“In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.”

The above is a relatively famous quote in the gaming scene, from Bungie game designer Jaime Griesemer. While Griesemer meant to convey that his team thought of the various set-pieces in the game as 30 second loops of varied and fun gameplay, each unique in their own right, this is not the message that most developers and gamers took from the quote. Instead, it seemed to speak of core gameplay mechanics, and the fact that as long as there are “30 seconds of fun” in the basic mechanics, then you’ve got a great game regardless of other factors.

Griesemer is no longer with Bungie, but the developers at the studio seem to have taken the misconception of his famous quote to heart with their newest game, Destiny. At its core, those oft-scrutinized “30 seconds of fun” are an absolute blast. The guns all feel right, the melee and grenade mechanics are just as satisfying as in the Halo series, the vertical mobility is liberating, and the entire game is built around these combat mechanics. However, unlike the Halo series, very little work seems to have been put into making anything else notable.

For one, the story is inexcusably weak. The player is never given any reason to care about the missions and, aside from one-off lines, is never given information on who the enemies are or why he/she is shooting at them. These enemies are almost all variations of the same type, and weapons are exactly as effective regardless of who you’re facing. The level design fares a little better, but levels within a planet (of which there are 4 in the game) all look and feel roughly the same. There are also only about 25 missions in the base game, each of which can be beaten in less than 30 minutes. Instead of a variety of 30 second gameplay loops, Destiny is the same loop, repeated over and over again in mildly different environments.

On its own, that doesn’t sound that bad. At least the game is fun, and since it only runs a little over 10 hours, the repetition isn’t a huge factor. But Destiny isn’t meant to be played through just once. Instead, Bungie has been pushing the “End Game Content” of Destiny, and the fact that they intend for players to spend hundreds of hours after they finish the game, completing bounties, getting new armor, and upgrading exotic weapons. Again, this isn’t a negative by itself; it’s hard to fault a game for having too much replay value, and this is essentially the same model that most MMORPGs use.

The problem is that, unlike most MMORPGS, there is practically no new “end-game content.” Instead, the game offers its rewards to players by giving them higher-level versions of the same missions that they’ve already played, and asks them to repeat these missions again and again and again and again for hundreds of hours, getting randomly lucky with weapon drops from time-to-time and accumulating mass amounts of certain items that are limited to only 2 per day.

Aside from the raid,  everything you will do in Destiny after you “complete” the story is something you’ve already done. And even if you are doing the raid on a weekly basis, at that point, what are you working toward? You’re gaining new weapons and armor, and upgrading those weapons and armor, but what is it helping you with? Aren’t you already facing the hardest challenge the game has to present you?

The unfortunate answer is that you’re doing it because you’re being psychologically tricked into doing it. Destiny is one of the biggest offenders out there when it comes to “skinner box gaming.” Very popular in mobile gaming, this is the practice of using the findings of B.F. Skinner to create games that compel players to keep playing and spending money for the tiniest of rewards.

In the mobile gaming world, this generally consists of giving a player a whole lot of rewards, progress, and “free” bonuses that speed up gameplay right up front. However, as time goes on, these rewards become fewer and farther between, and sometimes have a random element to them. This compels players to put in more and more time to get the same sought-after drip of a reward, and then offers them the chance to pay money to get past these new hurdles and earn rewards at a faster rate. Even though these “rewards” are usually meaningless accolades, the lower rate of reward registers as a type of loss for a lot of people.

Let’s look at how this applies to Destiny. Throughout your first playthrough of the “story,” you are constantly getting experience that allows you to level up and become more powerful. Even if you’re not getting great weapon or armor drops, you can at least subsist on a steady supply of experience and glimmer (money) to keep yourself growing in power. Then, you finish the game at level 20, and that progress stops dead in its tracks.

Level 20 is the game’s “level cap.” Many MMOs also have level caps, but they generally require the player to put in an exorbitant number of hours to reach them. Destiny changes things up by allowing the player to continue to grow in level past 20, but only by earning armor with “light” bonuses that help slowly push his or her level up further. You can eventually buy this armor, as well, but you have to have put in weeks of work to get to that point.

This is the exact same slowing of reward frequency that Skinner discovered to be effective. The player is so used to the satisfaction that comes with empowerment that simply seeing that level number tick up is a reward in and of itself. So the player will put in dozens more hours, repeating the same boring tasks again and again, just to change a number on the menu screen.

Unlike mobile games, Destiny does not monetize the ability to progress more quickly…at least not in such an obvious way. Instead, the raid, which is impossible to play without inviting your own friends, becomes the best way to progress at a high level. This incentivizes players to get their friends to buy the game, too, directly profiting Bungie. And then there are the “expansions.”

The first expansion, The Dark Below, was extraordinarily underwhelming when it came to content. Along with a number of new high-level weapons and armor (the better to keep you playing for), The Dark Below brought in only three new “story” missions, one (or two, on Playstation consoles) three-player strike(s), and a raid. All but one of these non-raid levels re-used locations that were already present and utilized in the primary campaign, and none of the enemies are new, except for a couple of re-skinned versions of foes that already existed in the vanilla game. And Bungie had the gall to charge $20 for it.

So why would people buy this? Well, if you were already at level 30 (the max “light” level you could achieve in the game before the expansion), the only way you could get the satisfaction of raising your level was to get new gear to replace your old stuff and level it up to 31/32. Also, the store vendors on the expansion sell armor that can raise a character to level 31, so the players who had committed hundreds of hours getting their character to level 30 before the expansion were now being outclassed by players who had barely touched the game after finishing the campaign, just because they bought the expansion.

Also, one of the main methods for leveling up your gear, playing the “Daily” mission for ascendant materials, started incorporating expansion-only levels every other day. So, if you still needed to level up your gear, and the daily mission just happened to be one that only expansion owners have access to, and you didn’t fork over $20 for a bunch of re-used game assets, you were unable to acquire materials that day. Effectively, this meant that the launch of the expansion halved the rate of growth for characters, unless they were willing to pay an extra $20 to keep the same rate of reward they previously had.

Starting to sound familiar?

So if Destiny is just the same type of repetitive, manipulative game as your standard “free-to-play” mobile game, why pay any attention to it at all? Well, it all comes back to that “30 seconds of fun.” Misconception or no, the idea that all a game needs is 30 seconds of extremely fun gameplay isn’t too far from the mark. I would argue that what it needs to be successful in the long run is the 30 seconds of fun, plus a clear goal to chase from start to finish. Destiny has both of these in spades.

It’s why, while I’ll probably stop as soon as an expansion I didn’t pre-purchase (with the Limited Edition) releases, I’m going to keep playing Destiny. There are new bounties every day to chase for experience, I always have more powerful weapons that I need to level, and at the end of the day, it’s still fun. It’s also extremely lazy, repetitive, and ideologically infuriating, but the fun factor often outweighs those negatives. And that’s ultimately what matters most.

But, um, please. Don’t buy Destiny.