4 weeks with Destiny review and miscellaneous thoughts (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, October 13, 2014, 19:44 (3936 days ago) @ RC

Soft-cap on player count in Tower / instancing at incoming parties

Do you mean a party? Fireteams in the Tower are capped at 6, aren't they?

No, I do mean the game instance. The party can be 2 players, open to friends, but the tower instance they're in has 14 other players - making it full, and me unable to join.

I really have to play with some people because this is all going over my head, like conversations about this usually do.

Visually Distinguish Majors in ways other than health-bar colour

I'm still not sure what you mean by Major and Minor.

Minors: Red health bar
Majors: Yellow health bar - more health, take less damage.

There is also the Ultra class: yellow health bar, but much bigger than other enemies. Sepiks Prime, Valus Ta'aurc, Fallen Walkers, Draksis, etc are all Ultra class.

oh, OK

Fuck that, I don't accept it. They should be regular rooms or at least have doors that close them off when not in use. Even failing that, I'd rather they break canon and/or make things too hard or easy than this lazy "they came from a dark room you can't enter" bullshit. They managed this fine in their previous games (not just Halo) and other games have managed it better than this for a long time; I would need an exceptionally good reason to excuse it.

It's a networking + pace of combat thing. Asychronous networking means fewer enemies can be in the world at any one time. So without making every enemy a bullet sponge, they need quick ways to introduce re-inforcements. Dropships work in some places, teleporting works for Vex, but they need more than that for the rest of the game.

The monster closets are a little crude, but they work.

The enemies you called Ultras and enemies between what you called Majors and Ultras (for example Fallen Captains) all seem to be able to teleport, and the Hive and Fallen teleport dropships (or maybe the Fallen just cloak them or something? the Hive definitely teleport them though), and as you said the Vex of all ranks teleport, so at the very least I fail to see the necessity at the level we see them at, they're everywhere, but I'm leaning towards more than that, I think they should've used these approaches and similar ones if they couldn't just make actual, go-to-able rooms.

Show how we got our cool stuff

I think that's going against what they want, which is for players to care enough to tell people or ask people where they got stuff.

So when people do ask, the answer is going to sometimes be: "ummm, can't remember." That's no good.

Well that's the thing, isn't it, if that's the case then they didn't do a good job of making it memorable, which A) would mean admitting a flaw in the execution of a relatively important design goal (which I'd love to see happen, but it's unlikely) and B) is not easy to fix. Telling people where something came from doesn't do any good if they don't think that's worth noting or it doesn't bring up an actual story in their mind. Regardless, if I was having that problem, my first thought would be to write it down or type it up, not ask for an in-game reminder.

At the start of missions, we need to be thrown into fights sometimes (e.g. Silent Cartographer). We need more missions where we're just left on the world to do whatever we want (dropping back to a 'patrol'-like state),

more missions like that? I don't remember any being like that

Slip of the finger.

or have to clear up enemies and collect some object that was protected by the boss.

eh, it can be tedious to track down the one low-level enemy that's off in a corner somewhere, and it can be (very) frustrating to beat the boss and then still die

Super-easy to fix: killing the boss lifts the 'darkness zone'. You can then still die to minions and respawn and finish them off/ do whatever else the mission requires.

You know, that could actually be cool, maybe they could even do that places besides the end of a level-- I was thinking the other day about how it's weird a lot of areas are darkness zones until I go open a door, and then they become normal zones.

A little more gradual come-down from the highs of the boss fights sometimes, rather than the vertical cliff it is currently.

eh, I think that would make it feel less climactic

Yes, and the final frame of A New Hope should have been the Death-Star exploding. 3:42 and cut straight to credits.

/sarc

There's already 30 seconds where you don't have to do anything, with half that or more not having dialogue or anything going on in it.

• Saved Films
  
• Creative screenshot features

or, you know, any screenshot features

PS4 has screenshotting built-in. I'm talking about fly-cam, FOV, depth of field, tilt/roll, exposure et al.

That's one console out of four, though. I welcome your features, I'm just saying for most of us the first step would be having a screenshot feature, period.

[*]Bosses shouldn't be immune on their introduction - see also: Valus Ta'aurc's showboating

I don't know, again, I thought that was kind of standard boss procedure; am I wrong?

Sepiks Prime is Okay because you can actually see there is a shield around him and it gives you time to move around and get established in the area as you kill the minions. But all the others are just annoying.

It's also worth noting that Riksis, the Devil Archon in Restoration in Old Russia, IS NOT immunue to damage as he crawls out of the pipe.

hmm