people would contest that Destiny is, and has always been, a great action game. There’s that core of charismatic gunplay at the centre, and then, moving outwards, the evocative and haunting spin on science fiction coupled with Bungie’s long-established knack for mournful and extravagant naming conventions. This is the studio that once gave us Halo levels called Pillar of Autumn and the Silent Cartographer. No wonder “Destiny weapon name or Roxy Music deep cut?” remains a reliable drinking game. (It goes both ways, too. I can easily imagine Bungie dropping an SMG called Sentimental Fool or Mother of Pearl.)

Still: fluctuations. The most recent expansion was welcomed as one of the best in a while, but player counts have not picked up significantly in its wake. Over time, Bungie has moved from questions about the cost of cosmetics to serious allegations regarding its internal culture. The studio has changed owners and recently suffered redundancies. Last week, Destiny 2’s Steam player count hit its lowest levels yet.

Even so, we are all still talking about the game that has always been there to be talked about (including Bungie, which has announced a developer blog discussing the game’s future that will go live tonight). Many of us are still feeling nostalgic for a game that was itself born into nostalgia. And both of these things create powerful allure. I remember the first time I ever dropped into Destiny 2, long after everyone I know had fallen in and back out of love with it. I found a game that was enduring fun for a few hectic minutes, and those minutes could easily spiral into hours. I also found a game world that might as well have been covered with those blue plaques that tell you that a long-dead painter once holidayed here.

Ultimately, Destiny the game benefits enormously from Destiny the conversation fallback. By the time I first actually met Devrim Kay, for example, Destiny’s gentleman sniper, I knew so much about him I could have been his biographer. I felt as if I was in the presence of a celebrity, even though he was just another quest-giver.