Played a little ODST today... (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Saturday, October 11, 2014, 16:12 (3940 days ago) @ Ragashingo

1. As much as I loved the strength of Halo's shooting and combat cycle, especially Halo 1, ODST, and Reach which I feel are the best in that area, Destiny's 30 seconds of fun are better. The movement modes, the unique classes, even the aiming down the sight make Destiny a better shooter.

Destiny's combat cycle is extremely visceral, although it seems mostly focused around cooperative firefight engagements. There's a lot of stuff that the different Halo games can pull of beautifully that seems completely absent from Destiny.

2. While I'd put Reach with it's better engine and more motion-captured animations at the top of the Halo series, I was struck by how... inferior ODST's animations were. Cutscene animations were noticeably not nearly as good as future titles, but even combat animations weren't as good either. At one point I remarked to myself it felt like I was fighting posable Halo action figure in that all the enemies felt more like limited motion toys than the alien creatures they were meant to be. It was kinda neat to see how far Bungie's combat animation and ragdoll systems have come since ODST.

Bungie's animations definitely weren't as polished, although IMO Halo 3/ODSTs animation work looks and feels pretty good if you imagine that it's supposed to be like a stop-motion action figure video.

4. Bungie is the king of skyboxes and has been for years and years. Maybe since 2001 when that Halo ring first arching up overhead.

Even the Marathon series has very pleasing skies IMO; the use of space and windows in completing the feel of areas on the Marathon in M1 is sublime, and M2's L'howon is brilliant (and includes day and night variants, hehe).

I don't like Infinity's L'howon sky as much. That might have been Double Aught, though, so clearly not Bungie's fault. :P

6. Oddly, even though ODST has a better story, and characters, and cutscenes, I think Destiny does win out on its ending. At the end of the day ODST's story didn't matter one bit.

The only reason that that bothered me is that they tried to make it out as if the engineer was a bigger deal than it seemed to be. If it had been a little bit less dramatic on the "what they know could win the war" stab at self-importance, would that have been less bothersome?

I guess I've just never gotten this complaint. ODST doesn't feel like a story that needs to be felt far and wide within its universe in order to work. Heck, that almost seems like it might make it worse.