Destiny Beta: Wot I think

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.

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

Does the logout option in the settings menu quit Destiny?

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

Does the logout option in the settings menu quit Destiny?

Lol. Never saw that. I'm guessing that does what I want.

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

Does the logout option in the settings menu quit Destiny?

Lol. Never saw that. I'm guessing that does what I want.

Yup. I've been swapping off with Lil' Blue and we found that very useful when swapping between our characters.

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

Does the logout option in the settings menu quit Destiny?

Lol. Never saw that. I'm guessing that does what I want.

Yup. I've been swapping off with Lil' Blue and we found that very useful when swapping between our characters.

Why do you log out when there's a button right below it that says "Change Characters"?

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

Does the logout option in the settings menu quit Destiny?

Lol. Never saw that. I'm guessing that does what I want.

Yup. I've been swapping off with Lil' Blue and we found that very useful when swapping between our characters.

Why do you log out when there's a button right below it that says "Change Characters"?

That's the button I meant.

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The best way to streamline it is to remove it altogether. It is innately broken.

What is the point of encrypting them?

Is it that, occasionally, you get a happy surprise and you don't know until you unwrap the present?

In a sense you get that just by picking up those coloured regular polygons. Any one of them could be a nice surprise.

Encrypting them might prolong the anticipation but I never dwell on them. How much time do you spend wondering if your encrypted item is going to be great?

I concentrate on picking my next mission, navigation, and head shots. I have forgotten what I picked up. It's major effect on my mind is that my inventory slots are filling up and I don't know whether to ditch a good known for the off chance that I am carrying an unknown, encrypted, great item. I need to get to the tower to find out if I should have binned it as soon as I picked it up.

What does anyone else think? What is the point of encryption? Does it work for you? Could it be optional? If you like it then keep it switched on. I suspect that, given the choice, everyone would switch it off.

This is something that a beta could have measured - what proportion of the players actually want the feature?

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I always figured it's encrypted so that it becomes a post-mission reward, rather than just another item you grabbed during.

I'm not sure what the actual point of that is, but it seems like the intention.

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I always figured it's encrypted so that it becomes a post-mission reward, rather than just another item you grabbed during.

That can be achieved by automatically decrypting in the post mission screen.

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My guess (without having played Destiny at all) is that encryption is designed to keep the flow and your head in the moment. If you knew exactly what the loot was, you might be very likely to stop, look at everything, maybe think about equipping it and then go back to the game.

Lots of start / stop.

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My guess (without having played Destiny at all) is that encryption is designed to keep the flow and your head in the moment. If you knew exactly what the loot was, you might be very likely to stop, look at everything, maybe think about equipping it and then go back to the game.

Lots of start / stop.

Already happens with regular gear. You run over a white item, then have to open the menu and dismantle it so you don't fill up your inventory with useless gear.

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My guess (without having played Destiny at all) is that encryption is designed to keep the flow and your head in the moment. If you knew exactly what the loot was, you might be very likely to stop, look at everything, maybe think about equipping it and then go back to the game.

Lots of start / stop.

Already happens with regular gear. You run over a white item, then have to open the menu and dismantle it so you don't fill up your inventory with useless gear.

Some of the white gear is actually decent for multiplayer because of the leveling. I do get a little annoyed when I get multiple identical weapons though.

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Some of the white gear is actually decent for multiplayer because of the leveling. I do get a little annoyed when I get multiple identical weapons though.

It would be easy to specify a rule to auto-dismantle duplicate whites because they don't have special effects: plus discipline, grenade damage recharges melee attack, etc

I'd love to be able to setup a loot manager to take out some of the busy work. But it would probably be a bitch to setup the rules. A bitch for Bungie to do a UI for and a bitch for me to tell it what to do.

How about an overflow vault?

I pick the nine items I want in my active set; everything in addition to that goes into my overflow.

I get notifications of rares or items with stats that exceed a value that I set. For example: stat > 57 or stat > current stat + N. (where N is an integer > 0)

Maybe limit notifications to:

damage
protection (or whatever it is that armor has)
discipline
strength
the other things like discipline or strength that I have forgotten

The extra wrinkles like: (makes reloading pulse rifles faster) can be ignored; you look for that stuff when you manage your overflow vault.

I then just play the game and get occasional notifications of rares or items that might be of interest.

In my down time I clean up my overflow. I can do this in-game or via companion app or web page(s).

dismantle
move to active 9
???
profit

Do we need a separate vault for our top faves to swap between characters? Do we want to rank weapons so that the good ones are easy to switch between characters?

Would anything like the above work for you?

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I'd love to be able to setup a loot manager to take out some of the busy work. But it would probably be a bitch to setup the rules. A bitch for Bungie to do a UI for and a bitch for me to tell it what to do.

Simpler would be 'Hold Square to pick up loot drop' rather than auto acquiring it. That way you can just ignore the whites.

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Given that you need the Internet to play and given that everybody who has Internet has access to a browser...

You could have a fairly fully featured browser interface to manage this stuff. There could even be a web service behind it all, publish the interface and let the fans fine tune your UI for you.

Could someone write a malicious script or server that takes player credentials and trashes their loot?

Grrr, I think the simple answer is yes. I wonder if that explains some of the limitations of the companion app.

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Is there REALLY a science behind it or is it all just waffle?

Why isn't Bungie giving us the choice and then measuring what we do?

Measuring whether people keep encrypted items is not a proper test of the desirability of encryption; of course people will take the chance, will be reluctant to bin an unknown. The only way to know if people want it is to give them the choice to switch encryption on or off.

I suspect that Bungie knows that very few people would want the hassle - the majority would switch it off.

Bungie had a reputation for making streamlined games. Destiny lives or dies on its population. Does Bungie feel that they need to stuff the game with something in order to keep peoples' interest.

I played Halo for years without an investment system but I'm aware that I'm in a minority.

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Is there REALLY a science behind it or is it all just waffle?

Why isn't Bungie giving us the choice and then measuring what we do?

Measuring whether people keep encrypted items is not a proper test of the desirability of encryption; of course people will take the chance, will be reluctant to bin an unknown. The only way to know if people want it is to give them the choice to switch encryption on or off.

I suspect that Bungie knows that very few people would want the hassle - the majority would switch it off.

Bungie had a reputation for making streamlined games. Destiny lives or dies on its population. Does Bungie feel that they need to stuff the game with something in order to keep peoples' interest.

I played Halo for years without an investment system but I'm aware that I'm in a minority.

The investment system seems to be mostly pointless busywork masquerading as features. I'm also bothered by the lack of originality, someone basically just took the unidentified items from Diablo and shmushed them together with the reputation grinding and rep vendors from WoW. Nothing creative or original, just more bars to fill.

[image]

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Bungie had a reputation for making streamlined games. Destiny lives or dies on its population. Does Bungie feel that they need to stuff the game with something in order to keep peoples' interest.

Yes. This ties directly in to the 10 year plan. Rather than create a tight game with no filler that may be shorter, instead we are going to have to play an experience padded out. It's absolutely wrong in terms of making an engaging game, and unfortunately our time doesn't seem valuable to Bungie.

It's not even as if player population matters a ton. For multiplayer yes, but for story you are only really ever playing with two other people, save for public events.

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I guess in one of those whonenjoys a grind to sone degree. I had fun leveling up my weapons, and such. Th gameplays great and i like working towards some goal (grinding) especially when the game play is great. So i guess im of a different opinion on the grinding thing.

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I have to admit I had no issue with grinding weapon levels up (plus if you equip them before finishing a mission or handing in some bounties you'll usually unlock the lot), and even the Cryptarch rank seems fine to me (it took very little effort to rank him up to Level 1 anyway).

But the Vanguard points you earn from Explore missions are pitiful. I've been grinding the Target Neutralisation missions for the Spinmetal they give you, then turning that in instead.

Edit: Though I can see why others make take issue at the Cryptarch and weapons, and could see it getting tedious spread across the whole game.

Grimoire progression gives me a perfect reason to grind anyway though, so I've been doubling up and levelling weapons while I do that.

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The weapons level so fast I don't consider that a grind. Also, blasting fallen in the face is a blast, even on the same 4 story missions and single strike which I completed several times each. I like the gun gameplay, it causes you to equip a gun and give it a good run, without it being too much. I could tell pretty quick which guns I liked and didn't like, but was sometimes pleasantly surprised over time.

I didn't feel like the game was too grindy. I think it might feel more so in the Beta because we only have a tiny percentage of the content. Running that strike 10 times, stuck at Level 8... well, it does feel grindy if you are just trying to get a single Shingen-C rare drop. But if I have 10 strikes and 25 story missions to play through and each has a chance to drop great gear, I won't even feel the grind. I'll be having a blast, getting rare loot (by probability), getting unique loot (because diff strikes/bosses will drop diff loot), getting rare, legendary, and exotic loot (because we only have common and uncommon available in Beta), leveling my new guns, having the ability to be choosy (my gun choices changed frequently until level 8 cap was hit) because there won't be a level cap. It will feel good I suspect when we get to run full to 20, and then even higher as we level our other subclasses.

By late-game, I suspect there will be several options for high level play (either really difficult strikes, story bosses, or raids) - where you won't grind, but the loot will be directed and streamlined because the challenge will be so high.

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Here are my likes and dislikes so far.

Likes:
- Music/sound effects. It's a shame Marty left.
- Class designs/weapon designs/everything art designs. They have really stepped up their design game since Reach.
- Story. Even the short story shown in the story missions is pretty compelling. It's a shame Staten left.
- All three classes are really fun to play.

Dislikes:
- Lack of streamlining.
- Too much time spent in loading screens. Elaborate loading screens really aren't necessary, especially in Crucible, just a simple lobby screen showing your team and map is all that's necessary.
- Field of view is too narrow.
- Bosses enemies are boring, they just seem like bullet sponges, like Spider Tank and Serpis Prime.
- Voice chat sucks. Fireteam emphasis really encumbers the social aspect of the game. Give us full lobby chat with proximity voice (at least in Crucible)!
- Crucible voice actor, why does he have to be English?
- Crucible maps are so-so. The Moon map is okay, I guess, but Mars and Brick-walls-everywhere maps are disorienting due to their uniformity, they lack distinctive landmarks and unique areas.
- The game is clearly loot-focused rather than gameplay focused. This is my biggest gripe with the game. Everything is centered around grinding. Want a new gun? Grind for it. Want a new Ship? Grind for it. Want to have fun? Sorry, you're out of luck. :D It's as if there was a huge brainstorm session during development solely dedicated to grinding options, and all suggestions made it into the game. The loot hooks are very strong and are the source of the beta's addictive quality. The addictiveness really overshadows other game content in some respects.

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- Too much time spent in loading screens. Elaborate loading screens really aren't necessary, especially in Crucible, just a simple lobby screen showing your team and map is all that's necessary.

Agree about the loading screens (though they are really pretty loading screens).

- Voice chat sucks. Fireteam emphasis really encumbers the social aspect of the game. Give us full lobby chat with proximity voice (at least in Crucible)!

I really hope they have more social options! Fire team/Proximity chat toggle would be great.

- Crucible voice actor, why does he have to be English?

Honestly I really like this guy.

- Crucible maps are so-so. The Moon map is okay, I guess, but Mars and Brick-walls-everywhere maps are disorienting due to their uniformity, they lack distinctive landmarks and unique areas.

My favorite maps were the Mars and Earth maps. Made some great shotgun plays and had a lot of fun playing those maps.

- The game is clearly loot-focused rather than gameplay focused. This is my biggest gripe with the game. Everything is centered around grinding. Want a new gun? Grind for it. Want a new Ship? Grind for it. Want to have fun? Sorry, you're out of luck. :D It's as if there was a huge brainstorm session during development solely dedicated to grinding options, and all suggestions made it into the game. The loot hooks are very strong and are the source of the beta's addictive quality. The addictiveness really overshadows other game content in some respects.

Maybe its because I have a lot of mmo experience under my belt, but I like the loot focused aspect of the game. Combined with the good gameplay it gives me excuses to go out and have fun killing aliens. To each his own I guess.

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- Class designs/weapon designs/everything art designs. They have really stepped up their design game since Reach.

Oh I have a gripe! I don't like the way hunter cloaks look, and I much prefer the scarves. However, I don't think you can get scarves anymore in the beta… I haven't had a single hunter item come up as a scarf.

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Just looks much cooler without a silly hood.

Also, NO CAPES

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Also, NO CAPES

What about this one?

[image]

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Also, NO CAPES

What about this one?

Yeah, that looks pretty similar to Xenos', which looks pretty rad in action.

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Also, NO CAPES

What about this one?

Yeah, that looks pretty similar to Xenos', which looks pretty rad in action.

The guardian in the foreground? I have that cloak and armor. I was talking about that ridiculously glitched cloak in front of him.

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goes on for days

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Also, NO CAPES

What about this one?

Yeah, that looks pretty similar to Xenos', which looks pretty rad in action.

The guardian in the foreground? I have that cloak and armor. I was talking about that ridiculously glitched cloak in front of him.

Didn't even notice that. Yuck.

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I don't see the problem with the voice over guy having the accent that he has; I myself rather like the voice-over.

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- Voice chat sucks. Fireteam emphasis really encumbers the social aspect of the game. Give us full lobby chat with proximity voice (at least in Crucible)!

See, I actually really like the way they did this. One of my least favorite parts of Halo was having to listen to the Timmies on the other team in the lobby. I almost always put my settings to party-only. I do occasionally miss having proximity chat while out exploring, but mostly, I don't.

- Crucible maps are so-so. The Moon map is okay, I guess, but Mars and Brick-walls-everywhere maps are disorienting due to their uniformity, they lack distinctive landmarks and unique areas.

The Venus map is actually one of my favorites. I haven't played any of the maps enough yet to find my way around easily, but that map in particular has been some of the most fun I've had in the Crucible so far.

- The game is clearly loot-focused rather than gameplay focused.

I've enjoyed the loot system. I love the surprise of picking up new gear and discovering what I just earned, even if it's not necessarily something I want or plan to keep. The Beta does feel a tad more grindy than the Alpha did, but again, it's a Beta. I expect there's going to be more tweaking between now and release. (Heck, there may be some tweaking happening right now that we'll see tomorrow.)

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