Essays, Not Rants! 349: Playing Together

Easily the highlight of my time playing Destiny was Vault of Glass. It’s a raid, that is a really difficult mission that requires serious teamwork and a pretty major time investment. It took work to even find a group to play with: I play on the PS4 and didn’t know anyone else who played Destiny. So I had to the internet to find a group who wanted to run Vault of Glass and were okay with bringing someone along who hadn’t done it before (me).

It took us around five hours.

Destiny’s raids are notoriously Big Deals. There are enemies to fight you won’t find anywhere else in the game, some fights necessitate really specific strategies to get through, and the final boss is really, really hard. It’s also the most fun thing in the game. The five others and I were all mic’d up, coming up with plans on the fly and, y’know, teamworking our way through it. Lots of calling out plans, asking for help (or telling the other to not help us as it was a lot cause), and so on. There was also a great deal of banter; complimenting each other’s work and comparing gear. Part of the fun was certainly the challenge of it, but much of it came from the camaraderie of spending that much time working together.

Teamwork is an aspect of multiplayer games that often gets downplayed in favor of competition. A game like Battlefront II isn’t so much about working as a cohesive unit as it is about beating the other faction and, ideally, playing the objective. Super Smash Bros. is all about beating each other up. There’s a bit of a reason for this; pitting human players against other human players allows for more complex games. There are things that AI is simply not good at doing in games, whether it’s balancing objective completion with combat or the on-the-fly countering that Smash lends itself to. It’s one reason why I gravitate towards games like Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime or Overcooked; yes, I love on-the-couch multiplayer, but I also enjoy having to figure out how to work together to do something.

Overcooked is frustratingly hectic, as everyone’s running around the virtual kitchen trying to serve up orders while not falling off the iceberg the kitchen happens to be on (or dealing with ghosts moving kitchenware about, or not letting rats steal your ingredients). Maybe this means assigning people roles or just constantly yelling about what needs doing and all, but most times we’ve managed to get all three stars on a particularly hard challenge was when we somehow started to really gel as a team.

My brother’s been playing Destiny since the game came out in 2014. But since he had an XBox, we couldn’t play together as there’s no cross-platform multiplayer. Courtesy of a recent sale, though, he picked up his own PS4 and with it, of course Destiny. Because now, after four years, he and I can finally play the game together.

And it’s like Vault of Glass all over. Granted, he’s still early on in the game and I’m piggybacking along while he gets back in the realm of where he was on his old account, but there’s still those elements of teamwork ("Let me know when your Super’s charged and we’ll tag-team them") and plenty of banter — I’ve lost count of the amount of times one of us has yelled "Yoink!" into the mic upon stealing the other’s kill.

Destiny, despite all its narrative foibles, is a really fun game. One of my biggest disappointments is how, up to now, I’ve essentially been playing it alone. Now that I’m not, I’m reminded of how much darn fun the game is — especially when sharing it with another person. It’s an annoying amount of hoops to have to jump through, but now that I’m here, yeah, it’s pretty great.

Which means I’ll have to grab Destiny 2 at some point in the future to continue these adventures.