Lots of people felt misled about Halo 2. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, January 08, 2017, 16:05 (2858 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Mission structure is one of Destiny's biggest weaknesses. There's actually very little story or scripted events in something like Attack on the Control Room or Two Betrayals. But because they're something like an hour long you can be given an overall objective and happily push and push towards it with only very occasional prompts from Cortana. Plus, because the levels were long, there was time to include neat little moments.

The Marines getting dropped off in AotCR isn't some massive scripted event. It places a Warthog, a Tank, and like six marines. But it means the world to the feel of the level and its works because the level is long enough for them to matter. They only ever say, what, two or three lines of mission dialogue but we ended up protecting them and sheparding them and swapping them out into the right order and reloading if Sarge died.

The first few missions of Destiny were five minutes long, if that. What would I even do with tanks and aircraft and friendly AI units? There were only a couple of levels in vanilla Destiny that had enough meat on them to feel good.

I still love the attack on the House of Winter's Ketch and Kell. It made good use of the volcano section of Venus. You fought your way a good distance from point A to point B similar to a Halo level. You had to enter actual enemy territory like with a lot of Halo levels. And the music that built up in the way spiraling down to the up to the Ketch was amazing. The fight to the Vex Spire being guarded deep within the Cabal base was similarly good. It had us fight through a significant section of Mars. It had multiple successive objectives. It had that fun little moment where the Cabal ambush us by jetpacking right up to us directly after our Ghost speculates it being a trap, and the fight around the Spire could get tough on occasion.

I've always wish Destiny's missions were more like Strikes, and Strikes were more like Raids. Not necessarily in requiring the same fireteam sizes or puzzle solving, but longer missions give more time for story and neat encounters. Base gameplay is fine. Enemy factions are fine. Having missions be three minutes long? That's what needed / needs to be fixed!