As part of the Destiny beta currently underway, Bungie remade their company app as the Destiny Companion app, a tool for Destiny players to manage their gear, track their bounties, track their stats, and more. I have been playing the game with the app over the past week, and I have to say that I like what they’re doing with it.
Right now, there are four major functions in the Destiny Companion app. There’s the Legend area, where you manage your Guardians. There’s also the Grimoire, where information about the game collects. Then there’s the Tower map, useful for finding the vendor you need. Lastly, there’s a Forums area for keeping up with player discussions. There are also standard minor functions like a newsfeed, messaging function, and player search.
In function, Bungie once did something similar with Halo, but here things are obviously done to a higher graphical polish, even in the beta — a sign of improved smartphone technology. The full character renders are impressively done. The real-time updates of gear are useful, though for the beta at least they serve a limited practical purpose. Once the full game is released and character inventories and task lists are longer, I can see myself consulting the app more and more.
The Grimoire is also a great idea to put in the app. I’m much more likely to browse it on my phone than I would in-game. There seems to be a lot of missing content here right now, but when it’s fully built I can see myself casually reading it. Likewise with the Tower map; with any luck, this section will eventually become an area with more maps of every area when the final version goes live.
I would love to see some built-in Tower functions here. For example, if I could grab my phone and access the Cryptarch to unencode an engram from the ground, or from orbit — anything to skip the long load times that the Tower seems to sometimes suffer — just to unlock my new gun, that would be great Likewise, the ability to send or trade weapons from the app would be helpful. I think that these would be great tools that would encourage players to use the app while not putting those who don’t have the app at some sort of disadvantage.
As this is just a beta, I am not going to assign a score to the Destiny Companion app. However, there are many things about the Destiny beta which suggest that Bungie has a winning game here, and the Destiny Companion app is more evidence to show that. I suspect it will be living on my smartphone for a long time to come.
The Destiny Companion app is available on iTunes and Google Play.
