Destiny: Rising has taken the Destiny community by storm, as it arrived just as Destiny 2 is going through a rough patch.
But, as I wrote previously, the game was always going to hit a ‘gacha wall’ that would, inevitably, turn some Destiny fans off. And yet, a month after release, it seems that wall isn’t as aggressive as I initially thought it would be.
And that’s partially due to a special modifier NetEase has added to the game: Fair Play.
Fair Play restricts a few things, but its most important feature is that it strips away much of the Talent Tree for Rising’s characters in certain activities – to the delight of players and creators.
Talent Tree upgrades are extremely powerful in Rising, but you can only upgrade a character’s Talent Tree by getting duplicate drops of them in the gacha pull. And the most consistent way to get additional pulls is to spend real-world money.
The Fair Play modifier shows up in a few different places in Rising, and you can find it regularly in PvP modes like Shifting Gates. But the real test case for Fair Play was in Rising’s first raid, Onslaught.
Under Fair Play, players’ favourite characters were forced into their most basic forms. Without their additional Talent bonuses, characters miss out on entire passives, many of which give boons like extra ability uses.
For example: Estela is a very powerful character that has some difficulty staying alive in hard content. But she can also gain a powerful ability that lets her lifesteal from enemies, and getting that duplicate is a huge grind if you’re unwilling to spend some cash. So removing her talents from the raid race evens out the playing field between Destiny: Rising’s big spenders and free-to-play players.
Destiny: Rising is still a gacha game, and gacha games are about encouraging players to spend money – hence why Estela is a limited-time character. Still, the Fair Play modifier is a great step to make Rising seem evened out for casual players. And it absolutely makes the game’s competitive moments more fair, though there’s still a little bit of a smoke and mirrors here.
In Destiny 2, these skill-based competitions are the reason many of us login to play. For my fireteam, all of the time we spend grinding is to better serve the next raid race or endgame piece of content. If it’s not fair, why play the game at all?
Rising is inherently different there. The raid is only a piece of Rising’s puzzle (albeit a pretty fun one), not the end goal. The game’s main focus is leveling up multiple characters in order to complete various activities that give you rare material.
Other critical endgame activities, like The Expanse and Calamity Ops, do not have Fair Play. And many of the high level materials you need to progress your characters are locked behind not only completing those activities, but completing them quickly.
Basically: there are plenty of reasons to want to spend money for an advantage elsewhere in the game.
Destiny: Rising’s Fair Play modifier is a boon for players, and gives a real chance to jump in and compete even if they don’t min-max their time or spend their real-life dollars. But it’s a mistake to suggest that Rising’s endgame is entirely casual player friendly – though you can absolutely get some sweet bragging rights in Destiny: Rising without paying a dime.
But if you really want to progress your account? You’re gonna need to get those Talent Trees up for all the non-Fair Play activities.
