I am through day one of Destiny Rising after its launch yesterday, and while I could do an initial review, I am still on content I was doing in the alpha tests, with a few exceptions, so that can wait a bit.
I will, however, address something I’m already seeing crop up among Destiny 2 players that have headed over to Rising with perhaps…not much experience with the gacha genre, which is the backbone of this game.
Gacha games are almost literally just gambling, at least in terms of the monetization model. You can only rarely directly buy something from a store, but rather the game is centered on “pulls,” in this case Guardians you can use to play. Four star Guardians can be good and fun, but those five star Guardians. You want those, you must have those.
I have seen a lot of players who were skeptical of getting into a gacha game surprised at how generous Destiny Rising actually is. The game lets you earn currency at a decent clip, it doesn’t feel overly predatory and you will almost automatically get a powerful five-star Guardian by the end of your first few hours. Awesome!
Sweet summer children, I’m sorry, but this will not last.
This is simply how this genre works, and it’s pretty basic psychology, as in, the first taste is free. You kick things off showering players in currency and good items/characters, implying the earning rates will stay this way and this is one of those good gacha games. But it will not stay that way. It will be harder and harder to get this currency over time, and outside of extremely rare events, you will almost certainly never progress at this pace again. So just…manage expectations here.
So, all gacha games are trash because of this, right? No, and whether the overall gacha model is predatory and whether a gacha game can be good and fun are two different things.
For the best gacha games, it is perfectly possible to do free-to-play runs, where you use those lower tier characters that are actually perfectly fine, and that’s especially true in a game like this that requires you to be good at offense and defense in a shooter. And you will eventually get more five star characters in time if you save up all your currency for a specific one, either getting lucky or hitting a pity timer (Rising’s pull system also mercifully avoids a dreaded genre staple, a 50/50 shot of actually getting the five star you want when it arrives).
The truth is, most gacha games, including this one, I predict, are more about want than need. I spent a long, long time playing Genshin Impact, and while my upper tier characters were strong and looked cool and such, they rarely felt necessary, and you could probably take on 98% of the game’s content without them, or at the very least, as a free-to-play player. Probably 100% if you were good enough. That may be true here.
Some players will still think this sucks, see character acquisition slow and then bounce. I would not blame anyone for that. But at least know what’s coming, and what that does or does not mean for your time with the game.
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