Bungie won't admit it, but Destiny is obviously a direct sequel to Sonic Team's 2000 Dreamcast hit, Phantasy Star Online (see reddit user KytorIndustries' conclusive infographic from 2014). So, with Destiny 2 out, it's important to look back at the features of Destiny's predecessor that still, for no reason at all, aren't in Destiny.
Feed-able, Evolve-able Shoulder-Bots
Destiny had a good start with retaining the shoulder bots from PSO, but they were heavily simplified. You couldn't feed them any of your unwanted trash items, and they almost never evolved into something different. There was that one time they all evolved from Peter Dinklage into Nolan North, but that only happened once.
In Phantasy Star Online, your shoulder-bot could evolve at least twice, and if you fed it the exact right things on the exact right character, they'd evolve into rare forms. And if you messed up by feeding it just one wrong item, you'd have to completely start over on a new one! How does Destiny not have this yet? Okay, maybe not the last part, but the rest of it, for sure.
Look at those cute li’l guys! They’d look cooler if I hadn’t accidentally fed them a monomate
Body Proportion Sliders
Phantasy Star Online (2000) had more body-type inclusivity in its character creation than Destiny (2014). I could be the tall, skinny, effeminate elf-boy in high heels that I'd always dreamed of being, or I could be the average height, average weight, boring man (that just now at the age of 27 worked up the courage to wear a single decorative ring) that I actually am.
In Destiny, all I can be is very fit and very boring. Everyone has the same body, which I guess makes sense in a sci-fi world that you just know has been through at least one or two troublesome eugenics phases in its lifetime, but come on.
I don’t have a joke for this. This was just really great.
Dual Wielding
What kind of self-respecting power fantasy doesn't have dual wielding? Like, what's even the point? One handcannon? One sword? Why even bother?
Chairs
No one likes sitting on the ground. It's a fact. It's hard and it's not ergonomic and there are bugs there. PSO had floating chairs that ballooned out from your character's behind like a comfortable airbag protecting you from a butt-on collision with the nasty ground. Somehow, this hasn’t become an industry standard.
Groundbreaking.
Enemy-Specific Rare Drops & Rare Enemies
Okay, this one is sort of real. Certain rare weapons in PSO would only drop from particular creatures, so you could essentially focus-farm for specific loot by doing missions that contained a lot of the enemy type that you needed.
It's nice to just be able to do whatever you want and have the same loot drops in Destiny, I guess, but unique enemy drop tables allow for a lot of minor goals to work toward, which helped give each play session at endgame a greater, more specific purpose.
On top of that, there were rare versions of enemies that then on top of that had a chance to drop even rarer loot! Cascades of delicious RNG fountains all the way down!
Here, I'll even help you out on this one: so you've got Hobgoblins in Destiny, right? Well, okay, so just put in a 1-in-1,000 chance that a Hobgoblin will instead spawn as a Cobgoblin; instead of a creative and clever sci-fi interpretation of a classic fantasy monster that pays tasteful homage to the roots of the genre itself, it'll be a big ear of corn. And it'll have a 1-in-100 chance of dropping a really good corn gun or something.
That one's free, Bungie. But I am available for paid consultation.
I am also available for art commissions
A Completely Unexplained Type-ID System that Determines What Drops Your Character Gets
When you created a character in Phantasy Star Online, your character would be randomly assigned a color-based Type-ID. This would put a cool little colored emblem on your character and would do apparently nothing else.
Oh, wait, actually it wasn't random at all, it was based on your character's name, and it had a huge effect on the types of equipment that would drop for your character.
So despite how pumped I was that my magic-wielding Fomar character got the "Skyly" Type-ID (who doesn't love sky blue, come on), it turned out that my sweet blue emblem was the reason that I found almost exclusively swords that I couldn't use on that character.
It was fun because there was no way to know that it did anything unless you read about it online, and it was unchangeable once your character was made. It encouraged trading with other people because everyone got different drops that their character couldn’t use! I cannot fathom why Destiny would fail to include such a scrutable, intuitive, and player-friendly system.
So, Bungie, we get it. You want to stand out from your predecessors and do new things. That makes sense. But there's no reason to abandon so many great features from the game that you definitely, definitely based your game on, despite the fact that you told my friend who visited your office otherwise.
Except, maybe, the Type-IDs. You can abandon that one.
