On Friday of this week, Chinese Marvel Rivals studio NetEase will launch Destiny Rising, a mobile adaptation of the series, and the first new Destiny game since 2017. It has had a number of alphas to test it out and the reaction has been…surprisingly positive from most Destiny players.
Destiny Rising is a competent shooter if you’re grading on a curve for mobile, and most importantly, it’s something that feels entirely new in the franchise. It takes place before the current era, before Guardian classes, and lets us play as not just our own Guardian, but a number of named characters with powers that go beyond what we’ve seen in the game.
Destiny Rising also has thing Destiny players have wanted for ages. Crossbows, dual wielding, a third person view, the return of Sparrow Racing, even player housing.
Uh oh.
You may see where I’m going here. Despite this being a mobile, non-canon gacha game that Bungie had very little to do with, it seems poised to potentially cannibalize part of the already-shrinking Destiny playerbase where the current mood of the community is close to bottoming out with a bad grind and a game that has shrunken into a series of Portal activities.
Yes, it’s a mobile game, but there are emulators you can use to get it on your PC, ones that work in tandem with NetEase to feel almost native on mouse and keyboard. It’s too bad that’s what it takes to get it off phones, but it’s still possible. And that may be another problem in terms of siphoning away Destiny players.
It would have been easy to preview Destiny Rising and have players think that it was just mobile trash but…it does come off as deeper than you might imagine and connected enough to Destiny gameplay to actually feel like a real Destiny game.
If Destiny Rising has one major thing working against it, it’s the gacha model. It has all these fun characters because, like any gacha game, you are meant to gamble for them, and it’s usually going to be pay-to-win with the highest tier of characters, or getting dupes to power them up. If Destiny players are complaining about expansion or Eververse prices, and are unfamiliar with genre, they are going to be in for a world of hurt once the initial “generosity” period ends at the start, which is meant to convince you this actually won’t be so bad. Later, it will, believe me.
I think Destiny Rising will have a successful launch and at least a successful medium-term future. But it will require more than just jaded Destiny players to be a success, as it will also need mobile players to try a Destiny game for the first time, not just OG game converts.
I think it does have the potential to cut into Destiny 2 in the current state of the game. Is this mobile gacha game going to feel and play worse in almost every way? Yes, but it’s also something that is brand new in this space, a fresh slate in the way that the never-gonna-happen Destiny 3 might have been. At least it’s something new to explore.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.