... but I agree with the whole of your message, particularly the part involving enemy personality in gameplay.

Good to see someone didn't like it. Seriously.

Interestingly, I found snipers in The Crucible to be far far less problematic than in any Halo. Both on the giving and receiving side!

In Halo, especially on the bigger maps, a good sniper could easily ruin your day because there was no good defense. In Destiny, any sniper was highlighted by a red targeting light before he fired, which helped me evade, and if he got me I wasn't stuck with a short or medium range weapon and no vehicle at spawn. I could ALWAYS switch to my high zoom Scout Rifle or Sniper Rifle if I needed to. A large part of my frustration with Halo snipers was they had an almost absolute advantage unless I caught the one weapon respawn on the one side of the map I was safe on. Destiny's bring your own weapon, spawn your own vehicle setup really empowered me to fight back against snipers. I very much enjoyed it.

During the entire beta I was only really pinned down by a camping sniper once... A guy stayed up on the spawn point between B and C on the Venus map which allowed him to fire into part of the B control point. He took me down a couple of times before I realized what he was doing, but I had the tools I needed to fight him. I probably died another couple of time but it never felt unfair in that "oh there's a sniper up on the ridge on Blood Gulch who I simply cannot touch" way that Halo sometimes did.

And on the offensive side, having a few rounds of sniper ammo per respawn got me to use a sniper rifle more. In Halo I'd always leave it for someone else because chances were SOMEBODY was a better sniper than me and there was only one rifle to go around. In Destiny I did my fair share of sniping because the game empowered me to do so. I still prefer a midrange primary / close range secondary setup, but sniping was an option for me in Destiny where it usually wasn't in Halo.

As for the rest, I largely disagree. :)

All this from a beta, huh?

Cool.

Okay.

Well that was a lot. Do you feel better now that you got it all out? ;)

Interesting points and thoughts in your post. Some I agree with, some I don't, some that didn't apply to me.

Let's get the easy one out of the way: Multi-player. I hated it. I had zero fun in it. I played 3 games and could not bring myself to play more. I'm not pro. You know this. That's why I typically don't play slayer only as I'm a better objective player.

The objective in the beta was a sham. Maybe there will be more in the future, IDK. For now, I agree with 90% of what you and Skooy said. The fact that I could pull out my shotgun whenever I wanted felt like I was cheating. Cheating!

I also found out what the new BR was- Do you have an auto rifle? Yeah? Use that. You don't need anything else.

I won't be stepping into the crucible. My G/F played too, (without my tainted opinion mind you) and other than a few casual Halo games this was her first MP experience and she did the same thing- played 3 games and hated it. She even told me how much fun she was having in campaign and then how frustrating MP was. Her skill level is sub-Kermit (no offense, kerm). She didn't get free super kills, even though Bungie pretty much gave em to her. So, there is still some challenge, I guess :P

(If she reads this, she'll hit me later)

Enemies

You bring up an interesting point about the enemies and personalities. Perhaps I was one of the lucky ones? I can recall SEVERAL times where I was a level 8, and I'd run up on two lone level 2 Dregs in explore mode and they'd run away from me.

I also recall a couple of times where I had a Thrall (Flood zombie)cower from me, like it would shake it's head and cower. It's possible that is NOT what it was doing, and I couldn't duplicate it, but I swear it happened once I greased a bunch of his friends or something.

As for the rest of the enemies... you've got a point. I can't recall any of the other enemies at any other time really doing anything other than staying in their little areas. Sometimes a Knight would pull up a shield when I was donging on him from afar, but he'd just stay there. If I did that shit to a Hunter in Halo, he starts walking towards you to make you regret it.

The Tank was boring, and just like a scarab but smaller. Shoot leg, fall down, shoot glowy part for extra damage.

Now for the Sphere boss (Sepiks Prime) I had a way different experience, but I was running all over the map too, so maybe that made a difference? Basically, he'd follow me everywhere and turn on his vacuum beam and kill me if he got me in a corner. Lol, there was one time he was with the two randoms, and I was donking on him from afar and he just tele-ported away. I looked for him and could not find him, then I looked up, and then I died. I thought that was pretty fun haha. But other than that, he was no different from the little guys and ultimately just took longer to kill.

Maybe I was too busy to notice, but looking back, I see it now. They were pretty bland. I hope that was just beta being beta.

Weapons

Everything seems the same to me. A rifle is a rifle is a rifle blah blah blah. I had the same feeling of overload that I did the first time I played MW2 where it was like "Oh shit, how do I know what guns are the good guns? There are so many guns...they all look the same and yet are slightly different! What do I use?".

I didn't bother looking at names- I won't remember that shit. I found one I liked later on that was basically the DMR from Reach. That was my favorite. Then I found that same gun, but it was named differently for some raisin, but the only thing that was noticeably different was a larger mag. Hooray!

I said the same thing about alien weapons. Hopefully you can use them later, and they were just hiding that for the beta. I noticed that when I got killed by enemies that it would tell me the name of what they used to kill me. That bodes well I think.

Melee pisses me the fuck off and I played as Titan, so I should have loved it right?

Well I play sneaky. Multiple times I would sneak up on a group of Fallen, and I'd melee them in the back and it wouldn't insta kill them. This needs to be a thing. Maybe not for Captains and larger boss type enemies, but I should be able to ninja pretty much any lower type of enemy, regardless of level. Also, why no assassinations? The hunter knife in particular begs for it! It's not like Microsoft and Halo own the term or action- what gives??

I like the type-damage mechanic- very Metroid Prime-ish. I like that certain races are move vulnerable to certain types, but that should apply to more than shields. That mechanic does encourage variety in weapon use, which is a good thing. However, in the beta, with fusion rifles for example it just meant that I used the exact same gun (3 slots) but with a different buff on each one. That's not exactly variety. That's like a peanut butter sandwich with white, wheat, or other. It's still a sandwich.

Art Style and world stuff: I must be missing something, but this game does not feel or look like Halo to me. It SOUNDS like Halo, but that is it, to me. Old Russia didn't wow me, but was nice to look at. The Moon however was fan-freakin-tastic and I want to go back. Did you get to do the moon? The hive stuff actually had atmosphere and was very crypt-like. Also, are they called Hive "Tube" or Hive "Tomb" ships? Anywho, that area was cool and exploring it with Paddy and Bones was the highlight of the Beta for me. I've got a good feeling for the rest.

I think the characters look stupid as hell. I don't get the obsession with capes and pieces of cloth with clashing colors and emblems on my character. I don't get the tribal face paints yet future everything else. I don't get the Decepticon looking Space ships. Why should I spend money one one? So I can look at it? It doesn't do anything. Why should I care about it?

I have to disagree with most of your story complaints because there is much more to see, and hopefully the dead ghost\grimore cards fill in gaps and make you want "more". As long as I don't have to leave the game to go read them.

There are no characters I feel close to, or care about. When you are in a fire team with other players and you advance in the story, the cutscene only shows YOU. YOU are the center. YOU are the nexus. YOU are the only thing that matters, and thats fucking stupid. When Paddy + Bones + I play, I didn't see their characters. THEY were the ones who completed the end mission objective, yet I'm the one getting thanked?

C'mon. Halo 3 and Reach did this much better. Everybody was included, even if it was minor.

My Musings.

Destiny IS an MMO. I don't care who says otherwise. It has all the grindy bits that make it one. Your sole motivator outside of the story is a quest for stuff. It's still fun, but I don't know why. I don't like that we can't get more than 3-6 in a group. I was REALLY looking forward to getting 16 of us together and just steam-rolling the countryside, but it is not to be.

I'm not a huge social person, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to play Destiny alone. Yet, for the majority of it, I WAS alone. Very alone. For the reasons you and everyone else have pointed out.

Yet for such a social game, it's the least social thing I've played in a lot of respects.

I'm getting it, but I'm not worried about day 1, pre-orders or any of that stuff. I want to play more campaign with you guys, and that's pretty much it.

I agree wholeheartedly with you that Destiny doesn't want you to fail. Destiny wants everyone to do well, everyone to be a winner. That's why they don't show you deaths, you get supers for just standing and a sure kill if you can just point in someones general direction. It wants you to get multi-kills and to feel like a tank (in MP and solo). There is no penalty for death. The only times that there was any, was the no-respawn campaign zones, and hoping that my random teammates didn't die. Sometimes that was tense. Beyond that, I did get the feeling that something was off. It felt too easy. Even with difficulty bumped up as high as it would let me, all that really did was make things more bullet spongy. The enemies didn't really get smarter.

Again, I hope most of that was beta being beta. We'll see!

I agree with almost everything you pointed out.

TL;DR

Campaign has these problems:

• There is very little variety to combat.

Very much this, probably the biggest reason why the story missions are so boring. The only enemies that really require you to think are husks because they run staight at you, the others just hang back and shoot.

[*]There is no difficulty to speak of.

The difficulty seems to be solely due to the enemies being more or less resistant to your shots depending upon your level, a pretty lazy design choice.

[*]Terrible boss design.

I am really hoping they improve the bosses in the final build, or maybe low level bosses are meant to be overly simplistic in order to coddle beginners. There is a lot left to be desired from the bosses present in the beta.

[*]Enemies infinitely respawn, and they do it fast.
[*]Missions are repetitive, not very replay-able.
[*]Enemies have no personality. They're just soulless monsters.

This is a huge one, some halfway decent voice acting for enemies would have gone a long way here. I miss the grunts and elites of the good old days.

[*]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.
[/list]

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.

I wonder if Bungie felt the same way about Halo multiplayer when designing Destiny as 343i did when designing Halo 4. It was too complex for most people to grasp. Maps and spawn locations are too hard to learn, so lets make it easier because players are too stupid to remember. :) Because players have such short attention spans, kill times need to be shorter, we don't want players dozing off during enemy encounters. :) Oh, and the voice chat really chaps my hide, I am really hoping that Bungie changes their mind about this. There is no reason why a six player team should be split communication-wise. If it weren't for party chat, this detail alone would kill any fun of PvP. It's not novel in any way whatsoever, it's just a huge pain in the ass.

Some general problems:

• Lack of customization (can't choose my armor color / no custom games as far as I can tell).

I think this will change with the addition of shaders, which weren't present in the beta.

[*]Weak feature-set (no theater mode / no map editor / no in-game screenshot tool).

Indeed, really felt like they cut serious corners in this aspect.

[*]Not very social for a social game.

Oh, hey, I see other players, let's wave at them and dance. It's so social!! :)

[*]"A bunch of guns" actually means nine guns, with a bunch of small variations. No alien guns.
[/list]

I was a little disappointed with the guns as well. Borderlands did a far better job creating guns with real personality. These guns seem fairly similar, but with minor differences in handling characteristics.

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.

I know how you feel, Snipe, it's like I was shortchanged, it's like Bungie was forced to cut corners. Lots of small details were simply overlooked it seems. Features and details you thought were commonplace were simply left out.

Even though I am fairly harsh in my criticism, I am still looking forward to Destiny, not because it looks like a good game, but because it's something different instead of the same games I have already been playing for 3-4 years. That's how desperate I am. Even a halfway decent game beats playing Reach, Halo 4, and MW2 for another year.

But, I am really hoping that the final release is far improved over the beta, because I feel Destiny has potential to be a great game. I know Bungie can do better.

Most of what you said is very easily rebuffed simply by saying it was just a beta. I actually think you are going through Destiny withdrawal and trying to combat it by bashing the game and trolling these forums. However, I'm also bored.

Campaign has these problems:

There is very little variety to combat. There will be a lot more variety as the game progresses beyond Earth and level 8.
There is no difficulty to speak of. There are Nightfall Missions and Raids, you know the game doesn't really start until level 20 right?
Terrible boss design. Beta Bosses were too easy. If those same bosses are much more aggressive in the Nightfall version, problem solved.
Enemies infinitely respawn, and they do it fast. I like to shoot things.
Missions are repetitive, not very replay-able. The first mission on the moon felt plenty replayable, but again Nightfall is where it's at.
Enemies have no personality. They're just soulless monsters. I remember one Fallen screaming a bunch of crazy stuff at me, but in general I get how you feel. Also, soulless monsters can be quite scary :p
Invincible enemies. Just make them really difficult to beat, making it impossible is very frustrating. I think that was just because we had our levels limited in Beta.
There are invisible walls everywhere. Bungie talks up how important exploration is, yet they heavily restrict it. I had a lot of fun exploring, but a few invis walls did push me to my death.
Multiplayer has these problems:

Aim Down Sights (Run or Gun). Yep.
Low kill times (empowers campers / places more importance on positioning than personal skill). Camping can work, but in general leads to less kills. Although I think the way radar works definitely can encourage camping.
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). I'm sure they can tweak ammo pretty easily. Less ammo makes those ammo spawns more important.
The Interceptor is extremely overpowered. Already nerfed.
Superpowers (helps to make instant death a very common occurrence).Super them right back. Bottom line, supers are fun.
Can't communicate with your teammates unless they're in your fireteam. Must be changed.
Some general problems:

Lack of customization (can't choose my armor color / no custom games as far as I can tell).Armor can be shaded later on. It does seem strange there wasn't a way to play against friends.
Weak feature-set (no theater mode / no map editor / no in-game screenshot tool). You can record on xBone and broadcast on twitch. I think they will do more in this area in the future. Some features are tougher when you throw four consoles into the mix.
Not very social for a social game. Needs area, game, and/or proximity chat.
"A bunch of guns" actually means nine guns, with a bunch of small variations. No alien guns. There's a lot of exotics and they do some crazy shit.
My subjective problems:

I hate the art style, mostly (the alien designs are pretty cool, though). We haven't seen that much yet, but I love the way it looks.
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. Agreed.

[*]Superpowers (helps to make instant death a very common occurrence).

Add an indicator on the enemy's life bar indicating when their super is charged. Problem solved. If you see and still choose to engage, then you deserve to lose.

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.

Having first played each Halo on Heroic I wasn't really scared until I went back with skulls on in Legendary. And then the fear came.

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.

By the time I was done with the Beta and had gone through the Strike a few times with friends we had developed a few different approaches based off of whatever we were facing and while I'm hoping that the Vex/Cabal mix things up really more I was really happy with the variety of gameplay I was getting out of the enemies.

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?

I loved almost everything about the Strike EXCEPT for the bosses. The sponginess of them was way too much. The Spider Tank was a lot more fun in the public event where you could approach it from any angle and had more than 3 guardians slowly poking away at it. I really really really hope there's going to be more to the bosses than a super large amount of HP.

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 mentioned it earlier, but I found there to be variety in the enemies and how I approached them. I hope there are more like the Hive Knight who had a shield that I began to anticipate and would use my movement mode to get an angle on them to finish them off at an angle.

[*]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.

I saw the challenge in some of the bounties. Trying to get through Strikes and some of the other higher level content without dying was pretty thrilling.

[*]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.

I appreciated the enemies repopulating areas. When I'm playing campaign and it ends up being this massively empty battlefield, it lacks a certain sense of urgency. Having the Hive and Fallen crawling all over wherever I go felt like we were indeed being encroached upon and it was my job to help push them back.

[*]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.

Yeah, I hope these get more interesting. In the Alpha replaying That Wizard Came From The Moon on the harder difficulty felt a lot different.

[*]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.

I just simply do not care about this. I was really impressed by the spaces that Bungie put together for us and had fun exploring them with my friends. We checked out random caves, ran into crashed Hive pods, knocked each other off cliffs. And ran all around. I'd sometimes climb a building and fall because of the barrier and would shrug and move on. I hear people complain about these but don't hear any reasonable solutions. It takes only a few randoms who aren't trying to see untextured nonsense but still randomly get launched beyond the barriers for people to start crying about the game being broken and them losing progress. It's a lot of work to make a polished experience the way Bungie has and a lot more work to then maintain that experience without a few barriers, these complaints rarely acknowledge that.

[*]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.

It was so amazing and awesome to interact with so many people without ever once hearing a random ignorant bigot spewing nonsense.

[/list]

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.

So you have both had some of the best performances of your life AND the skill gap is smaller? So you're saying it's easier for bad players to get kills and also easier for you to dominate? That doesn't make any sense. The more I played I was able to really fine tune my play style to keep myself alive and my enemies dead. Supers became something I was able to start avoiding (When someone is coming and you're standing IN a zone you hold, just GET OUT, they're likely to super the zone blindly).

• 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.

I've always appreciated Halo's slower TTK, allowed for more protracted battles. It makes me think about one of the comments made about Halo's AI, that by beefing up the elite's shield and health, they would live longer and appear more intelligent by virtue you able to see them react to you for longer. I'm inclined to think the same applies to PvP.

[*]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 never bothered with the sniper and did reasonably well, hovered above 2.0K/D for most of the beta and fell to 1.9 at the end of it. Whenever some sniper was trying to hold down a spot, I'd just sneak on over and run them down with my auto rifle. They never were as awful as they would be in Halo when they would effectively gain and never secede map control and subsequently control over sniper spawn and dominate the rest of the map. There would still be a few steamrollings at the hands of organized teams against randoms, but that SHOULD happen occasionally.

I also never ran into an enemy team that could hold down 2 points against my team for the whole match. We were able to pull it off but it's really hard without the data to determine if the camping theory you have is actually a problem.

[*]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.

Yeah curious to see how the nerfing goes and agree with your assessment of only having one on the map, the dueling interceptors was fine by me.

[*]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.

They deserve those kills as much as someone with a rocket launcher in halo deserved those kills. I found it got really important to maximize your super not only to generate more orbs of light but also that a single kill was a waste. It's another thing for me to get much better at more from an awareness and from an executing it. Also forces more communication with my Fireteam as we try to super chain.

[*]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.

Ugh, people like you are why we don't get proximity chat. Being an asshole is not cool, especially if you're winning. Seriously. Glad teabagging doesn't appear to be coming over to Destiny in the way it was in Halo.

[/list]

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.

Yeah, hope there's some HUD and gun lowering, the screenshot/video community suffers for it

[*]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.

Nah, we apparently have folks who think harassing each other on the internet is cool. I'd like to not hear them, ever, thanks. And no, I don't think assholes should get their way when it comes to things like this... or anything really.

[*]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.
[/list]

I'm going to miss the crazy variations of guns that they had with Halo. This is one of the biggest differences for me.

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.

Eh, I'm a huge fan of the art style so far. It's grand. But you're right, very much an opinion.

Also I largely agree with the UI analysis in this video.

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.

This game became a must buy after the Alpha, and a BUY BUY BUY after the beta for me. Also I played it on 360, PS4, and XB1 and was blown away by how much better the next-gen versions looked. They played the same, but definitely looked a lot better. That may have factored into your experience.

I don't take issue with most of what you said... not because I agree with most of it --but because I think you made many valid points about your experience with the beta. I greatly enjoyed the experience overall, including the multiplayer, but I definitely understand why you hated it so I have no issue with that.

However, I would like to rebut much of this section:

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.

As others have pointed out (not that you weren't aware already), this beta was very much a limited look at the game in many ways, especially the things I quoted above.

The lack of customization options was not indicative of the experience we will have in September and in the following months/years. Bungie has hinted that there will be more customization options when picking your character's appearance. In the beta, you could get different colored (and powered) sparrows; I acquired varying colors of the same armor, and it was clear that we will be able to apply shaders and emblems to both our armor and weapons.

Some of the features you lament being absent could very well be part of the final game. Theater mode and saved films might or might not be gone, but even if they are, they are arguably unnecessary with today's one-button sharing options. Who says machinima tools like dropping your HUD and weapon won't be there? Who says custom games won't be an option? Some of these things are less likely to be in the final game than others (I, personally, think custom games are likely whereas theater mode is almost surely gone), but in any case we obviously don't know yet so I think it is very presumptuous to dismiss the game based on such a limited beta sampling.

I absolutely understand why Bungie has made the decisions regarding audio chat. They are clearly trying to get away from the stereotypical atmosphere of online multiplayer filled with racist, foul-mouthed teenagers and teebagging. I wholly support that goal, and I think the steps they have taken are very effective in making Destiny a welcoming place to all. Sure, I think it's odd that you can't talk to the rest of your team in multiplayer by default, but I will gladly accept that inconvenience if it means I won't have to worry about what I and my kids hear.

Finally, I think the issues you have with the "lack" of guns are presumptuous like some of the other complaints you have. I expect the exotic and legendary weapons (that we didn't get to experience in the limited beta) to look and feel like different weapons. But even still -- even among just a single weapon type like the ARs that you say are all the same gun -- I think the Sahara felt wildly different from the Cydonia, for example. Bungie has also strongly hinted that alien weapons will be available -- I think it was in the video tour of the tower on IGN that they made a comment about a particular corner lounge that would have some "freaky" stuff for sale, and on that particular wall there were alien-looking weapons and stuff hanging.

In sum, I won't take issue with your dislike of the multiplayer because you have valid points and it is obvious that the multiplayer design philosophy is (a) not Halo and (b) not going to change. However, we clearly have not experienced much of what Destiny will have to offer. I have faith that some of the features you lamented being missing will actually be in the final game, and that the story and strikes will have a lot more variability and interesting qualities than what we have seen so far.

That was a good read. Some general thoughts:

Regarding everyone (potentially) having snipers and (relatively) unlimited ammo: I wonder what effect this will have on big, open maps. Will such a map even be viable? Consider Valhalla from Halo, but if everyone could choose Snipers. Would anyone ever have anything else? No mid or long range skirmishing, just sniping.

Regarding MP quick deaths: I wonder how much emergent complexity (i.e. counters, buffs, etc) might be found over time. I hate dying cheaply, and I did a lot of that in the beta crucible. But I wonder if it would be a different story if I had a bulked-up warlock with damage reduction buffs or something.

Regarding it being too easy for you: agreed. My impression was that great players (i.e. you, not me) will vastly outpace even good players, leading to lopsided matches wherever they go. Combine 2 or 3 great players in a party, and abandon all hope ye randoms who enter the Crucible.

Regarding customization: I believe Bungie only showed a tiny taste. Shaders, exploration, new gizmos, whatever. Not saying that invalidates your concerns, only that I need a bit more exposure.

Regarding vehicles: I was ambivalent in general, but hated them with a passion in MP. The pike was fine for getting from point A to B, but the vehicles in general lack personality.

Regarding the enemies: Overall, I enjoyed fighting the AI, though I do recognize the repetitive nature. Killing them generally felt good to me, but remember, I'm not the player you are. Sometimes I wonder if your skill and experience work against you in this regard. Additionally, I hope that like customization and exploration, Bungie was greatly limiting exposure to the baddies.

Regarding the general nature of story: Underwhelming, for a start. Much has been made of lack of narrative, and I cannot disagree. Again, hoping that the real game will have more, and that the story will be emergent over time. After all, Halo had one story running on top, but a far more interesting one running below - one that only came into focus (for me) after I stumbled into HBO.

You had a number of good change suggestions, especially in regards to transforming bosses and co-op nature of vehicles. Overall, I found your article to be enjoyable, insightful, and reasonable.

I will be getting Destiny, primarily for the co-op story mode with my friends. But I believe MCC and H5 (hopefully!) will be serving my MP needs going forward.

I agree with the general response that many of your complaints aren't valid against Destiny as a whole, only the Beta. Example, Jackal shields. Cabal will have shields as well. There are color shaders in the game (you could see them in the store!), they just weren't accessible in the Beta. Interceptor. Invisible walls are a quality issue, arguing against them is silly--but I think this is more of a wording thing. I would support more playable space, but accessing nonplayable space isn't the way to accomplish that.

I really enjoyed the Destiny Beta and can't wait for the final game. Destiny has a lot of unique characteristics that set it apart from Halo, and I can understand if you don't like them. You're certainly not the only one, and certainly Destiny isn't perfect. I just actually like a lot of the things you suggest are problems. I could argue point by point, but it's not like I'm going to convince you to like the game or something.

I think I have been playing Halo wrong for a while. I enjoyed the Campaign, and the Multiplayer just fine. Some of the best games I have played.

After playing Destiny, Halo feels slow and clunky. I love the pace of Destiny. A lot of your disappointments can be boiled down to pace. In Destiny the pace is at least 2x faster than Halo. Enemies go down faster, and you can mow down a lot of them quickly (until you get to stronger classes). Personally, I love it and I feel waaaay more powerful than I did in Halo, although I am still vulnerable.

Shanks will flank you, Invis Vandals will try to sneak up and melee you, Knights play D, Thralls run up and try to overrun you, or they hide around inside corners and wait. Captains sit back (and remind me a lot of low level Covenant Elites), Orge's were a whole other class altogether. We have seen less than half of the enemy types, and I am already having a blast.

What I read in your complaints was this: "I wish this were Halo and because it isn't Halo, it isn't any good, or fun." I had a blast, I think PVP is very balanced. I learned a lot in the 4 days I played the Beta at less than a third of the total level cap (I'm guessing 30 is the top). The people I played got better. The moon was amazing. I loved Old Russia. I have several friends in town that I played with and we all had a blast. We didn't win every game, we had some GREAT nail biters (more frequent towards the end). I felt like I could win even when I was seen first (switch to shotgun, maybe the fusion rifle? Drop my grenade and duck around a corner, double jump, sprint away, throw my super? I HAD TONS of options. In Halo, my only real choice was to re engage the person with the same weapons (unless I happened to have a diff weapon picked up - and there were good chances if it were one on one - the loser would just run away before dying).

I enjoyed Halo, but I LOVE Destiny's playstyle. They are very different. What cracks me up is all the journalists and reviewers complaining how Destiny is just "Halo with space magic." Are you kidding? These are very different games.

I am bummed you didn't enjoy Destiny. I hope you enjoy The Master Chief Collection and Halo 5.

That seems to be what your main problems boil down to. The ones I don't agree with, anyway :P

Destiny does feel very similar to other games at the start - and I think it's supposed to. The leveling and early story missions almost seem like one giant tutorial - slowly introducing you to all the powers and options and giving you time to use each one.

But dude, if you play it exactly the way you've played Halo for 11 years (rifle+sniper), then of course it isn't going to feel much different!
It's more interesting the more you exploit the uniqueness of it and - perhaps crucially - be willing to try different things and not be amazing at them instantly.

I surprised myself when I started to use a shotgun towards the end of the Beta: after an adjustment period I did really well with it and had more fun than standing on perches waiting for fools to enter my scopes.

Compare in Halo: it was totally possible to beat Halo 3 Legendary by mostly standing back and dinging the enemies with BR and Carbine fire - but that wasn't the most FUN way. Getting closer, PP, grenades, swords, occasional rockets, assassinations - so much better.

So, your expecatations are letting you down here: take advantage of what Destiny IS and what it DOES allow rather than what anyone has told you it is or your own delusions about what you want it to be or think it should be.

Bungie's communication about it was kinda crap. In the end, just playing it seems to have won a lot of people over. Not you, obviously - other people.

Elitism goes to the tired, old arguments I heard a trillion times in Halo on 'skill-gap', 'everyone should start equal', "balance", "these noobs shouldn't get this many kills on me!" and "the only kind of skill is the the kind I value". Bored of all that.

Truth is: imbalance and asymmetry is actually fun, having a chance at some measure of success is fun, getting to actually use cool weapons like Snipers and shotguns is fun and in the end, you can't even have competition if no-one actually plays (e.g. all those competitive playlists in Halo that ALWAYS DIED).

Campaign has these problems:

• There is very little variety to combat.

I'm hoping level design changes things up later in the game. But, just play it differently! You have all the tools on you now.

[*]There is no difficulty to speak of.

Oh, try doing the story missions on the higher difficulty when you're under-leveled: it's hard, just not in a fun way!

[*]Terrible boss design.

They're certainly not inspiring.

[*]Enemies infinitely respawn, and they do it fast.

Yeah, hoping this get's toned down.

[*]Missions are repetitive, not very replay-able.

Disagree in general. But, mission openings certainly get samey after you get your sparrow since the quickest thing is to just get on it and ride to the objective.

[*]Enemies have no personality. They're just soulless monsters.

Agree with this one. I think perhaps they should be louder and clearer. Make their presence known more. As it is, they kinda just mumble in the background.

- Invincible enemies. Just make them really difficult to beat, making it impossible is very frustrating.

Nah, they made them 'very hard' in the Alpha (1 damage per shot) and it was just silly. This won't last long as you level up.

Multiplayer problems
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.

Yeah, that's kinda what they were talking about when they said Halo 2 'created a monster.'

[*] ... I hate sitting through the spaceship animations over and over.

Spaceship is the loading screen. But you already knew that, right?

With all the problems this game has, I won't be buying it. Not a chance.

Ah, well.

Except for that one game where those guys destroyed us with fusion rifles, we had fun. Therefore your argument is invalid.

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?

I find you’re being WAY over the top here. ANY game require you invest a basic amount in its story. Complaining about this is pretty weak.

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.

Do you want a real answer here or are you just complain to hear yourself to complain? The real answer is most of humanity was killed and there’s only a few places left in the solar system even capable of making new guns… and none of those places are a corridor in an abandoned Russian cosmodrome.

Also, I don't know who this Tyrion person is. Referring to one character as another is unnecessarily grating, but then that's probably what you were going for. I wish you had taken a more mature approach. :/

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.

There was even less reason to be scared during the initial run to the Pillar of Autumn’s bridge back in 2001. There’s real, honest complaints about a game and then there what you’ve been doing these first few paragraphs…

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.

Again, you don’t seem to have even given the game a fair chance. Why should anyone take your story complaints seriously? I’m going to go ahead and skip forward a ways since you weren’t even trying to give a serious impression of the game.

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.

Meh. I think you rationalized away the Destiny unit’s protections. Fallen Captains are very much like Elites. Hive Knights can form an invincible shield. I expect the Cabal units with big shields to act somewhat like Hunters, and who knows what the Vex do. Are there a couple more units in all of Halo than in the Destiny beta that require a second step for an easy kill? Perhaps. But you’re blowing that small difference way out of proportion.

[*]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.

The Beta was limited to a low level cap and what seemed to be tutorial level missions. It seems foolish to judge the entirety of Destiny by it, just as one wouldn’t judge all of Halo by its first level.

[*]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.

At the very least you can shoot off the four shot blue pulse launcher. Doesn’t completely address your boss complaint, but… well woe to those that use the term “only option.” :)

[*]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.

This one I agree with a bit. But then I also don’t want the world permanently depopulated by the fireteam in front of me.

[*]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.

I’ve seen enemies taunt when they’ve shot me off a sparrow. Lower class enemies will often flee and hide if you beat their handlers. Are their emotions less obvious? Of course, it’s pretty hard to beat “Leader dead! Run away!” I think the emotional states of surprised, afraid, taunting, etc are present, however. I’m going to have to play more to really get a feel if they unit’s individual actions are under exposed or not grand enough to notice. It is possible that they are…

[*]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.

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I agree there should be more options. I think the way it was in the beta is an ok default, especially for a T rated game.

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

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.

I deleted my main character the last day of the beta so I don’t have a link to the stats, but I got occasional 3 and 4 K/D games as well. And I didn’t do it by camping with a one shot kill rifle. I attribute some of those good games to most not being used to Destiny but some of it was certainly me adjusting and doing well. My first two dozen games or so my K/D was well below 0.5…

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.

Yeah, completely disagree here. I’ve already gone into why. To quickly repeat though, there is a massive difference between a player succeeding where they shouldn’t and someone outplaying you. The first would be someone killing you via a glitch, or bug, or cheat. The second is them being better at Destiny than you in that particular encounter.

[*]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.

Don’t get shot from behind? Ok, that’s a bit tongue in cheek, but it’s a different game. In my experience, in that I frequently used Scout Rifles or Hand Cannons for my primary gun, I had to use about the same amount of aiming as I do in Halo with a DMR. Perhaps a bit more since the enemy could kill me quicker with their Auto Rifles. A missed shot by me was probably a bit more disastrous in Destiny than in Halo… I guess I’m not seeing the lack of emphasis on aiming that you are…

[*]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.

I agree. This may become a problem. The “don’t take A” thing was already being used during the Beta… As discussed before, I don’t think you having unlimited sniper ammo is that big a deal since Destiny gives your enemies tools to better avoid, approach, and engage you.

[*]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.

I didn’t have quite the problem with the Interceptor that others had, but admittedly this is because I chose a “Run away! Run away!” strategy at all times.

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.

The aiming shape I think referred to its proximity fuse. In the full game Interceptor pilots will need to be more accurate because the missiles will be less likely to airburst near enemy Guardians.

*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.

My guess is something close to the health tiers model. The Interceptor seemed to gain a player’s shields, but damaging one especially severely did seem to help the next person take it out even if it had time to recharge.

[*]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.

What you call broken I call a different game. Supers did charge significantly faster if you captured points and got kills to the point I think I got supered twice by the same guy in one match before my super was ready, so there is a positive reinforcement to playing well and using the supers well. If one Super had dominated I would have had a problem but I thought they came out surprisingly well balanced to each other all things considered.

[*]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.

Right.

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.
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If that’s your attitude then I’m glad you aren’t buying the game. What’s a good strategy and what is appropriate or sportsmanlike are two very different things. Yelling and tea-bagging are unacceptable in my book. Period. (Using the dance emote in Destiny is just fine however)

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...

As others have said, color options were in the Alpha (apparently) and will be in the final game.

[*]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.

Agreed. I like theater mode.

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.

Red vs. Blue began with a crosshair on the hud, didn’t it? I would be fairly surprised if Bungie did not include some helpful things for machinima though. We’ll see I guess…

[*]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.

Again, I think silence is a good default, especially when some think angering other players is a good strategy.

[*]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.
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I do hope for alien weapons. Even the alien guns are named in the kill cam so it’s possible they are player usable. Also, I disagree with the guns being the same. The special abilities of the higher level guns looked to really be able to mix things up. Just in the beta I had a revolver that reloaded in half the time or less if I emptied its magazine. I got some extra kills because of that. Other guns could do additional damage, or regenerate ammo, or maintain stability, or quicken one of your cooldowns, and those were the simpler guns. The really high end stuff were getting pretty crazy with their abilities and often had more than one.

Even beyond that, I had a definite preference for one of my scout rifles over the other because it’s firing rate and power suited my play style more than the others.

Overall, I think this was a pretty disappointing review of the beta by you. You start with a purposely grating attitude in unfairly criticizing the story. You then move into the "they didn't deserve that kill" mindset which I highly disagree with. Some of your complaints were also uninformed like being able to customize colors. And to top it off you admitted that you think angering teabagging players is acceptable behavior. You have a handful of good points. Halo probably does have more expressive enemies. The rollback of the non-core feature set like Theater is disappointing but in my opinion you did not make up for your intentional lack of maturity.

In then end, if you really stand by some of the things you said, I think it is a good thing that you plan to stay away from Destiny.

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Damn, i agree with everything you just said. Im upset because i didn't realise it till i read your post. I think you just ruined Destiny for me. :(