Destiny Beta: Issues, suggestions, & thoughts. (Destiny)

by ShadowOfTheVoid , South Carolina, Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 11:09 (3788 days ago)
edited by ShadowOfTheVoid, Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 11:33

Well, I played the alpha and the beta is much of the same, just a bit more. Which of course means it's quite fun. The movement, gunplay, and other basic mechanics feel great. I like how even though the game has ADS, unlike other games that use it (e.g., COD, Battlefield) I don't feel obligated to use it. I can hip fire just as effectively; it's more like if every gun in Halo had a scope. Even though we're still limited to just the Cosmodrome level, if that's just a taste of Bungie's new approach to level design, then color me impressed. The Cosmodrome is a pretty big level with a lot to explore. It feels as big as Assault on the Control Room, and there's a good mix of open outdoors environments and indoor areas. There's still a lot of areas blocked off by barriers — either invincible ??-ranked enemies, or ominous, impenetrable black mist, or physical objects that seem like they either open or aren't normally supposed to be there (hello, Fallen Dreg arm sticking out of that mysterious sealed door) — but I assume they'll be passable in the final game, and that means that we haven't even seen all of that one level. The multiplayer is decent, though not anything remarkable. I imagine it becomes much less conventional at higher levels when your Guardian becomes a veritable superhero.

Of course, this is a beta test and the game's not finished, so there's some issues. Here's the ones I remembered to record while I was playing:

- Special/heavy weapon ammo needs to carry over when you switch weapons, or at the very least each one needs its own independent supply just like regular weapons. Let's say I found a shotgun in the first area of the game in that first treasure chest and I'm fully stocked up on ammo. I then find a sniper rifle later on and then switch to that since it's more suitable for open outdoors environments. Of course, it has no ammo so I fill it up with green ammo boxes. But when I switch to my shotgun when I go back indoors, the shotgun is empty even though I had previously stocked it full of ammo, and of course because I switched to the shotgun any sniper ammo I had left disappears as well. Even if I switch to another special or heavy weapon only briefly to check it out, it means any special or heavy ammo I've collected just evaporates into the ether. At the very least, each class of weapon (shotgun, fusion rifle, sniper rifle, machine gun, or rocket launcher) needs their own separate pools of ammo), kind of like how Perfect Dark had SMG, rifle, pistol, revolver, and shotgun ammo, and each weapon in those classes that you have on hand shares your stock of ammo of the appropriate type.

- There needs to be more variety in enemy encounters in explore mode. The same squads keep showing up in the same spots, and at regular and frequent intervals, which can make exploring repetitive and sometimes tedious. In fact, there's this one cave in the first outdoors area of the Cosmodrome level that you have to climb up a plane's wing to get to. There's two Fallen in the cave. If you kill them and then leave that chamber, they immediately respawn. Enemies either need to respawn less frequently, or the numbers, types, and positions need to change.

- There's no collision detection with either NPCs at the tower or other player characters. I can just walk straight through them with no problem, which is just weird and immersion-breaking.

- There's an area in the hangar wing of the tower where you can get over the fence and then get stuck in a small area in the hangar proper because invisible walls block you from going more than a few feet. The only way out is to go back into orbit. They need to either A) get rid of the invisible wall and let me explore that area, B) put an RTB barrier that will kill me after 10 seconds in that area, or C) make it to where it's impossible to hop over the fence. I just pray that there's no areas like that in the actual missions. Invisible walls suck, but if they're going to be there they need to actually do their job and not cause me to get stuck because I got curious and wanted to explore.

- The bosses in the Strike mission — the Devil Walker and and that floating orb thing (can't remember its name) — have too much health. It ends up becoming a battle of attrition. It shouldn't take that long for three people to kill one bad guy. Boss battles can be fun, but there's a point where they simply become tedious because you're doing the exact same thing for five minutes straight. Most bosses should realistically take only two or three minutes to beat with a good team.