I'm a long time gamer (started on a Tandy 1000 and NES), and have played games my whole life since then. My first RPG was Ultima V and I loved it, and I stuck closely with RPGs since then. Some of my favorites include Planescape: Torment, the Baldur's Gate Series, the Icewind Dale series, KoTOR I and II, and all things Dragon Age and Mass Effect. I spent more time than I should have with World of Warcraft, which was my first and last MMO experience. Like many people, I felt the game became too much "work," and simply wasn't fun. I've also played my fair share of FPS; my favorite early FPS was Quake, and I loved the intense, harrowing action. I came to Destiny via the Action/RPG genre, which we saw brilliantly achieved with Borderlands 2 and Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. I've been playing Destiny since the Beta. I'm not the best, but I've played enough to see almost all the content. If you look me up on Destiny Tracker you'll see I've probably spent more time than I should with Destiny, but that's a testament to the promise of the game and the development we've seen since launch. Part 1 - The Past and the Negative My first impression of the game ran along the lines of much of the professional commentary: the gameplay was tight but a little repetitive, and the story was severely lacking. I've heard different rumors for the reasons behind the lack of story, but ultimately it simply felt like the game wasn't really finished. My biggest complaint with the story was that it was vacant of meaningful details as we played in game. It felt like someone had simply stumbled into TV tropes and pilfered fantasy stereotypes like: "Dark Bad, Light Good!" In-game information specific to the game-world itself was non-existent, so it felt like I wasn't learning anything about the world as I was playing through it. It felt like everything in Destiny was borrowed from somewhere else and turned simply into a bad stereotype - there was little information in-game to make the Hive, Vex, or Cabal distinct from other faceless, generic space villains (this has changed with House of Wolves and Taken King, quite exceptionally). Everything in the base campaign left me with questions that should have seen at least some treatment in-game: What is the Black Garden? What exactly are we fighting in the Black Garden, and how does shooting a bunch of statues defeat a floating black space blob? How is the floating black space blob related to the Vex Hive Mind? How can the Vex have a biological neural component while also having a universal hive mind that can communicate instantly across whole galaxies? These questions may seem extreme, but they point to the general incoherence of the game at this point. I was able to follow some of the grimoire cards and piece together pieces of story, but this was dependent on my finding dead ghost shells. I felt like I wasn't learning anything about the game world from the progressing the narrative, but instead had to learn about the game world by spending time away from the story, away from questing, and away from completing story missions. This was ultimately was much less satisfying than seeing story unfold in-game, especially when we consider series like Borderlands, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. These action/RPGs presented immense game worlds filled with narrative, information, and detail, and placed it all in game. I understand the desire to create some new experience, and also possibly promote a phone app, but I thought the decision to relegate all the storytelling work to the phone app was a mistake. As a narrative mechanism the ghost simply wasn't strong enough by itself to carry all the storytelling that should have occurred in Destiny's base campaign. And when the Ghost could have provided information I felt it didn't - there were countless missed opportunities for providing back-story in-game, where the ghost could have provided information gleaned from the World's Grave, or the Archive, or Vex nodes, or the Cabal's hacked databases on Mars. There was also some very, very bad dialogue, culminating for me in the line "I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain." This is about the worst thing you can possibly do in storytelling: relying on a cliché phrase that punished player curiosity, and then doubling down on that cliché to make it even more dismissive. Thankfully things have improved. But at the time I found the storytelling lacking and haphazard. Despite that, the base game was very successful at creating an online space where people could engage in many different types of gameplay (exploration, PVP, questing, or MMO-style raiding) and do so in a way that relatively easy to manage and relatively safe from the worst abuses of online gaming. I loved the fact that I could simply turn on the 360 (I've upgraded to Xbone for Taken King), and simply jump into the Crucible or Strike Playlists without having to go through any additional process (do you remember trying to assemble parties in WoW, and spending too much time in LFG? I do. It was less than ideal). I enjoyed learning how to PVP and thoroughly felt like I was growing as a PVP gamer by learning how to handle Control, Clash, and Rumble (Control often feels like going to the bowling alley and playing with the bumpers in the lanes, it guides you to the firefights - but sometimes that's what you want, something easy and uncomplicated). The Dark Below was an improvement but it didn't resolve fundamental problems. We did see more content, which was appreciated, and the armor and weapons developed in terms of aesthetics and functions. We did see more information in-game, provided by Eris Morn. But the in-game story still felt flat and the equipment dynamic was still the same (gather a new flavor of Unobtanium and use it to make your gear stronger). House of Wolves substantially improved on storytelling, using in-game communications to enhance the narrative quality of story missions and provide much-needed backstory. The dialogue between Petra Varj and Variks was a welcome improvement to the empty narratives of previous story missions. But despite this we were still left with little information behind the base campaign. I suspect a lot of energy was being spent towards the Taken King, so I can see how many of these details weren't being filled in at the time.