Very disappointed in Destiny. *long* *TL;DR included* (Destiny)

by Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316) , Detroit, Thursday, August 07, 2014, 17:05 (3764 days ago)

TL;DR at bottom. Although, I don't often do mega-posts, so you should really just read it, ya baby.

Story time.

I was lucky enough to get early access to the 360 beta on the 15th. Once it was done downloading, I hopped into the campaign not knowing what exactly to expect. I already knew PvP was going to suck, but I'll have more on that below.

The opening cutscene was really cool, and got my hopes up for the rest of the game.
Astronauts on Mars?
Cool!
Why do they have guns?
Rain? What?
Whats that big ball?

Next thing I know, Tyrion is waking me up to tell me that I've been dead for centuries, and we need to GTFO now or these big alien dudes are gonna push our shit in. A bit of running, and the littlest Lannister finds me a gun. Now, I like the M4 as much as anybody, but it's been hundreds of years and we're still using them? Come on.

Immediately I notice how familiar the game feels. I've been playing Halo for over 11 years now, and Destiny's roots are obvious, but it's also different. The addition of an Aim-down-the-sights mechanic is one that feels foreign and out of place, but at least it's not always necessary. It's quickly apparent that all of the big scary aliens are easily killed with a simple headshot or two, and it turns out, there's really no reason to be scared at all.

Tyrion guides me to this busted old ship and tells me we're gonna fly it to "The City." "Okay, bro. Let's-a-go!" We get there and grab some supplies because we need to go back to Russia to get a warp drive. Without it, we can't zoom to the Moon or whatever. Which is absolutely fine by me, but he's very insistent.

Back into the thick of it, and I'm starting to notice a pattern. Shoot them in the head (or other weak spot). Over, and over, and over, and... ughh. I'm not having much fun at this point, and then BAM! This Fallen Captain on steroids crawls out of the wall and attempts to eat me. I figure I'm in for a long and difficult battle, but in reality, it's only long. I can just sit back and shoot him in the head.

When the big guy's head explodes, I'm not relieved, or proud, or anything. Just bored, and disappointed. Tyrion says some stuff, but I'm not really listening. I'm done with that for the night, so I go play Halo: Reach with you guys, and have a blast.

The next day, I decide to give it another shot. Figure I might as well finish the beta. At some point, Tyrion and I are sent to find out what the Fallen have locked behind this door. Ends up being another alien race, The Hive. "Good," I think to myself. Maybe these other aliens will switch up the combat in new and interesting ways! Nope. Just shoot 'em in the head.

Now Ty and I are out to see what's up with this big radio tower or something. I stopped paying attention a while ago. We get there, and I'm clearing out rooms when I run out of sniper ammo. "Oh, I'll just run back in the last room. There's bound to be some laying around." I go back and, WTF? All the guys I just killed are back. I re-clear that room, and with my sniper refilled I head back the way I was going. Son of a- this room respawned, too! Finish the mission, and I need a break.

When I reach level 6, I go to try out the Strike. There's not much different here. Then I get to the first boss. It looks promising, but it ends up just being a giant bullet sponge. All I do to beat it is hide behind a pillar and whittle away at its health by shooting the legs until it has a little downtime (a lot like the Halo 3 Scarab). Occasionally a small group of enemies will attack me, but they're really just there to give me ammo. Fifteen minutes later (at level 6), the thing explodes, and my fireteam is ready to move on. After a few more rooms, we get to another boss. This fight is even worse than the last. The boss is just a bigger version of the floating ball enemy, with a ton of health. This one never changes, never switches its tactics. You just shoot its weak spot for ten minutes until it explodes.

Is this Bungie's idea of fun?

The problems of Campaign.

• First, the lack of variety in the combat. Every enemy is defeated in the same way. To kill a Dreg, Vandal, Captain, Acolyte, Thrall, Knight, Ogre, or Wizard, you shoot them in the head. The Servitor too, but its weakpoint is the eyeball. The Shank and Shrieker are the only two that I haven't found a weakspot on. Shanks usually go down in one shot anyway, so they don't really need one. Captains and Wizards do have shields, but with the ability to always have a sniper rifle with basically unlimited ammo, that never really matters.
  
  Compare this to Halo (because it's pretty much unavoidable). Yes, the goal is to shoot everything in the head or other weak spot, but you have to do something else first to make that possible. Every enemy has something special that makes it unique. Jackals need to be shot in the hand or foot so they'll flinch and expose their head for a short time. Elites have shields (this is different than the Captains and Wizards because you don't always have a power weapon with you in Halo). You have to get their shields down before you can headshot them. Brutes have a helmet you have to remove first, and they berserk if you kill their friends (with varying effectiveness depending on what game you're playing). Drones and Skirmishers are fast and hard to hit, and occasionally have shields of their own. Hunters you have to get behind (or land some lucky shots from the front), which usually involves getting in close, and they always come in pairs. Engineers you'll want to pop first, or every other enemy will get an overshield. Grunts are the exception, but they're just cannon fodder. A distraction while the bigger aliens try to kill you. Dangerous in groups, and they flee when their leader is killed.
  
  Do you see the difference? All of Halo's enemies have something that makes them unique, and mixes up the combat. There's nothing special about Destiny's enemies. You just shoot them in the head. It's boring and repetitive.
  
  
• I wasn't challenged once. There is no difficulty to speak of. Even in single player, death just means you have to wait four seconds to get right back to where you were, with no penalties. There are occasionally rooms or small areas that don't allow you to respawn, but if you just sit back and shoot heads, you'll not have any trouble. Furthermore, if you're in a fireteam, dying in these areas isn't even permanent. The respawn time is just extended to 25 seconds. It's a lot harder to fail than to complete your objective, even with bosses.
  
  
• Speaking of bosses, Destiny's are terrible. They take the term bullet sponge to the extreme. With a ridiculous amount of health, and two instant kill attacks, your only option for the Devil Walker is to stand behind one of the various pillars in the area while whittling away at its health, and deal with the occasional Fallen squad (which are just there to give you ammo), until it explodes fifteen minutes later. The second boss is much the same way, requiring the player to shoot its eye for ten minutes while swatting at the Fallen flies for ammo.
  
  What makes a good boss? Challenge and transformation. Imagine if you had to shoot the big ball in the eye until the eye broke, then he unfolded and spurted legs, while he shot fire and chased you around the map. That'd be cool, right? Then what if you could shoot his legs off and he turned into a snake or something, and slithered in and out of holes in the wall, while shooting at you? All while hurling threats and insults your way, in English. Respawning could be truly disabled, with checkpoints when he transformed. You'd have to learn his tactics, and work with your fireteam to take him down together.
  
  Just a thought. A thought that I came up with in two minutes. Why can't professional game designers? Nope, just floaty teleporting ball with eye.
  
  
• Enemies infinitely respawn. Now, this is honestly to be expected in Explore mode. I mean, the world would feel empty pretty quickly if the enemies were permanently dead. However, they turned up the dial quite a bit too much. When I'm making my way through the plane graveyard, and the Fallen I just killed on the other side of the plane where I just was, start shooting at me ten seconds after I killed them, that's ridiculous. Should limit the respawning to explore mode. Having them respawn while I'm on a mission makes it feel like I'm not making any progress.
  
  
• The missions themselves are really boring to replay. It's because all of the same enemies spawn in the same place every time, and they always do the same things. There's never any variance to the way they play out. It certainly doesn't help that there's very little variety to the combat.
  
  Maybe if there were more vehicles you could drive, or if you could play the game stealthily. Anything to switch it up a little would be nice. The best I can come up with is if you go through a mission with a sniper the first time, and a shotgun the next. Not great, but, better than nothing.
  
  
• The aliens have no personality. They feel like soulless robot monsters. I never get the sense that they're scared, or happy, or curious. They either don't know I'm there, or they do. When they notice me, they're not shocked to see me, nor do they beat their chest with pride at the prospect of a challenge. It's just "TARGET ACQUIRED: FIRING MAIN CANNON."
  
  Compare this, once more, to Halo. Or Gears of War. You can understand the Covenant and the Locust Horde's motivations, and get a sense of what they're feeling. They'll taunt you, get angry when their brothers die, or run from you if they're scared. At least, the Grunts and Jackals will. You get the feeling that these are sentient beings, with thoughts and emotions. Something I'm not getting from Destiny.
  
  
• It's very frustrating to be doing some exploring, and run into invincible enemies. I finally find something that could be a challenge in this game, and they completely stop players from even being able to try. If someone wants to test their might, I think they should be able to. Instead, they're met with instant death.
  
  In most cases, it doesn't seem like they're blocking off areas not meant to be seen with these enemies. If you sneak past them, the most you'll find is a common loot chest, or a dead ghost. Any areas they're actually blocking (such as the Jovian Complex), are sealed with visible walls. If they're afraid of players acquiring loot that's out of their league, I'm sure they could just make it not drop that loot if the monster is killed by a player below a certain level.
  
  
• Bungie still has a problem with invisible walls. This started with Halo 3, and continued though ODST, Reach, and now Destiny. A great portion of the fun I had in Halo 2 was escaping and exploring the campaign's normal bounds. Remember that giant mountain in the background of Delta Halo? I've been to its peak, and looked down to see the entirety of the mission below. I've circumnavigated the lake that houses Regret's temple, and discovered another lake beyond the mountains.
  
  Invisible walls completely prevent things like this. It really kills a lot of exploration. They talk up how important exploration is, even have a mode specifically for it, yet they heavily restrict it. How am I supposed to explore the map if everywhere I go, I'm hitting an arbitrary soft wall? Combine this with the soft-kill zones (return to battlefield zones, for you non-forgers), and you're left with a game that routinely cuts off your exploring, instead of encouraging it.
  
  
• Randomly running into other players while out and about is pretty cool. Why can't I talk to them? I think proximity chat should be enabled within shouting distance, communicating outside of hand gestures seems important to me. Maybe they want to show me something, or they heard a story from another guy earlier and they want to share. As long as there's a quick and easy way to mute them in case they're annoying, and an option to turn it off altogether, why not let us talk? Seems pretty unsociable in a game that's supposedly designed for the opposite.
  

PvP, and being the best in the world (briefly).

More story!

Before we knew anything about the PvP portion of Destiny, I had high hopes for it. Bungie has traditionally valued balance in their competitive multiplayer offerings. An equal start for all players, with the better man, or woman, coming out on top. When the Alpha was made public, and the streamers started streaming, I took to Twitch and found MLG pro Ninja's channel. What I saw was a game that looked like Call of Duty. Everyone starts with whatever gun they want, the time to kill was less than a second, and everyone occasionally gets the ability to press (button) to instantly kill someone even if you don't deserve it.

I wasn't happy. I wanted another Bungie arena shooter masterpiece. I wanted a game that took skill to succeed at. A game that rewarded you for being better than your opponent. I got on DBO to complain, but Schooly had it covered. So, going into the beta, I thought the campaign would be awesome, and expected the multiplayer to suck. I was wrong, but not about multiplayer.

During the early access timeframe, there weren't a whole lot of people on. I kept seeing the same thirty or so names over and over. I played with several Bungie employees, a bunch of Microsoft employees, the guy who makes RoosterTeeth's music, and, oddly enough, a Treyarch higher-up. With so few people in the Beta, and only a small portion of them searching in the Crucible, I didn't get any matches in for a few days. On the 18th, the planets aligned and I participated in what I can only assume were the first two matches of the Beta on Xbox 360. The vast majority of the regulars on this forum have played Halo with me more than a few times. You know my style. Well, Bungie let me spawn with a sniper rifle, and my kill to death ratio for my first Destiny match was 4.25. I don't think I should spawn with the tools I need to dominate, I should have to earn them.

With a K/D of 2:0 and a W/L of 13:1, as far as I can tell, I was the best Destiny player on 360 in the world :p. At least for the private Beta. Followed closest by our very own Bluerunner. I'm pretty sure his is due to the monstrosity known as the Interceptor. That thing is exactly what I imagine it would be like if the Reach Banshee and Gauss Hog joined forces to make the ultimate overpowered vehicle. It is unstoppable if the driver has even the slightest bit of skill. Bungie apparently learned nothing from Reach. With the Sparrow or Pike, It's pretty easy to take the driver's head off. The Interceptor however, I can't even see the pilot's head unless I have a pretty good height advantage, and the low health of players only exacerbates the effectiveness of this beast.

Bungie's philosophy with Destiny is clear; they want bad players to succeed where they shouldn't. It's all very frustrating when, like Halo 4, there's a good multiplayer game hiding in there. It's just covered in shit.

• First, let's go over the Aim-Down-Sights mechanic. This doesn't necessarily have to be bad, but in most shooters, to make aiming down the sights worthwhile, they make hip firing very inaccurate. Destiny isn't extreme about it, but hip fire is tempered a bit. The other half of the equation is that aiming down the sights normally reduces player speed. Run or Gun (thanks, Uberfoop). This one Destiny is guilty of. When combined, they serve to make aiming easier for bad players, in a game that already has more than sufficient bullet-magnetism and aim-assist. It decreases the skill gap.
  
  It might be okay if hip fire was always accurate and reliable, and aiming down the sights didn't slow you down at all. Just zoomed in a bit.
  
  
• Next, the low time to kill. This is one of the biggest problems. Although it isn't Call of Duty length, it's still far too short for personal skill to really matter. A low time to kill places greater emphasis on positioning (which you have little control over in a game with respawning), than a player's aiming skill. In Halo, Gears, or TF2, I can start taking damage from behind, and still have time to turn around and beat my attacker because I have better aim and strafing than they do. That's not the case in Destiny. If I'm getting shot from behind, I'm going to die.
  
  
• The ability to start the game with any gun eliminates the need to have weapons on the map. Without weapons on the map, there is no risk/reward to acquiring power weapons. You can automatically have a sniper rifle; you don't need to earn it. You don't need to hold down sniper spawn, you are sniper spawn. This discourages movement, and empowers camping. If I can sit on the rock above point B and rain down unlimited sniper ammo* on my unfortunate victims, why would I ever move?
  
  It encourages camping, even in an objective gametype, because killing gives your team points, too. The best strategy on any map was to hold B and C, and just slaughter the idiots who dared to approach them. There's no reason to take A, even though we easily could. If they have A, then we know where they'll spawn. We get more objective points than them because we hold two bases to their one, and we're out-slaying them because we're camping.
  
  *Every place I perch from is within twenty feet of an ammo box. I never run out.
  
  
• I imagine you're all familiar with the Interceptor by now. In the Beta, it was an unstoppable machine of death. I don't think I have to do much explaining here, it speaks for itself. Then it kills you. Over and over. If it sees you first, you're dead. If you see it first, run. If the driver is an idiot, you might be able to take it down with a super. If you get everyone on your team to focus fire on it, it'll go down eventually, but not without taking a few of you with it. What I like to do is get someone to distract it, them take the drivers head off from the side. However you do it, you had better do it fast. Otherwise, it could easily cost you the game.
  
  It's very fast and kills a Guardian or Sparrow in one hit. Pike in two. To fix it, I'd decrease its health by about two thirds, and slow its rate of fire. Even better, It could require a driver and a gunner. Would promote teamwork.
  
  Since the Beta, Bungie has announced that they'll nerf the Interceptor. I definitely agree with lowering its rate of fire and reducing the blast radius of the rockets. Not sure I understand what they mean by "arming shape", so no opinion on that. I do not agree with having only one on the map. With there being two, they always end up fighting each other. This usually results in one being destroyed, and the other being severely damaged*. That gives the team who lost their Interceptor a much better chance to take out the opponent's death machine.
  
  *In my time with the Beta, I couldn't tell if a vehicle being visually damaged mattered or not. Halo has had three different vehicle damage models. In Halo: CE, any damage done to your vehicle was permanent, and when your health ran out, you exploded. In Halo 2/3, your vehicle would take visible damage, but as long as the occupant(s) still had health, the vehicle was fine. In Reach/4, vehicles had health tiers. They could take damage to a point, and heal if that line wasn't crossed. If the damage went beyond that tier, the health was lost, but it still healed to the nearest tier. I wasn't able to determine how Destiny's vehicles worked.
  
  
• One of the most annoying parts of the multiplayer is the Supers. Titans can slam the ground and instantly kill everything around them. Warlocks can fly up in the air and Kamehameha wherever they're pointing, killing everyone in the area of effect. Hunters can go Super Saiyan and activate their golden guns, killing anything they almost hit. That's right, they don't actually have to hit their target to kill them, and they get three shots. They're acquired periodically (about every three minutes) throughout a match, and people don't actually have to do anything to get them. Getting points will speed up the process, but the super bar fills up automatically.
  
  This is bad because players don't deserve those kills. They didn't best their opponent, they're not more skilled. They just pressed LB+RB to get free kills. It really discourages going for the objective when you know somebody can just press a button and you're done. Combined with having any weapon on spawn, and the Interceptor, instant death is a very common occurrence in the Crucible. The worst part is, your enemy doesn't have to be better than you. The game basically kills you on its own just by being as broken as it is.
  
  
• The most important part of teamwork is communication. In Destiny, you can't talk to your teammates unless they're in your fireteam. I shouldn't have to invite people to my party just to talk to my teammates. Hand gestures aren't going to cut it. This one is pretty important, and not against their vision for the game. It may be my only point that has a chance of being fixed.
  
  Also, I'd like to have proximity chat. Demoralizing and angering the other team is always a good strategy, and sometimes teabagging isn't enough.

These are general problems and disappointments.

• There is a disturbing lack of customization in this game. I can't select the color of my armor, emblem, ship, or sparrow. There aren't many armors, emblems, ships, or sparrows to choose from in the first place. I think it'd be cool to customize your guns, too. I'd probably like my guns a lot more if I could choose their colors. Also, it looks like there are no custom games in Destiny at all. Which brings me to...
  
  
• The weak feature-set. With Halo, Bungie were pioneers in bringing PC game features to consoles, and inventing new systems of play. First it was the FPS alone, then they created matchmaking. Halo 3 added theater mode, Forge, rendered films, and screenshots. Nobody else was bringing all of these things to a console in one game. They were ahead of the pack. With Destiny, that is no longer the case. The way you run into players in the world randomly is seamless, and very cool. It's just disappointing that they felt things like theater weren't important enough to keep.
  
  Remember all of Pete's awesome mini-games? There will be none in Destiny. You won't see any Destiny machinimas*. Remember Hedge and BlueNinja's awesome panoramas? You aren't going to see any from Destiny*. Screenshots will always have a visible HUD and gun*. You won't be able to inspect your clips from every angle.
  
  *Unless they get creative and someone figures out how to disable the HUD and lower their gun.
  
  
• Destiny is being billed as a social game, but you can't talk to anybody unless you know them already. In Crucible, it's ridiculous that you can't hear your teammates if they aren't in your party. I've been over it, but communication is extremely important in multiplayer. In Campaign, proximity chat should be enabled for nearby Guardians. It would be cool as hell to run into another fireteam in the wild, swap war stories, and go about your respective business. Or tell them about a loot chest you just came from, or convince them to help you take out a high level enemy so you can get whatever it's guarding. Or whatever.
  
  
• They talk about how there are more guns in Destiny than in all the Halo games combined. There are actually only nine guns in Destiny, with many small variations. The guns within each of the nine gun classes operate the same, but have small statistical differences. Every scout rifle is functionally the same. Having a smaller magazine and a slightly lower rate of fire does not make it much different. There are also no alien guns you can get for yourself. That was pretty disappointing. Bungie has been pretty inventive with alien weaponry in the past, and I was looking forward to what they had come up with this time. Most of the enemies use the same Needler-like gun, and the player can't pick it up.

Just a few opinions.

• I'm not liking the art style. At least most of it. I like the designs for the aliens I saw, and the environments are great, but I hated most of the armor and weapons. Military weaponry is normally a shade of black or gray. Maybe some white. Some green or beige for camouflage. Having all of those weird colors really puts me off. Many of the weapons were also shaped weird, a lot of angles that just look off to me. It seems like Bungie was inspired by Mass Effect. Tried to make things look futurey, and I don't personally enjoy it.
  
  
• Not digging the UI, either. I understand they want to be different and eye-pleasing, but it seems like form over function. I just think it'd be faster and easier to scroll through options than to move the cursor around. That type of menu is popular for a reason: it works.

In conclusion.

With all the problems this game has, I won't be buying it. Not a chance. I still hope they address some of the points I brought up for Destiny 2. At least for Campaign. It's clear that they want to cater to people who are bad at games for the multiplayer. Campaign though, I could really enjoy it if they fix some of the massive problems for the sequel.

See you guys on November 11th.

-Mr. Snipe.

TL;DR

Campaign has these problems:

• There is very little variety to combat.
  
• There is no difficulty to speak of.
  
• Terrible boss design.
  
• Enemies infinitely respawn, and they do it fast.
  
• Missions are repetitive, not very replay-able.
  
• Enemies have no personality. They're just soulless monsters.
  
• Invincible enemies. Just make them really difficult to beat, making it impossible is very frustrating.
  
• There are invisible walls everywhere. Bungie talks up how important exploration is, yet they heavily restrict it.

Multiplayer has these problems:

• Aim Down Sights (Run or Gun).
  
• Low kill times (empowers campers / places more importance on positioning than personal skill).
  
• Spawn with any gun, no on-map weapons (REALLY empowers campers / makes instant death a very common occurrence / severely decreases importance of map control, or movement in general).
  
• The Interceptor is extremely overpowered.
  
• Superpowers (helps to make instant death a very common occurrence).
  
• Can't communicate with your teammates unless they're in your fireteam.

Some general problems:

• Lack of customization (can't choose my armor color / no custom games as far as I can tell).
  
• Weak feature-set (no theater mode / no map editor / no in-game screenshot tool).
  
• Not very social for a social game.
  
• "A bunch of guns" actually means nine guns, with a bunch of small variations. No alien guns.

My subjective problems:

• I hate the art style, mostly (the alien designs are pretty cool, though).
  
• I don't like the UI. It's slower to move the cursor around than to just scroll through options, and I hate sitting through the spaceship animations over and over.