Destiny: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly !!!!
Destiny: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly !!!!
Well the Beta is officially done, and after playing it for the entire 9 days it was on Playstation; I have a few comments of what I think is great about the game and what desperately needs to be tweaked before release.
First off the play mechanics are tight, if you've played a lot of Halo in the past, then you were right at home playing Destiny, now I've heard some people complain about the auto targeting, and reticle; I had no issues, and never really had to tweak the sensitivity of the controls.
Public Events are a lot of fun, but there were times when it came to loot; I really didn't receive anything spectacular for taking down another Devil Walker, hell I've taken down one by my lonesome self and just got recognition for the deed. The bounties seamed to give you better loot if sucessful.
As for Saturday's very hyped event; I'm going to say outright, that I was scratching my head and saying "Is that all there is to do???", literally did the Moon mission with two other people in under 30 minutes, if there was something that was to take place on the Tower, it never occurred, the place was empty, the only thing different, was the huge doors in front were open, so I went looking around and found one vendor, and another Ghost to revive, but that was it; the only thing that I appreciated out of the whole event was gaining a better sniper rifle, otherwise I played some Iron Banner for a little while, but eventually got sick of participating.
Now here are some areas that scare me about the overall quality of Destiny; I read in an article that was published on IGN, that there will be only 4 planets to explore and a total of 32 missions, 23 of which are strike; also everyone was right when they asked is Old Russia the only area on Earth to explore, guess what folks?? it is, unless Bungie decides to create new areas through DLC; the same applies to other planets, only one huge area to explore.
I've heard major complaints of the games radar, I myself call it a guestamation gauge; because it's not entirely accurate, when I see a blip, I just know that I need to pay attention to that particular direction; a mini-map would be useful in story mode, hell it could be displayed when you press the touch pad of the controller.
Free Roaming can be a great way to level up your character; however I found most of the missions extremely repetitive; most of them were kill a shit load of enemies, or kill some enemies and find stuff on their person; but after awhile it gets boring.
I wish Bungie would seriously change their minds of 3 man fire teams, let alone penalize a player trying to do a mission (The Devil's Lair for instance) that they are not allowed to do it; without the help of two other players, it's fine if your able to have two friends tag along; however I wanted to do it, but no one that I knew was online, so of course the game squads you up with two complete strangers, now you may get lucky and they are decent players, or you wind up with two idiots, that are do busy running around performing melee attacks on each other, or running in front of your line of fire; or better yet, consistently dying, that I have to run over and revive the dumb SOB.
Why the hell can't we just do the mission ourselves??? if I die, then hey I have to start over, but let that be my decision to make, also when I complete a mission, allow me to decide whether I want to leave the area or not; instead of a 30 second timer counting down and pulling me out of the game, maybe I want to look around a little more.
Spaceships & Sparrows; I'm sorry but unless there's an actual use for upgrading to a different class spaceship, other than cosmetic looks; who the f@#$ cares; I rather use the money towards weapons & armor; speaking of which, is Bungie going to force you the player to participate in Crucible Events in order to obtain certain items??? because it seams this game is really focusing on those types of events, than actual story missions, and while the MP aspect of Destiny was decent, it certainly wasn't spectacular, doing Control on the Moon, seriously needs to be tweaked, either reduce the damage of the vehicles or take them out entirely, and the balancing of teams needs to be addressed as well.
Don't get me wrong this isn't a rant; I think the game is fun and with a lot of potential; hell it's been boughten for both the PS4 & XB1 (my brother hates Sony controllers); just writing down a few things that I expressed to Bungie; but hey I would love to hear other people's comments, what do you love about Destiny??, did your opinion change after playing the Beta??? what don't you like about the game??? what do you think needs to tweaked or fixed, or do you thing the game is perfect as is???
There's going to be 32 story missions, then 15 strikes to do. I'm a little worried about the replay value. The one story mission on the moon wasn't bad to do, but most of the story missions we had on Earth were pretty dull. And if the strikes are going to be mostly like Devil's Lair with just 2 bosses, no loot and only take an hour I'm not sure how much I wanna do that.
I'm also a little disappointed that I've already explored 50% of the game since each planet only get 1 map and we got to explore Earth and the moon. If we get 32 story missions that's 8 per planet, we're gonna be reusing the same areas over and over, and then over again for the strikes.
I liked the radar in the PvP. It makes it easier when I'm sitting in a corner with my shotgun, I just have to watch it to know what direction to look. Based on what we had in the beta, most of the maps are based around buildings and hallways, so the radar is more than enough to let you know what door to look at.
I don't know. I see this as an FPS co-op loot collecting game and I'm reminded that the new Borderlands drops only a month after Destiny does. If I don't have any real interest in the PvP, I can only wonder if the content in Destiny will be vast and interesting enough to stay fun after a month.
I found a real interesting read tonight on Gameformers website, basically going into much furhter detail with concerns over the game; here is the link to that article:
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2014/07/28/to-the-moon-an...
At first I didn’t like the crucible. Everyone is running around with auto rifles doing BF4/CoD Spray-and-pray. If I use the auto rifle I would do OK. The problem is that I love the scout rifle. It reminds me of the DMR in Halo. So I changed me strategy. Instead of blindly running from zone to zone, I made sure to always put myself in good positions with as much distance to the enemy as possible. The scout rifle has much better range then the auto rifle. It changed everything for me. My KDR changed from 0.5 to 2.5-3.0. In the last 5 games before beta ended I had 3.47 KDR with the Scout Rifle.
In every crucible game, your armor + weapons get leveled out. That means that every auto rifle has the same amount of damage over the same amount of time. A white auto rifle with 33 in attack will do the same amount of damage as a green one with 62 in attack in the same amount of time. The same goes for scout rifle vs scout rifle, shotgun vs shotgun and so on. The only place where armor and level matters, is in Iron Banner. Here you have to bring your best gear to win.
Regarding the radar in Destiny vs e.g. Halo. I actually like the radar in Destiny. In halo I preferred games without radar.
I too found the moon mission boring. 3 shots from my golden gun and the boss was dead. BUT remember it was a level 6 mission. In the final version of Destiny, you would properly do the mission with your Titan/Warlock/Hunter at level 5 or 6 and weapons with attack level around 30-35.
Here are my tips for Crucible:
The most important thing first: NEVER ever stand still when you are up against someone with an auto rifle. They will kill you in 1-2 sec. Move randomly from side to side while shooting them in the head.
If you choose auto rifle and shotgun, just jump right in, but if you choose scout rifle, I would advise you to go practice. Go explore on earth and try to take out enemies with as few shots as possible (headshot). Go up against Fallen Captains or higher.
Save your super on First Light/Moon. Use it against the Interceptor (which Bungie says is getting a nerf), Pike and Turrets. The sniper rifle is very good on First Light/Moon. You can kill the driver in the Interceptor with your sniper. You can also do it with your scout rifle, but it will take 2-3 headshots.
On Venus/Shores of time you can find a very good spot to “camp” with your scout rifle. If you and another team m8 stand around to corner with zone C on your left and facing zone B, you can shoot at enemies in zone B and still defend zone C. The rest of your team can concentrate their firepower on zone A and get support from you on zone B.
Some advice I have seen a lot, is to keep your team together, but I don’t agree on that. It only results in to large groups running around in circles. Usually resulting in almost equal scores between the two teams (something like 20.000 vs 18.000 points).
Hope to see you on the battlefield 9/9.
This is partly correct. Yes, the attack and armor ratings are leveled. However, the other stats on your weapons do still matter. This means things like impact, rate of fire, stability and reload all come into play when it comes to how a weapon performs. Also, if you have a green weapon or better, your weapon "perks" will also play a role in how the weapon functions. In other words, not all weapons were created equal...lol
True. But if you take a white weapon with the same impact and rate of fire as a green weapon, it will not matter what attack it has. They will perform the same in crucible. My point is that you don't have to be level 8 with a green weapon to play the crucible. You will do just fine with at level 4-6 with a good white weapon.
Green weapon perks has effect, but not perks that change your weapons impact and attack. My Jigoku SR3-SL has the "Luck in the camber" perk which is "one random bullet in the magazine causes considerable bonus damage". It has effect on co-op missions/explorer, but not in the crucible.
If I should point out something that makes the game unbalanced, it would be something like the Komarov 3.0b gauntlets. It gives me extreme fast reload and it helps me a lot in the game. I'm not saying that the game is perfect. It still needs a lot of adjusting, but it's not as bad as most people say. Remember that Bungie can nerf/buff gear on the fly without patching the game.
I find it hard to believe the armor and weapons are balanced out. I was getting mowed down in 1 shot with the shotgun, but it would take me 3-4 shots.
Could it be that you are using a shotgun with high fire rate and fast reload? Usually that means low damage/shot. If you combine that with range, you have to be really close to do real damage. For me a slow fire rate with high damage works best. I can get a one shot kill, but I have to get really close. 10 steps away and it hardly do any damage.
I also kind of feel like people are being a little too hard on the Beta content. You know what, it's a Beta! I think for a Beta, we got a lot of content, plus we got our hands on the game as a sneak peek.
Bungie has flat-out stated they do not want to spoil too much of the game and really want us to find and discover things for ourselves. I'm not expecting Skyrim size maps, but I think we'll have enough to keep us busy.
Also, the nature of games where you are continuously looking for that next piece of sweet loot does involve a lot of repetition and farming of previously played areas. Some folks will not like it and others will enjoy this type of activity. This is what allows people to make their characters unique.
As for Saturday's "event", it was more like Bungie wanting as many people online as possible to stress test the game. I think they opened up the Moon and the Iron Banner as a way to give us a little treat for showing up. I don't think it was meant as anything more than a way to get people get online and play at the same time.
Agreed
Agreed. The beta is for stress testing and bug finding. If all the basics in the game holds water, it will be a great game. It's to late for Bungie to make big changes, but most complains I hear, is things that can be changed on the fly without patching the game (like nerfing the interceptor).
Except it's not really. A beta gives you access to the game, they want you to play it, they want you to break it and see what's wrong and what needs fixing. Blacklight Retribution on PS4 for the last 2 months was a beta. Everything was open, they wanted us to explore and use and do as much as we could to see what they needed to do. World of Tanks back on the 360 IIRC is still in beta. Once again, access to everything and they want people to play as much as possible and break shit. Most of what consoles get are demos. The difference here is, a demo doesn't give them the leeway of a beta. For example if you don't like the UI layout or how vehicles handle people can always say "Oh, it's just a beta" and assume it'll just get fixed. But if it's a demo, that's generally accepted to be the final version so if you don't like something there, it could turn you off the sale.
We're getting 4 Borderlands sized maps. I'm sure most of us have played that game. Remember how long it took to learn where things were on those maps? Not all that long when you're doing missions all over them and some of them even loaded into new fairly large dungeons. If Destiny has 32 campaign missions and 4 planets, that's probably 8 per mission. We're going to explore every inch of those maps multiple times fairly quickly.
And keep in mind, the level cap is 20 and they're also trying to balance weapons for PvP. It doesn't seem likely that we'll be grinding on the same boss 30+ times to get the unique legendary gun he has that shoots homing rockets. He's going to drop an assault rifle or shotgun with the same damage and stats as the one you already got, just the abilities of it might be different.
But I don't think it will be long til we figure out which are the needed abilities. I had a shotgun that fired in full auto. Did the exact same damage still, but let me fire 2 rounds in the time it used to take to fire 1. It really doesn't matter if the other guys shotgun gives him grenade cooldown for melee strikes or if the last round in the magazine speeds up reloading, my gun lets me do double the damage of his, I'm going to win every engagement with him. So once you have the auto rifle or sniper with the ability you want, what's the point in grinding for more? The weapons don't have random stats, there's zero chance of getting a better one.
Yes, in the traditional sense it's not the type of Beta that's open for weeks or months. What we saw with the Destiny beta is essentially what we'll be getting and I don't expect any major changes. I do expect tweaks to weapons and maps and the like, but people shouldn't be expecting Bungie to be able to redo major portions of the game.
I mean I'd love for Auto Rifles to be toned down a little bit in PvP or at least give us a little more shielding so it doesn't feel like I don't have a chance if the other player gets off the first shot.
Reminder, Iron Banner is supposed to allow the full features of your charater and weapons.
I just read that this morning. I didn't really know what the Iron Banner was, but it was what my friend and I played on Friday night where we got raped. I'll try out the regular Crucible when the game comes out. Even if the PvP does suck for me, I had a lot of fun in the PvE with my friends.
Well IGN posted up an interesting article on the game today; it answered a few of my questions, such as the level cap; which appears to be 20, but can be increased by finding armor & weapons at a higher level; so what that means exactly, is that your a Level 20 player for example, but by playing Raids with your buddies, you could possibly find armor that's class at Level 28, so if you wear that stuff, your character's level has increased to Level 28 now. Anyways here's the link to the actual article; I think someone else has posted it up as well:
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2014/07/30/destiny-the-endgame-is-only-the-be...
Good: I love the game.
Bad: I thought MMO big. Skyrim big even. Like, hey there is a mountain! Hey! I can climb the mountain! Maybe even run out the front door of the tower into the city. I had too much MMO and skyrim on the brain cuz it will be big.
Ugly: I have to wait over a month to play!!!!!
No coop splitscreen is close to a deal breaker for me. Anyone with kids knows why.
Online-only play is a disturbing trend. The first four Halo games I bought were all played offline in the beginning. With H4, only the campaign is accessible offline.
No more Red-v-Blue. I spent the first part of the first Crucible game trying to figure out who "we" were. Deep doesn' t like my plasma sticking him when he's on my team.
A few really, really random thoughts on Destiny:
I really enjoyed playing Destiny. I played on the Xbox 360 so I got the low-res experience. While it was a bit blurry it was a hell of a lot of fun and ran great on my aging, broken DVD player, worn-down, full of dust bunnies MS console. As a big-time graphics nerd. I think it speaks volumes that I enjoyed the game as much as I did without the extra eye-candy the Xbox One and (to a somewhat greater degree) Playstation 4 folks got.
I was *pleasantly surprised* to get to experience the Xbox 360 "open beta" last weekend. It was a great surprise because I turned my nose up at the idea of pre-ordering a game just so I could play what was essentially a demo. As has been mentioned, (and I can only speak to the Xbox 360 Beta) the "Beta" seemed to be more "stress test" than anything else. I'm pretty sure what we saw is what we are gonna get when Destiny ships, so I'm telling people I love and would not lie to that I played the Destiny *demo*. For the record, I thought it was kinda low for Bungie to demand that people pre-order the game just so they could act as testers. Did anyone out there not like what they saw and cancel their pre-order? Did you get all your money back? Anyway... the 'demo' did a great job of convincing me that I *might* want to buy the full game. While I had a BLAST playing, I had all the same concerns so many others have voiced on this and other forums.
I was struck by the game's similarity to other games from recent years. Borderlands 1 and 2 (stripped of some fat) and all the Halo games (with some modern tweaks. Read: iron sights) being examples that pop up a lot. I didn't get a "revolutionary" feel from the game. Definitely a good "evolutionary" feel though.
The fact that you can't play split-screen bugs me. Bungie has an explanation for this: split-screen would be counter to the free-roaming feel they were going for. I think that's silly. If I'm playing at home with my kid (like another poster mentioned), or wife or buddy, I'm not gonna go off and explore by myself. The reason they are next to me on the couch is so we can play TOGETHER. If we wanted to freely explore without getting warped back to our partner we'd take turns and play at different times. And there's no inter-platform/cross-generation play. So I guess I'll have to buy two XBones or PS4s so I can play co-op with someone who's in my house. I don't see this happening. And, no. I'm not gonna buy a used 360 just for you (if you're reading this ; )
Again, as has been mentioned over and over... over the years... Internet-only games make pretty much everyone grumpy. Anyone buy a boxed copy of Half-Life 2 (for PC) a million years ago and not be able to play that much-anticipated, SINGLE-PLAYER game on release cuz Valve had server problems? How about something less ancient like the cluster-buckle that was Diablo III (PC) during its week of release? How many of you played the Destiny beta/demo and got the "Destiny servers are full. You're number 7503 in line' message? Here's hoping Bungie can keep those servers up! Remember: Destiny is not an MMO. Destiny is a shooter with MMO elements... like Borderlands. But I can play Borderlands 1 and 2 (by myself) even if my internet connection is down.
Not sure what to say about the length of the first of 10 years of installments (I'm assuming that's what we'll be getting in September) other than that I agree with many others that I'm a bit worried the campaign/story part of the game is gonna be too short. My family got 3 characters to level 8 over the weekend without breaking a sweat or stumbling over each other. I messed with the arena a couple of times but got my ass handed to me enough to get me to go back to playing the story and leveling in the world until I was feeling foolish again. I'm not a big multi-player guy. I burned out on multi-player back in the Quake III/Unreal Tournament days -- when I was younger and good at it. I like single player and co-op (split-screen, on the couch) games with a beefy campaign and some deathmatch/slayer-type action included as an option to extend the life of the game or just mix things up a bit. I like a good story to go along with (and explain) my shootin', stabbin' and mutilatin'. And I like to be able to PAUSE THE ACTION if real life dares interfere with my play time ; )
Ug... I'm rambling... but here's another random observation: last day of the beta/demo, when I was in the tower, playing using my wife's level 8 female Hunter, I got followed by a couple of dorks who were dancing around her, getting in her face, pointing and generally accosting her and being a nuisance. I used the 'right stick-click' menu to report them as being "unhelpful." I REALLY, REALLY hope this isn't going to be a game-ruining issue. One of the major reasons I shy away from open-to-the-public, multi-player games is because they are FILLED with jerks. I really hope Bungie provides the tools needed to protect the world of Destiny from assholes and griefers.
Just a few you say?
Something that has come to light recently (for me atleast) is that level 20 is only has high as you can level your character XP wise. After that you have to perform raids and such to unlock new armor and keep leveling up. I watched a video earlier of a Lvl 28 Titan. So getting to level 20 is just the story part of the game I believe, after that it's open to just fuck shit up.
To advance beyond level 20, you apparently have to collect or earn Motes of Light.
Check out this video of a level 29 Titan:
http://youtu.be/QDr6HU-2cgE
What DT said with a bit more detail http://ps4daily.com/2014/07/destiny-level-cap-explained/
Considering you could blow away level 9 enemies quite quickly with a leveled up weapon, I guess your level might not mean much.
Diablo III does something similar to where you reach the level cap (level 70) and then you start to acquire "paragon points" which basically have no cap. The paragon points are used to buff your character stats - like offense, defence, passives, etc.
I think it's a way developers can cap the levels and make that the spot where the best gear will start to drop for everyone that reaches the cap. Then as you play and gather Light/Points/whatever, you have a better chance of being rewarded with even greater gear.
I have no clue, but it's kind of how I see why you have these soft level caps in games.
In the beta, your level was capped at 8, but I'm thinking in the retail version that as you level skills that will also help to level up your overall ranking.
That's the same way Final Fantasy 14 works. You XP cap at 50 but that's when you start doing dungeon runs to earn Item Level gear and climb into the 60s, 70s and so on. It certainly gives incentive to keep playing because you need to be ilv 90+ to tackle the harder stuff just to climb into the 100s. But you are basically running the same dungeon 10 times or more jut trying to get one certain thing so you can run the next dungeon 10 more times for the next piece. Not exactly everybody's cup of tea.
You got it right. Weapons/armor level with use. I'm not sure if skills are exactly preset, but you earn xp for em automatically in the line they go in on the skill page. I used my melee WAY more often than my grenade and I still got the grenade upgradde first.