Destiny is the new WoW

Perhaps the title of this post seems a bit of a stretch at first, but over the last month I’ve thought about this more and more and it seems that there are many parallels between Destiny and World of Warcraft and there is speculation of more additions to Destiny that will further support my point. For starters, they both have an ever expanding story line. Granted, at this point WoW’s story line has much much more content than Destiny, Bungie has promised DLC’s  for the next 10 years.

This brings me to my next point: what everybody does after the storyline in Destiny. They do raids or strikes for a chance for legendary or exotic loot. This sounds similar to dungeon crawling in WoW where teams of people go into dungeons to defeat a massive boss in order to get rare items. In fact when described like that, it is exactly the same as Destiny’s raid system. Obviously there are some differences. In Destiny only 6 people can make up a team where in WoW you can have teams of 20 or more, but those are just ways to balance how challenging the game is (and could have to do with other things like server handling and rendering). Nevertheless the reason why many people play the game post-story is to obtain rare armor and level their player up to the cap or collect rare weapons making themselves more valuable to people playing raids.

The next similarity I find between Destiny and WoW is the common social area where people can meet up and prepare before going into a dungeon. There are numerous of these in WoW. Currently there is only one in Destiny, The Tower, but there has been speculation and leaked information that Bungie may be adding a second social place in an area called the Reef. Who knows if they will expand on the map and make more social areas for people to meet up in.

Finally I’ll talk about character classes. Destiny currently has 3 character classes all with different abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. Each character class then has two subclasses with skill and perk trees associated with it. This is not expanded quite to the depth of WoW, but if Destiny is to keep the interest of its players for the next 10 years I can see their player types and subclasses expanded drastically as the game progresses. I would not be surprised to see new character types, and there has already been discussion and leaked information on new subclasses for the existing characters.

So what do I see happening with Destiny. The current state of the game allows players to reach a level of 32. This is achieved by first getting you player to level 20. This is done by your basic experience getting methods: killing enemies, completing missions, completing bounties, etc. Once you reach level 20, a player can continue to level up by getting armor with a higher “light level”. Light level is just an attribute that armors have that can be upgraded so that the armor has more light. Typically if you wish to reach 32 you need upgraded exotic armor, or you need upgraded armor from the most recent raid “Crota’s End” or a combination of the two. This could be discouraging as more DLC’s come out though as new players will really have to strive and grind to reach the cap. This can create a market very similar to that of WoW where people begin making Microsoft Accounts for disposable email addresses, leveling up their characters in Destiny, and then selling them to the highest bidder. In reality I’m not sure why I haven’t done that yet.

So perhaps Destiny is not necessarily at the WoW status just yet, but I see it getting there in the future, and if Bungie continues on this path they might want to ask Blizzard for some insight.