First Impression: Destiny (Playstation 4)

This is the 96th instalment of our first impression video series. Today, we are not playing Destiny for the first time.

Welcome to the 96th instalment of our first impression video series. Today, we are not playing the Playstation 4 game, Destiny for the first time. You can check out the video directly on YouTube or in the embed below:

So, we have finally made it to the Playstation 4 era in these first impression video’s. While I was excited to finally be playing more modern games, I am definitely not off to a good start. In this video, all I show is an error message that I got attempting to play. While it is not necessarily visually stunning, I felt that it also amounts to a picture that says a thousand words.

On my end, I bought the physical game, inserted it into the Playstation 4, downloaded and installed a 32GB update file followed up by an 8GB update file. After it installed, the game attempted to connect to the Bungie web servers. The result is what you see above.

Naturally, like your average consumer, I attempted to trouble shoot this problem. First, I looked around on various web documentation to see if this game is still functional today. All the documentation I saw said that this game is still playable.

The next question is whether or not I have an internet connection at all. First, I opened up the consoles web browser and started browsing the web. I was successful in browsing both a Google web search and was also successful in browsing YouTube. So, it was clear that I had an internet connection.

In the event that it was only the browser that functioned, I also took the liberty of conducting an internet connection test using the Playstation 4 utility. The test was successful and I ended up having a very solid high speed internet connection. As a result, I can successfully rule out that the connection issue was not on my end.

This leaves the Bungie servers which this game attempts to connect to. On two separate days, I attempted to connect to the servers. In both days, the error persisted. At this point, I felt that I have done everything that would be expected from a consumer to get this game to run.

For those of you who think that I should just play in some sort of offline only mode, that is not an option for Destiny. This is an online only game with no option to play offline. You just have the intro splash screen and an invitation to press the cross button to continue (at which point, the game attempts to connect and errors out).

So, I can safely conclude that this game is, indeed, broken from my perspective and I am all too happy to rate this a “0%”, only the second game that has ever received such a rating in the history of Freezenet.

As I mentioned in the video, this is definitely a pitfall to the whole “video game as a service” style of game. Eventually, the servers are going offline and, as a result, the game itself is no longer functional. So, this video also serves as a warning to anyone thinking of playing this game, at least, on the PS4, because you run the risk of what I encountered – that the game is quite literally broken and will not boot. So, feel free to treat this as a PSA that if you do try playing this game on a PS4, it is buyer beware as you very likely will run into this exact problem as I did with no real viable solution to be had.

Again, not the start to the PS4 gaming experience I was expecting, but I will be trying other games and not letting this rocky start deter me.

This video is part of our first impression video series. Below is a list of 50 of the previously made first impression video’s we’ve made in the past: