Destiny: Rising, the upcoming mobile game, highlights how great Destiny used to be

Destiny is an old enough franchise to have gone through multiple eras. There were the early days of the original Destiny, when the game was a true grindfest. And then there’s the more modern Destiny 2, which has made a lot of moves to be friendly toward players’ time while still allowing for a bit of loot pursuit. Destiny: Rising — the new mobile title from NetEase Games — feels like a return to that original Destiny vibe. Polygon got an early look at the game, and while it’s still in a closed alpha state, Destiny: Rising shows off why Destiny first hooked so many players, and why Rising will struggle to reach that peak.

To just get it out of the way, Destiny: Rising is a gacha game. It’s Genshin Impact set in the universe of Destiny. There’s a campaign, strikes, bounties, a pretty sweet roguelite mode, and even a raid-adjacent activity. But most importantly, there are playable characters to gamble for.

These characters, along with their weapons, take a lot of time to collect and improve. And while the grind itself can be tedious, it reminds me of how the original Destiny used to approach its grind, where single, rare items enhanced your power so much that they could make or break your ability to join a group of other players and complete a raid.

Destiny 2 is far more generous with its loot than the original game, and Bungie is constantly releasing incredible new weapons to grind for, all of which add a fraction of a percentile point to your power. This makes the grind rewarding for sickos like me, but not necessary for even slightly more casual players. 

I like this modern version of Destiny, which Bungie has been angling toward for the past five or six years. As a longtime player and now as a dad, it’s nice to log on with my friends, clear a couple of dungeons a week during our lunch hours, and know I’ll walk away with the items I want relatively quickly.

But there are two wolves in me when it comes to Destiny, and one of them misses how shitty it used to be. I miss feeling like I had a real edge when I went through the difficult process to get Black Spindle in Destiny, an Exotic only available through a timed mission once every few weeks. I even liked the desperate hunt for Gjallarhorn, and the power I felt once I had it. The grind to power up was bad, but it compelled me to consume the game at a ravenous pace — a time I still look back on fondly. And while it’s not the same, the gacha element of Rising takes me back to that time.

Destiny activities mesh with the gacha elements shockingly well, and I’ve had a good deal of fun with Destiny: Rising in my five or six hours of playtime. I’m excited to work through the story a little more each day, and each pull for a new character is as exciting as it was during my brief love affair with Genshin Impact.

But it’s the loot investment that really makes it feel like Destiny, even if it takes a different shape. Sure, when I play Rising I’m grinding for great rolls — but I’m also investing heaps of currencies into weapons and characters to power them up and make them stronger.

As for the financials, I feel like I could reasonably play the release version (whenever it officially launches, that is) of Rising without spending a dime. I have multiple rare characters after logging in for several days in a row, all without buying anything from the shop. But given that players are unable to access the shop to see prices during the alpha, it’s hard to tell exactly how costly Rising could become in the future.

But it’s the baseline ability to pay your way past the grind that’ll ultimately be the thing that pulls me away from Destiny: Rising. It’s a game where the characters and weapons you invest in make a huge difference, and can be rare as hell. Where I can show up in Haven sporting a fully leveled-up Mythic character and make all the new players stop and go ooooh, like the little aliens from Toy Story. The problem is that unlike similar moments I’ve had in Destiny, nobody will ever know if my character is decked out because I’ve played for thousands of hours or because I pulled out my credit card. 

When I load into a strike and the sickest new character leaps out and blasts through a wave of Fallen, leaving me in the dust, that power won’t necessarily feel earned. It won’t feel like they’re just lucky the way I do when I see a new raid Exotic the first weekend. It’ll feel like that person is having more fun because they have deeper pockets. And for a loot game like Destiny, that’s a hard pill to swallow. 

That’s not to say that everything is pay-to-win in Destiny: Rising, nor that players won’t be able to express high levels of skill or earn incredible new tools by playing completely for free. But it creates an itch in my mind that will be impossible to ignore.

Completing the Vow of the Disciple raid on Contest difficulty in Destiny 2 is one of my favorite gaming memories and achievements. And I was fortunate enough to get Lubrae’s Ruin to drop that first night, a Legendary glaive that looks absolutely wild and is the same weapon used by the raid’s villain, Rhulk. As I was getting ready for bed the night we finished the raid, I stood in the Tower with the glaive resting on my back, and dozens of players who I didn’t know came up to look at it. It’s one of my favorite memories in Destiny 2. But that moment can’t exist without caveats in Destiny: Rising. Because even if I never spend a dime, even if all those little Toy Story aliens show up to ogle at my cool new character, I’ll always wonder how much faster I could’ve earned it had I just forked over some cash.