Played a little ODST today... (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Saturday, October 11, 2014, 17:44 (3940 days ago) @ uberfoop

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.

What kind of stuff? What would you like to see Destiny do that it didn't?

My hope and feeling is that Destiny is capable of a lot more than was asked of it so far. Missions like the attack on the Ketch and battling to the Garden Spire give me confidence that the combat cycle holds up in more Halo-like missions. That we've seen custom animations like the Fallen crawling through the walls in the first mission or Phogath breaking his chains gives me hope that the animation and scripting systems could be pointed more fully at in-mission storytelling. The few cutscenes we got were good. Basically I think all the features from AI to animation to scripting are there, they just need to be better utilized.

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.

ODST's cutscene animations are probably a bit worse than Halo 3's just because of the smaller team and shorter development time, too. That and Bungie made a big leap forward in animation for Reach. I absolutely love Jorge's very subtle split second look of surprise (in full heavy armor no less!) when the scientist's daughter tells him (in Hungarian) that the three Elites are still hiding in the room with them.

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

I never played much Marathon so it's neat to hear the great skybox tradition extends further than I thought. :)

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.

Right. It's not a huge bother to me, just in an ideal world either ODST would have been a self-contained story about one team surviving the night... and not tried to link to anything grander. Or, it would have found some better way to shed light on Halo 3's story than it did with that one odd cutscene of Truth finding... Forerunner Stuff. Saving the Engineers didn't resonate or matter much when we already knew Humanity would beat the Covenant and Flood a few days later... Now if ODST had actually been released between Halo 2 and Halo 3... that might have been really interesting! :)