Destiny Beta: Wot I think (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, July 21, 2014, 13:35 (3789 days ago)
edited by Cody Miller, Monday, July 21, 2014, 13:42

My thoughts on the Alpha largely apply, however this time around I played a ton more crucible, and Bungie expanded the Beta enough to show us what kind of grind is creeping in.

First of all, the game is super fun, but there are a bunch of things that make the experience worse.

As kapowaz has stated, the mechanics of handling busy work are fairly time consuming and poor. Everything needs to be far more streamlined. For example, identifying engrams is a huge pain. Why do I have to go all the way back to the tower to do it? Again, Diablo had this same type of identifying mechanic, and Blizzard realized it added nothing to have to go back to town or use scrolls to identify items. In Diablo 3, just hold right click until the bar is done and it's identified. That's how it needs to be in Destiny. Pull up the menu, move your cursor over the engram, and hold square until it identifies, similar to how you dismantle identified gear. There is no reason to string out the process.

Same thing with shops. You can easily consolidate all the busy work you need to do, buying gear, getting bounties, or whatever, into an easy to navigate menu from orbit. You can keep the tower, but let us do it by menu as well. Bungie needs to realize that these are things players are going to do hundreds of times. It's fun the first time to wander the tower, but not the 100th. Streamline everything.

I'm majorly bummed that I'm getting a glimpse of the grind that's going to be in the game. This is 2014, and not a single person likes or enjoys grinding, so why the fuck is Bungie incorporating it into the game? In the Alpha, the character who sold engrams appeared to get better ones as your character leveled up, which is a fine way to do it. In the Beta, you have to increase your standing with him by buying and decoding engrams with him. The higher your standing the better gear you get. Why this bullshit? It worked fine before, especially since now you get money much more slowly, you get fewer resources to trade in, and the explore missions are worth a pitiful amount of reputation. The weapons that require marks or faction points to buy are going to take a long time to get. Why do this? You already have a progression system built into character level. As you level up, so should the gear available for sale. Getting standing with certain factions is a cool idea and all, but that should manifest itself as side story and mission progression, not faction points you have to grind for!

Bounties are similarly MMO bullshit unimaginative busy work. All of them require you do to a simple task many times, like kill 30 guys with melees, kill 50 titans, etc. Come on. These sucked in Reach, and in Destiny you could have gone so much farther. If I had my way, beacons in explore mode would be gone, and they instead would be replaced by bounties. You could carry 3-5 of them. The bounties would work similarly to how I suggest the explore missions should work, and otherwise be designed, novel missions that are fun to accomplish. You can tie bounties together to create side story, or otherwise offer some choice to the narrative. Completing one could open a story opportunity where you can choose between more bounties, etc. Bungie has a few hundred million dollars, and lots of talent, so this should be considered for Destiny 2. Bounties and explore mode missions are lazy MMO bullshit right now. You can do better Bungie.

The last grinding problem is with weapons, especially since the abilities carry over in the crucible. Let's say you get a sweet new weapon drop. Cool! Now you have to go farm enemy kills in order to get all the abilities on the gun. I suppose if you have a bunch of story missions you can do, you can do that as you progress and it's not so bad, but I came a cross a very cool weapon whose default scope was unusable. Visually, it was a tiny ring with the dot in the middle, and you couldn't see shit. So, in order for the weapon to be usable, I had to farm enemy kills with it until I unlocked the new sight.

Sights should be available for purchase since they are so important since you look down them all the time. Bungie could restrict certain types of sights to certain weapons I guess, but leveling a weapon ability to change the sight kind of sucks. I don't know what to do about the other weapon abilities, but my gut tells me that a gun should come with all the abilities already learned, and then you allow players to modify and improve them by spending money with a weapon smith. Anything to untie gun progression from killing with it, especially when you have weapons like rocket launchers which you use sparingly, but would like to level up. If I have a gun I want to upgrade, I should just be able to if I have the resources, especially since I've found having a wide variety of guns is ideal. That way, you can upgrade them all at once with all your money and parts, and not have to farm for kills with each one.

Crucible is fun as shit, but man, what you do outside of it has a huge impact. I can throw grenades like crazy since I stacked discipline, and that carries over into crucible. So do weapons upgrades and things like rate of fire and stability. You've got to play story mode to get the guns, but on the other hand there's all these guns you can eventually grind out if you play crucible. These are two separate modes, and I feel there is way too much overlap.

That being said, I love the multiplayer a lot. It's different worrying about control points and heavy weapon ammo spawns instead of weapon spawns like in Halo. As others have pointed out, map control is still important, because Control is basically still Slayer with the twist of kill bonuses based on captured territories. On Mars for example, it's really easy to hold B and C, so if you can get those two, let the other team have A, then just defend up. Particularly awesome is the way heavy ammo drops work. If you open the box, only those around you can also get ammo. If you are too fa away you get nothing. This created a hilarious situation where me and tons of DBO folks all gathered around the drop so as to all get the ammo, but were all wiped out by a single Nova Bomb. Haha! So it's kind of a balancing act, and you need to co-ordinate but also mitigate risk.

The maps are fun and it looks great. I love the increased pace with always having sprint, and the jumping abilities. I'm not that good, so I will leave the high level analysis to someone else.

I guess my opinion is roughly the same as it was in the Alpha, although now instead of speculating I can see the grindy elements creep in. Again, I'm hoping that there is enough to do without worrying about that in the final version, but I can tell if I don;t engage with the system I will not be able to do some content. You'll have my money Bungie, but not necessarily my ten years.

P.S. Let me switch guardians without closing Destiny and relaunching.