Ok, gotta get it out there! Wife doesn't want to hear it for some reason.

POV:Mad Halo/Myth Fanboy.

LOVE

The world

Weird accelerated near future apocalyptic landscape inviting exploration. Bungie style attention to detail. Usually curiosity ends at the end of a ??'s sword or fusion gun. It's awesome though, those colony ships look like something off of a 60's Sci-fi paperback. Art design is terrific, sound is perfect. VO is alien/unfamiliar in a way that comes across as dry/flat at first but the in-universe consistancy has grown on me, and might be more tolerable over the long run than the usual bro-time hooahs. Story feels like it's got some teeth, even if it's probably watered down to some kind of infinite status quo to provide for 10 years of replaying maps and fighting the same enemies.

The fightin'

Guns sound great, distant fire is also brilliant (no need to fake ambient combat here!). Melee is as impactful as Halo, sometime moreso! I miss assassinations and back-wacks/stealth, but when the mission difficulty/number of players/user progression lines up it feels as awesome as a good Heroic encounter. MP also feels good. I have trouble holding target sometimes, but being a sneaky deceitful shotgun wielding shot-gunner or heavy ammo hogging MG spree'er works often enough to keep me happy.

I kind of suck, but every couple of games I will pull off a double or triple with the Hunter's golden pistol (A Halo 1 homage?).

Co-op!

Feels more natural than co-op in H3/ODST/Reach, and for the strike required. Cruisin' about Space with friends while the leader selects a hopper/mission is more relaxing/thematic than any lobby I've been in before.

Lootz

They feel like proper Bungie guns, with differences subtle or otherwise giving an air of variety to them. I like where the weapon leveling is going, and I don't spend 80% of my time in inventory/at the bank/auction house like in mist loot games. Love it.

Control

Seemed like a shallow objective type at first, or a baby battlefield. Now that I have spent more time in it I love it.

It's basically Team Slayer, but without the camping, or at least with specific points of campery tied to objectives. Not that I hate camping or anything. The flags are there to get people fighting, and it gives you a constant puzzle to fight with the strangers you have been MM'd with. Usually I get blasted, but when I pull off a lone wolf objective clearance, or grab some assists from long range with a group, it feels like I am always fighting for something instead of a score (even though thats exactly what you want!).

Also liked the Iron Banner stuff, pretty sure that gun with extra damage on a low clip is OP but I'm sure that will all wash out in the long run.

HATE

Loading Screens.

They are not the worse ever, but Halo 1, and most of those after had NONE during a single player walk-through and this ads so, so much to a title. Only initial load and for those jumping in an out of MP did you get a fancy load-screen. The space ship transitions in destiny would be fine, and usually are enough (And seem much faster than destiny), but when there is more than one or if it happens at a silly time it really hurts the immersion. Are these mostly doing connections or actual loading? It's related to the following point.

Non-seemless JIP.

When free roaming people just appear, and that's awesome. Get invited or join their Fireteam (Via PSN's horrid invite system) and get a loading/connection screen! Destiny don't care that you are in the same mission, standing next to each other in the mothyards! Or dancing with each other in the tower! You are going to do a few hot laps around mother earth then we can make it official!

This really hurts it. Not having ago at Bungie here, I'm sure there are good technical reasons why this is the case, but it really, really hurts the shared experience/chance encounters/seamless multiplayer. Fatally.

A bit annoyed but can live with/they might get fixed

Lack of activities for 4p+

Comes across as a bit of a downgrade from previous titles, although the title seems much more appropriate for MP otherwise. It just seems like the game is screaming for bigger groups, like in an MMO, even though in my heart I know that outside ARMA nobody does much more than 4p co-op.

I hope there are lots of raids!

Marine/Elite chats

Oh, boy do I miss those 40000 lines of dialogue per halo game. Yes, you ended up lone wolfing/murdering through neglect most of your allies but it was always worth an easy/normal run to hear at least some of what they had to say in the old titles. I feel lonely in Destiny, most people don't talk. Either there is no universal chat or nobody uses microphones. Those that do seem to have the sensitivity to high and need me to mute their sweet rap tunes.

Not that it was always bad, the loneliness in Halo was inherent to John's own sense of solitude, especially sans Cortana which I feel was very effective throughout the series (And in ODST and Reach). But it doesn't feel like there is much to contrast it with.

Fin.

I felt like I had more ideas today at work, but I forgot them all. My only other concern is that Bungie don't bring enough content to last us until the expansions, or even to cover the price of entry (Though I've had more fun with Alpha/Beta than some actual games in the AAA space).

I'm not convinced it doesn't have the tight Heroic/Legendary sandbox balance it needs to make the canned missions fun forever like the previous series did (I'm hoping that this is solved by a level-cap balanced version of all missions at something equivalent to those two difficulties) but this is all to be seen. At the moment, selecting a mission 2 or 3 levels above your current level seems to end in tears most the time, with immune bullet sponge nightmares plaguing your every step. Not fun.

But this is conjecture, I think this Beta is representative of the first part of the game and that that what we see at launch wont be much different. And that's fine, I am still having fun with it. I just hope the rest of the title keeps ramping it up like the Warmind mission did. If it does Bungie will blow everything out of the water and make other titles glad they are hiding off in 2015. To the moon!

HATE

Loading Screens.

They are not the worse ever, but Halo 1, and most of those after had NONE during a single player walk-through

That's completely false.

Halo 2 made switching from one level to the next fairly seamless, because the amount of memory that needed to be loaded from cached HDD content was small compared with the speed of the HDD. By preloading the next level to the HDD as you play, load times were negligible.

But all other Halo games have loading screens when switching areas.

Halo 1 only post-caches to make it so you can quickly rejoin a level you played recently, it doesn't pre-cache the next level as you play, so you still generally get load screens from one level to the next. I don't know the full extent of what the 360 games do internally, and their initial load is often slower than subsequent ones, but there are still load screens between levels.

Ok, if I am wrong I take it back.

Is it perhaps slower on emulated hardware? I didn't have much time for the 360 versions of these games due to the bugs, and my H1 Disc disintegrating due to what I imagine was old age and overuse.

I remember Halo 1 only bringing the initial loading screen per game session, or if there was one between levels it was super quick.

But whatever it was, it was nothing like it is now. Halo 3 even cached the selected level in the lobby (Maybe Destiny does this without showing off). There was also a good hour or so per mission, so any small break/cinematic/loading screen was no biggie. Of Course Destiny is trying to do so much more, including not being linear, but it IS a tradeoff.

That said, would have paid a few seconds of black screen to remove some of the cinematic pop-in in H2.

Lack of activities for 4p+

Comes across as a bit of a downgrade from previous titles, although the title seems much more appropriate for MP otherwise. It just seems like the game is screaming for bigger groups, like in an MMO, even though in my heart I know that outside ARMA nobody does much more than 4p co-op.

I hope there are lots of raids!

I get that the player cap serves a purpose in keeping main missions and strikes tight and streamlined without being too easy, but I'm kind of bummed you can't bring your whole 6-wo/man/robot fireteam into Explore mode with you. Imagine it would feel incredible to zoom around in formation on your sparrow, or take on a public event with a group of 5 friends.

Is it perhaps slower on emulated hardware? I didn't have much time for the 360 versions of these games due to the bugs, and my H1 Disc disintegrating due to what I imagine was old age and overuse.

I play Halo 1 almost exclusively on my oXbox.

I remember Halo 1 only bringing the initial loading screen per game session, or if there was one between levels it was super quick.

It's not horribly long, but I'm not sure it's any faster than the initial load time.

Actually, seems like you're more likely to get a fast load at the start of a game session, as continuing where you left off in a level means that the level is already HDD-cached and loads basically instantly (it's possible to go from cold boot to gameplay in under 30 second on oXbox by taking advantage of this).

But whatever it was, it was nothing like it is now. Halo 3 even cached the selected level in the lobby (Maybe Destiny does this without showing off).

Sort of. Halo 3 still has some load times between levels. Halo 3 caches a LOT of data (including huge amounts of sound data), though, and it's especially noticeable at the start of a session.

There was also a good hour or so per mission, so any small break/cinematic/loading screen was no biggie.

That's a major factor. Load times are less annoying when you experience them less often; Sonic 2006's loading isn't ridiculous because the screens are long, it's ridiculous because you wind up going through several of them to get anything done (for no apparent reason, in that case).

That's perhaps a big issue for Destiny because there's often reason to bounce around between things. Especially given that you have to go to orbit to switch what you're doing, which a game with so much switching about really shouldn't require.

//==========

I haven't bothered clocking load times to compare between all the games, but load screens between levels is very typical for Bungie games.

I get that the player cap serves a purpose in keeping main missions and strikes tight and streamlined without being too easy, but I'm kind of bummed you can't bring your whole 6-wo/man/robot fireteam into Explore mode with you. Imagine it would feel incredible to zoom around in formation on your sparrow, or take on a public event with a group of 5 friends.

Yeah explore is really the one area I wish had more than 3 player fireteams, though I would be interested in knowing how much of the lack of up to 6 player has to do with technical issues. Might be none, might be all.