This week marks the anniversary of Determinationa game that accidentally became my entire personality when it was launched in September 2014. I have loved it since the days of its alpha testing and I still love it, in the form of Fate 2. Sometimes it was hard to love, whether because of stumbling blocks in his live service offerings or his reckless property that led to years of creative turmoil and constant iteration. Perhaps the celebration of this huge milestone is somewhat muted in the wake of mass layoffs earlier this year and these massive changes, but that hasn’t stopped me from talking about it.
As part of the celebrations, Bungie gave away armor for all three. Determination‘s subclasses, which are pretty close to the first pieces of equipment we saw in the original game. Conceptual art. My Warlock, who has been with me since September 9, 2014, is currently sporting a look that felt annoyingly unattainable for ten years – he looks like I imagined him to look as a bright-eyed teenager.
Additionally, Bungie has added a new title to earn in-game to complete the occasion. Players who complete a few perfectly reasonable tasks (and one annoying one) can earn the title of Legend. I’m not a title hunter, having only earned one in the past, but given the ease and my love of DeterminationI’ve started tinkering with it. I should have it by this weekend. I’ll have fulfilled the slogan of the first game all these years later: “Become a legend.”
The objectives that must be completed to earn the title of Legend are, as expected, nostalgic. One of them requires you to fight enemies and search for loot engrams in the Skywatch area of the Cosmodrome, the very first destination in . Determination. It is a place I know like the back of my hand, having worked hard in my youth, and it is a place I rarely visit in Fate 2which is filled to the brim with more exciting locations and ongoing stories. In comparison, the Cosmodrome feels like a snapshot frozen in time. When I jump in there, I’m suddenly back in my school uniform, racing home after the last lesson to return to the game that would define my life for a decade. It’s nice to be back.
When I started the weekly Nightfall Strike (a mission meant to be played with a full fireteam and otherwise made more difficult by modifiers), it said “Cosmodrome” and I was left scratching my head trying to guess what level that could be. Eventually I felt a slight pang of trepidation when I realized I had to go back to the Devil’s Den. Determination‘s first blow, in a move that would be a damned coincidence if it wasn’t definitely intentional. The completion of the Devil’s Lair back in TK was the moment when Determination something clicked for me – we have been inseparable ever since. I know every single beat of this mission, so I go through it on autopilot, and when I did it for the first time this week, I was still in my D1-inspired anniversary armor, I felt the greatness of my decades of history and relationship to the game crashed over my body. I didn’t sob, but I did cry. It’s been such a long journey and I can’t believe that ten years later we’re still here, running Devil’s Lair ad nauseam.
This all brings me back to a time when it felt like Determination had a million things to prove, and I believed in its ability to do so. I had nothing but Bungie’s pedigree back then, and I grew up eating that crap. That seems a lot harder to do, given the increasingly precarious position Bungie is in these days, and the tide has turned against live service games like. Fate 2. I still hope that it can weather the storm, if only because despite everything Determination still means the world to me. I don’t know if I would be lost without it, but I can’t imagine my life or career without it either.
As Fate 2 stares into the barrel of another Uncertain yearsAnd reinvents itself and its formula againI’m just glad to have been here at all, to have succumbed to the mysticism of the first game, to have plumbed the depths of the Moon’s Hellmouth, to have defeated countless Hive Kings and Gods, to have avenged characters who have transcended their simplistic caricatures, to have befriended former enemies, to have explored and mastered the darkness, and to have created countless memories with cherished friends along the way. And to have played a small part in this wild, unfathomable, and highly inconsistent journey. That journey began ten years ago in this little corner of ancient Russia, and look where we’ve gone since then.
