Correspondence From Limbo

The House of Devils wears Prada

I’ve recently gotten back into Destiny 2 in preparation for its new major new expansion, and I’ve been having a lovely time. Part of that is down to something that may sound surprising; dressing up. Hear me out, I know it sounds weird. But dressing up is an incredibly important part of playing. Everyone, or at least everyone’s parents, has stories about them dressing up as a fireman or an astronaut or a princess when they were younger. Dressing up and assuming a new character or identity is incredibly fun, and, as an experience, can often be transformational. As former videogames critic, and current boardgames reviewer, Matt Lees stated in his video on Dark Souls 3, dressing up is an incredibly important part of playing.

But how does this relate to Destiny 2? Well, Destiny 2 is a game that focuses heavily on loot. You do activities to unlock and collect new guns or armour or cloaks or armbands. You can then equip these items to confer new abilities upon your player character, your guardian, and change their look. So far, so videogamey. But where Destiny 2 stands out from other videogames is that it actively encourages players to engage with the clothes that their character wears, to take an interest dressing up.

There are multiple ways that the game does this. For example, certain weapons and armour pieces are “exotic”; incredibly rare items with special abilities that can change certain aspects of the game experience. You might have a helmet that upgrades your mini-map, or gloves that give you an over-shield when you kill an enemy in melee. And, when you get these ultra-rare items, it seems like a shame when the rest of your outfit doesn’t match. So you start playing around with how your armour looks, leading us to the second way the game encourages the player to think about their fashion choices; shaders. Destiny 2 is a game that requires characters to spend at least a short amount of time in mismatched armour. This has been true in many games over the years, from World of Warcraft to Dragon Age. But through the use of shaders, players can change the colour of their equipment, meaning that you don’t have to worry about your new yellow boots clashing with your blue gloves, or your silver chest plate not being the same colour as your luminous green trousers. You can just change their colour until you find something that looks cool. And, since these shaders can be changed at any time, and can be routinely discovered through playing the game, you aren’t really left with an excuse to not experiment with how you look.

So Destiny’s developers, Bungie, have created a game where one of the main aims of the game, aside from killing aliens or completing quests, is to look cool. And it seems that the community has taken to this like a fish to water; one of the more popular Destiny forums is r/DestinyFashion on Reddit, where players post pictures of their in-game outfits alongside comments on how to replicate them. In the short time that I have returned to Destiny, this subreddit has become one of my favourite places online.

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I’ve spent a fair amount of time these past few weeks trying to find the perfect accessory for my guardian. It isn’t a new cloak or a new pair of trousers, but instead a specific gun.

The Last Word.

In the world of Destiny, it’s a weapon that has a long and storied history, stretching back hundreds of years. A history that involves fallen heroes, brave gunslingers, Darkness and Light. But outside of that universe? It’s just a cool revolver. It has several perks that give you bonuses if you fire the gun without aiming down its sights, bringing to mind images of outlaws and sheriffs drawing their weapons in shoot outs at high noon on a long, sandy highstreet. 

I have a bit of a love of cowboys and gunslingers. I don’t know why. I’m not very outdoorsy and I don’t like guns. But I still have a strange fascination with westerns. I’ve watched Firefly, Dead Wood, Cowboy Bebop, Justified, My Darling Clementine and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Hell, I decided to attempt to unlock The Last Word after watching the western-inspired The Mandalorian.

But finding this gun wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.

There are some exotics that you can’t just find, that are instead the reward for completing specific quest lines. And the quest to unlock The Last Word, The Draw, is incredibly long and complicated. Most exotic quests are, but this one had several challenges. One of its steps involved getting kills in Destiny’s player versus player mode The Crucible. On the surface this step is simple; you have a bar that you need to fill, scoring kills nets you 2 percent. Easy. But the step is more complicated than it seemed. Every time you died in The Crucible you would lose 1 percent of progress. And if you are bad at PVP, like I am, well then you are going to lose any progress that you’ve made almost as soon as you have made it. 

I spent a long time on this step of the quest. 

But why would I do subject myself to a part of the game that I wasn’t especially good at, and didn’t even enjoy that much? Well, because of fashion. I wanted to make a cool space-gunslinger, and I thought that having a specific weapon would make that idea a reality.

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For one of Destiny’s strengths is recognising when it is a videogame. Almost all the exotics that you find are items that used to belong to other, non-playable guardians, and lots of them can be found just as a random loot drop from an ordinary enemy. And these legendary items only became legendary because their old owner will have worn them while killing aliens. They have their own backgrounds and legends, one that is added to by your character and, by extension, you. By making dressing up an important part of the game experience, by starting new players in crappy armour and challenging them to make it cool, by using mechanics to make players think about how their character looks, Destiny 2 allows players to role play as the “legends” that made up so many of its initial marketing strategy.

Dressing up allows us to assume new identities and personalities. As Lees explained in his video, putting on costumes can give us a sort of visual shorthand when assuming different roles, no matter if they are noble, evil or even silly. It gives us another way to express ourselves.

Destiny 2 is a game that recognizes this. Underneath all the complicated lore, shooting mechanics and exploration, it is a game about looking cool, a game about choosing the perfect outfit to show off to your friends and to strangers. It is a game where dressing up as a space cowboy or deciding to spend a frankly irresponsible amount of time looking for a specific item are just as valid as completing missions or dueling others in PVP. It is a game where sometimes making your own fun is encouraged, especially if the end result is a story you can share and an outfit you can show off. And, honestly? That might be the best part of the game.