I dunno, I've got 4000 hours between D1 and D2 and I'm still not sure if I like the game to be honest. I'll check in again in another thous.
Sarcasm aside, Destiny has probably been the biggest turnaround from disinterest to an actual reason I still play video games. I can remember me and a battlefield buddy having to justify the crap out of D1 when it first came out because we were lukewarm on the alpha and beta gameplay. The content seemed barebones, but battlefield was getting stale, and eventually it came to "well there ain't nothing else out, and we can get a good 10-15 hours out of it" I traded in Killzone Shadowfall and something else I can't remember and walked out of Gamestop with it for like $9 on launch day. We got about 15 hours and both dropped of the game right there. There wasn't endgame content for 2 players to do, we didn't really know what endgame was, and no one knew what a Raid was at the time. This was towards the beginning of college for me as well and without going into details, the first year of college for me also coincided with the start of some depression related issues.
Then some randoms on my friends list invited me to do Vault of Glass because they needed a sixth and had seen me playing the game. I didn't even really know these people, they were mostly friend adds from when I was an events manager on a trophy hunting website and was coordinating events. We were even the first team to wind up popping platinum trophies in Destiny. The promise of raiding brought my buddy I initally bought the game with back into the fold too. We started grinding out our exotic collections and getting the rolls on stuff we wanted to prepare for the next DLC. Throughout Destiny 1 they were my team, we had a roster, everyone planned around work schedules so we could do Raids with certain people before other people got home so we could slot everyone in. Destiny Tuesday was like a holiday. We're all still friends now though most of them have since stopped with Destiny, primarily because of D2Y1 being such a misfire. Sometimes you just can't win people back. But because of them I ended up putting over a thousand hours into games like Monster Hunter and a couple hundred into The Division. I had been playing Battlefield with some internet acquaintances since BC2, but it was always sort of a "they invited whoever was online" type of mass friends list. I didn't know names. We didn't talk life. It was usernames and call outs, with your standard bitching and moaning in-between. All my Destiny buddies, we all know each others names, about each others lives. We have running inside jokes, we can play casually and just joke around. I couldn't explain in words why Destiny played out different than other games socially, even other coop games, but I think alot of really has to do with the absolute staying power Destiny has.
Destiny is a social platform for me. I take breaks from Destiny, often, I basically didn't play season of the drifter, and took 3 weeks off when cross-save was announced so my friends and I could build PCs. There's been weeks I don't get a chance to do anything because of work. But I know my Destiny friends are always in our group PSN chat, and now on Discord. I'm actually able to go onto LFG chats and banter with people these days. Destiny is such a big fucking deal to me. I can sit and complain endlessly about terrible Gambit and Crucible are, but in the end, I'd rather play a round of Gambit than anything else these days. It's why every time I see people making their big nonsensical shitposts about the game across the internet, I just think, "It's the best 6/10 I've ever played, and I hope you find yours one day"
Here's to hoping my Crown of Sorrows jacket arrives here soon.
