and better game. I remember there being
three servers, and my
friend
Ryan
was
amazed when there
were 1000 people on
each. Now, there are
almost that many per
server at busy times,
with 70 or so. It's a fun
game, Jagex does a
very good job to convince someone to become a member. You
don't have to pay from
the start, but seeing all
those great updates is
enough to convince anyone. Membership is
incredible, worth the
money. A whole new
world, and ton of new
items,
quests,
and
things to do. So try
RuneScape, it's a lot of
fun, although I never
told anyone I played it.
It’s called the Black
Garden. You see it from
a clifftop above, gazing
across the blooming
acres through a thick
green haze, and imagine the sights that might
be seen there, and the
adventures you might
have there. The reality
of the garden is sadly
never better than the
stories you might make
up in your head when
you look down at it.
What you see is a facade; the garden is a
broken promise of adventures you never
have and landscapes
never explored, and it
represents the whole of
Destiny, a multiplayer
shooter that cobbles together
elements
of
massively
multiplayer
games but overlooks
the lessons developers
of such games learned
many years ago. I
dream of the tales that
might one day be told in
that sprawling expanse,
but Destiny is not yet
telling them.
Instead, Destiny prefers telling the same pedestrian stories time
and time again, hoping
to transfix you with its
rinse-and-repeat pace
and ply you with the
possibility of better loot,
rather than with gameplay diversity that gives
you good reason to
hope for surprises on
the horizon. Cooperative missions--some of
them occurring within
the story, and others,
called strikes, occurring
outside of it--are primarily about doors and
computers. Your robotic
companion,
an
orb
voiced by Game of
Thrones actor Peter
Dinklage, hacks into a
lot of them, and it is
your job to shoot aliens
hailing from various galactic races while he
drones the occasional
word of encouragement.
("I'll work faster," he
says, in a bored notquite-robot,
not-quite
human delivery that, like
most of Destiny, lacks
energy and charisma.)
The fight may end with
an elite enemy, or even
a giant boss, that absorbs many minutes
worth of bullet fire before it falls, just in time
for Dinklage-bot to announce his success and
open the door that leads