Destiny biggest disappointment of the year?

[wittyscorpion]

Every game needs a hashest critics, and here it is:

www.gamersheroes.com/opinion-articles/destiny-will-biggest-disappointment-2014/#

He has to find an angle, so he did it from MMO point of view. Bros who played MMO extensively in the past, what do you think of his points?

1) Regarding boss fights: I never played MMO, I did played Borderlands though. From my point of view, shooting and dodging seem to be the primary way to deal with bosses, at least for lower levels. The sophisticated boss may tranform a few times, but it is still shoot and dodge.

On the reasonable note: granted, if all bosses are like the spider tank the game can be boring. But it's safe to say that wont be the case, because Destiny has many examples to copy from…

2) Regarding various classes: The guy obviously has not played different choices long enough, or had no experience playing FPS. From my experience, they are quite different even at low level. I can see that they become very different at the higher level, when moves can be chained together as demonstrated in the level 29 game play.

3) Regarding loot: This is the area I cant agree at all. The private loot stream is a great mechanism to get players play together.

[daftpunk]

Have to agree with most of what he said , i was a bit underwhelmed by the beta and the PvP was just Halo , nothing new and i hated that moon map as well , il be getting Destiny but im not getting moist over it , more looking forward to the Halo collection oh and 60 fps instead of Destinys 30 fps ..

[hebbnh]

A few thoughts on that:

1). I admittedly don't have any MMO experience whatsoever, but I don't see how Destiny is an MMO. Even in the Tower, where you see the greatest number of other players at any given time, you're still segmented off with what, 20 others at most? You're limited to 3 person fire teams for a lot of the content, and 6 person teams are the limit. How is that MMO? Again, I'm just going off what I've heard/read, but aren't 25+ person raiding parties pretty common in true MMOs? Aren't the player counts in the open world much much bigger than what's in Destiny? The largest number of people I ran into in the open world was 5 during one of the public event things. That doesn't say MMO to me, it says FPS that has borrowed some MMO mechanics. Bungie likes to call it a shared world shooter, and that seems much more appropriate to me than MMO. Maybe it's all just semantics, but using his logic, GTAV is an MMO too. Just...no.

2). "Aim, shoot, dodge, repeat" boss fights. As opposed to point, click, dodge, repeat in an MMO? Did the Devil Walker and Sepiks Prime fights get repetitive after a while? Yes, but it's the first and lowest level strike in the game. I imagine Bungie has plenty of stuff in store for later in the game, and probably some new mechanics for the Nightfall versions of the standard strikes to keep things interesting.

3). It's way too early to say the classes all play the same. Given the cap at level 8, we didn't get to see many of the available abilities in action, not to mention that half the subclasses weren't even unlocked yet. I think anyone who's looked at all the abilities for the locked subclasses can tell that they're going to be quite a bit different from the classes we've already had access to.

4). PvP felt similar to both Halo and CoD to me, but definitely not "exactly like Halo." That and we've seen exactly one PvP game type. Again, way too early to judge.

5). He might have a point about the story. It felt totally disjointed to me, but then again I was in party chat with my brother the whole time and he wouldn't shut up. I'm hoping I just missed a decent amount of the story due to that, but time will tell I guess.

[mannon]

Yeah I'm not on board with this guy. Destiny borrows from MMO's but it really is not an MMO at all. There's really not that much interaction with other people unless you actually join the same strike team. You can't even chat with them. There is no way to buy or sell items between players. No I think shared world shooter is actually much more descriptive of what Destiny is.

As for "aim, shoot, dodge, repeat"... well it's a shooter. That's what you do. We aren't getting 50 different abilities that we have to spread across multiple hotbars just to access them all. That was always my least favorite thing about traditional MMO's. Every ability is jut target a thing, and hit a button, and oh your UI will be a hot mess once you level up. I was okay with it for a while, because that's just what MMO's were, but I got burned out on it in WoW. Now I won't play an MMORPG unless it's actually a good RPG first and an MMO second. (Yes I'm saying WoW is a shitty RPG, but a massive MMO.) Anyway, Destiny is neither an RPG or an MMO. It's a shooter where you can share the experience with other players. For that matter the bosses we fought in beta weren't even REAL bosses. At the levels we got to the game was still introducing enemies that are really more minibosses than bosses, but your first encounter with them is as a boss fight. None of them were truly unique bosses. Arguably the tank could be said to be one for the Beta, but I doubt it will be unique in the final game.

As for the classes again I think he's bringing his expectations from MMORPG's which generally try to segregate classes into strict playstyles and make them all as different from each other as possible in every way. This generally includes making nearly all weapons either specific to one class or to a couple. But your weapons in an FPS are your primary means of interacting with the game. If they segregated the weapons per class it would become THE defining characteristic of the class, and all the other differences would just be subtext. Nobody would pick Warlock for the grenades and super if they really wanted to use an Auto Rifle and Titans were the only ones that could. Frankly I think it would suck big balls if the weapons were segregated between the classes. I like using my scout rifle whether I'm playing my Hunter or not. There are only so many weapon types anyway. It would be incredibly limited and that much harder to balance. So, yes, the weapons work the same for all the classes. Pretty much literally everything else is different. Grenades, health, armor, mobility, vertical movement, melee, super, ect... all different.

I still haven't played Crucible, but while it may look exactly like Halo to CoD players it looks significantly different to me. Halo is dominated by the binary equation of it's health system being split between shields and health and pretty much every weapon in the game is good against one and not as good against the other. The moment you take down an opponent's shield or lose your own the dynamic changes drastically. That's why combos that can quickly deplete an enemy's shield and then finish them off become keys to victory in Halo. Destiny does have shields, but it isn't the game changer it is in Halo and combo's don't seem to be nearly so important. It's more about just doing enough damage to kill the guy. Some of the weapons are quite similar, namely scout rifles are very much like the DMR. Then again the DMR was only in one Halo game and while it's similar to the BR, there are significant differences for it not being a burst weapon. Auto rifles don't really have an analogue in Halo. Halo had an AR, but it didn't operate much like auto rifles. It was more like an SMG that was pretty accurate for the first few shots, then really inaccurate after. (I always kinda hated the AR in Halo, though it was more usable in Reach. Well, that is unless you combo'ed it. Vs unshielded enemies at closer ranges it could wreck 'em.) Anyway...

As for the story. I don't think we've seen much story from Destiny, but I don't really have any problems with it. I expect it to be a little more generic. It seems more like an excuse to get us into the world rather than being a primary narrative to drive the game. In Destiny the story is there to set you up as a guardian and let you know that you have shit to do, then it gets out of the way and lets you make your own path. Destiny is not a linear narrative driven game, it's a sandbox.

[Dumien]

So, quick bullet points for me since everybody discussed this very well.


1. Private/non-tradeable loot is a positive thing if done correctly. Hearthstone is a positive exactly. Everybody has access to the same cards, but not through other players. This ensures Blizzard gets paid AND non-uniform value is non-existent. Also, it encourages focus on playing rather than sitting in lobbies trying to pwn off some legendary gear to the highest bidder. Some games can handle that, but they are much less focused in their goals (can be a good thing).

2. Diverse bosses are very important. Each boss should have either a neat gimmick or a unique strategy. Shoot/Dodge is cool and all, but there has to be something more. For example summoning certain borderlands bosses involved making sure a specific weak enemy (one of those little bugs) would kill off and level up off of other enemies. borderlands.wikia.com/wiki/Vermivorous_the_Invincible Vermivorous is a good example. Bosses that are impossible to damage without some sort of unique buff that you can only get my slaying a certain minion the boss spawns... is also a good example. Little things like that go a long way for replay-ability and game depth.

A good way to think about this is "Hey which boss do you want to face today?" disregarding need for loot, the answer should be based off of a personal preference that is not based merely off of difficulty ramp (as in two similar bosses, but one has more hp and higher attack). Preference should be based off of diversity.

3. The classes are going to be playing very differently. If you play dodge/shoot then they will all be the same. The abilities and bonuses are clearly different for each class though. This guy really didn't know what he was talking about here.

[wittyscorpion]

Honestly speaking, when playing Borderlands 2 I was not a big fan of boss fight. Repeatedly doing the same thing over and over just to reduce the bar very slowly does not feel very fun.

But I was almost exclusively playing solo so I understand that's not how it is supposed to be played (and I only played Zer0 which is not the easiest character in the world ). Random matchmaking may make things easier, but it does not make the experience any more fun.

In Destiny, I can see the potential of very interesting boss fight. First of all, at high level each subclass can have its own combo that chains things together; Secondly, continuously spawned minions, majors and mini bosses can provide streams of killings to reduce cooldown of various abilities, especially supers; Lastly, teammates can feed each other will Orbs of Lights to form "team combo chains".

Many of these things are available in Borderlands 2 as well, but its lengthy leveling process and enemy scaling with the highest level player make it difficult for friends of different levels to play together. One of the Destiny's philosophy is to make that much easier.

I am not worried about Bosses' difficulty in Destiny, because there are countless examples from previous games to learn from. I do worry about the number of bosses though, given that the raid count at launch is low. What I am hoping for is multiple interesting bosses per Raid, which are also available to play against in free roaming.

[TheHawkNY]

I think the majority of his issues are based upon the fact that we were against the lowest difficulty enemies, as we get to the more difficult enemies I expect most of his complaints to be irrelevant.

[Pegasus Actual]

I was never hyped on this game, so it's hard for it to be a disappointment. After the beta I'm still not hyped on it at all. But, seems like most people really enjoyed it, so more power to them I guess, but I'm leaning towards skipping this game, at least until a sale.

[wittyscorpion]

Aug 4, 2014 10:08:57 GMT -5 Pegasus Actual said:

I was never hyped on this game, so it's hard for it to be a disappointment. After the beta I'm still not hyped on it at all. But, seems like most people really enjoyed it, so more power to them I guess, but I'm leaning towards skipping this game, at least until a sale.

I can definitely see that the game is not for everyone. Based on the feedback I saw so far, there are 3 archetypes of players who really enjoy this game:

1) Borderlands fans who are into character development, boss fights, and looting;
2) Halo Competitive MP fans who prefer longer TTK and headshots importance;
3) Halo campaign fans who enjoy sci-fi based alien pawnage and exploration;

Players outside of these archetypes on the other hand don't like it as much, like a big section of CoD/Titanfall fan base who prefer low TTK military style shooters.

[iw5000]

I think the reviewer was a bit harsh, he seemed to be going for some angle (for ratings) imho.

That said, I did kind of agree with many of his points. While I have zero experience with MMO's, I know of them. And this game felt like how I envisioned a MMO to be. People standing around. Guilds. Buying sh1t. Leveling trees. Nothing against that stuff, to each his/her own, but it's not my thing. That's not what interests me when gaming. I also found the boss battles to be just ok. I didn't have a bad time, I did have fun, but nothing like a "HOLY SH1T, THIS GAME IS SPECTACULAR" type of thing. Shoot. Duck. Recharge health shield. Shoot again. Repeat as many times as necessary. Don't die, as you have to repeat the whole process again. Classes? It's classes.

I think his shot with the PvP was a cheap shot. FPS'ers aren't not the game of a ten year old anymore. Adults play this stuff. And while I didn't quite get the Destiny PvP multiplayer (do very well), I could see where it might have it's moments. You need time to feel that out. You can't give an honest review it, until you see how the playerbase interacts over time. I think the Halo references were unneeded too. At least for me, the PvP felt more CoD'ish than Halo.

I will say this. I think the hype being generated off of this is waaaaaay past the point of what the Beta showed. What I played, is not worth the hype it's getting. Just my opinion. And I say that as someone who was pretty excited to play this game. I want to like it a lot. I really do. And just because hype 'might' be overreaching, that doesn't mean this game won't be fun, or be a great game. I just think that a typical good Halo player....can get better fun with the PvP with sticking with Halo. And same goes for the CoD player.

I did prepay for this game. I might wait until October to get it. I going to be playing CoD a decent amount in Sept now, that kind of changed things a bit, that turn of events.

[hebbnh]

Yeah, if you don't enjoy the RPG elements then I think you'll be missing a big part of the game's appeal and I get why it may not really work for you. I'm hoping some of the beta repetitiveness (shoot, duck, recharge, repeat) is only because Bungie didn't wan't to give too much away and are saving the really cool stuff for the endgame. Of course that may end up hurting them if people get bored before then.

I only got to play like 8 games of the PvP, but felt like a nice mix of Halo and CoD to me. Higher TTK and Halo-esque movement/jumping, with CoD-like weapon handling/ADS and pace of play. I did pretty poorly but still enjoyed it a good bit. It felt fresh yet familiar, and I can see a lot of people who are getting burnt out on Halo or CoD having a lot of fun with Destiny PvP. Then again, I can also see nobody playing it because, as you said, they may just prefer sticking with what they've already got. Time will tell I suppose.

[iw5000]

Did I miss something on the boss battles? In terms of fun? From my standpoint, everything I saw just followed the same format I mentioned (shoot, duck, recharge, repeat) I simply just can't suspend my sense of reality enough, to get into that. That some big bad 'boss monster' with sixty helper minions, just stands in a room and let's me continually retreat 10' away behind a wall, to recharge my shields. It's dumb AI gameplay. It's why I stopped playing CoD campaigns years ago. At least for me, there is absolutely nothing interesting about this process.

[TheHawkNY]

Aug 4, 2014 15:56:37 GMT -5 iw5000 said:

Did I miss something on the boss battles? In terms of fun? From my standpoint, everything I saw just followed the same format I mentioned (shoot, duck, recharge, repeat) I simply just can't suspend my sense of reality enough, to get into that. That some big bad 'boss monster' with sixty helper minions, just stands in a room and let's me continually retreat 10' away behind a wall, to recharge my shields. It's dumb AI gameplay. It's why I stopped playing CoD campaigns years ago. At least for me, there is absolutely nothing interesting about this process.

Like I said, we were against the lowest difficulty enemies. Did you play the Moon mission when it was live? Because when those doors opened and the enemies came flooding out, that was pretty tough, and that was only the first Moon mission. I think the difficulty could ramp pretty significantly.

[hebbnh]

Honestly, no, I don't think you missed anything. But like I said, there were only 2 real boss battles in the beta, and I'd imagine there will be more variety later on. If not...yeah, I think it might get old pretty fast.

[Dumien]

So video games do the whole fantasy fulfillment thing. Obviously some certain people prefer certain fantasies to others.

CoD has almost always been about the power fantasy. Sure. That's easy enough to see if you listen to common CoD lobbies and gamechat. MMOs primarily fill a different role: social fantasy. I think that is where the main stigma of MMOs stems from. "Oh that person has no life, so they run away to that MMO." That might be true for some, but I don't think it is about this sort of seemingly necessary life substitution for the majority. It more or less coincides with why people read fantasy novels. It is more about having a social life in a new world and the immersion into said world. In WoW's case it is a fantasy world. In the Star Wars MMOs it is about living as a character in star wars. In the Disney MMO it was about living as a Disney cartoon.

Destiny, I'm sure, will be about feeling like you are living in a Halo style world.

[wings]

Aug 4, 2014 8:44:36 GMT -5 wittyscorpion said:

Honestly speaking, when playing Borderlands 2 I was not a big fan of boss fight. Repeatedly doing the same thing over and over just to reduce the bar very slowly does not feel very fun.

But I was almost exclusively playing solo so I understand that's not how it is supposed to be played (and I only played Zer0 which is not the easiest character in the world ). Random matchmaking may make things easier, but it does not make the experience any more fun.

In Destiny, I can see the potential of very interesting boss fight. First of all, at high level each subclass can have its own combo that chains things together; Secondly, continuously spawned minions, majors and mini bosses can provide streams of killings to reduce cooldown of various abilities, especially supers; Lastly, teammates can feed each other will Orbs of Lights to form "team combo chains".

Many of these things are available in Borderlands 2 as well, but its lengthy leveling process and enemy scaling with the highest level player make it difficult for friends of different levels to play together. One of the Destiny's philosophy is to make that much easier.

I am not worried about Bosses' difficulty in Destiny, because there are countless examples from previous games to learn from. I do worry about the number of bosses though, given that the raid count at launch is low. What I am hoping for is multiple interesting bosses per Raid, which are also available to play against in free roaming.

Terramorphous killed in a flash, although you haven't done yourself any favours by playing as Zer0 as he is the hardest character to master. Salvador is the raid boss king.

I would like to think Destiny would learn from BL2 over boss health, but time will tell. Often it is a case of knowing what bonuses work, which will be the same for Destiny. In BL2 I used to use Heart of the Ancients relics to boost weapon damage but it turns out the Bone of the Ancient relic is better as it increases all damage from the weapon, not just the base. Stuff like that can be tested in the firing range but I don't think players should be resorting to that method too much. Another one is rounds fired from Two Fang don't stack Critical Asciensi0n, which is less obvious.

[mannon]

As for the bosses in Destiny we actually haven't seen any of them as far as I know. The only unique enemies in the beta were the spider tank which was presented as a miniboss on Devil's Lair and There is a level 20 screamer turret thing you can find in free roam if you go to the coast then take the path to the right and survive past all the high level mobs guarding it. That floating turret thing guards the entrance to the caves that lead down back up under Devil's Lair to the the big laser wall fight. (Technically you could argue Sepiks Prime is unique because it has a unique name, and it's possibly the largest of the orbs, but it doesn't do anything other orbs don't do, and I'm not even certain it is the largest. I saw some in exploration that looked about as big.)

I'm fairly certain we will see more spider tanks, and we may even see more of those screamer turret things, so I don't think either of those were technically bosses either.

What we did see is stronger enemies presented as boss fights to introduce them to us at low levels. This does tell us something about how boss fights will happen, but doesn't necessarily tell us too much about the bosses themselves. Bungie has said that the bosses will be similar to familiar enemies, but will also have abilities none of them have had, basically saying the bosses will be unique and challenging. Although I'm sure there will still be a fair bit of shoot, dodge, repeat... this being an FPS.

I have not played enough of BL2 to really have played all the bosses being discussed here. Personally I hope that Destiny's bosses are interesting, but do not go overboard with the gimmicks. I for one don't really like fighting bosses with completely non-intuitive ways you have to fight them where there's one, and only one way to win and it involves doing some seemingly completely unrelated BS. Bosses that automatically kill players and require you to revive them or require you to be shielded by a Defender, for example. I don't like that stuff. I don't mind if a boss is simply very hard unless you employ a strategy such as having a Defender, but I've never liked forced gimmicks. I think the best boss fights are tough and require strategy and tactics, but still let the players come at it in different ways. If there is no player choice then I'm not really playing the game so much as just going through the motions until I hit the combination that the designer intended. If I wanted to play a rhythm or QTE game I'd go do that, not play a shooter.

I played a lot of MMO's and no I never particularly liked raiding high level bosses with canned ways you had to defeat them. It's not fun just following a set of steps that can never be deviated from with no skill or anything else involved, just timing. Not all bosses were like that, of course. My favorite thing was really just to put together a group to hunt specific types of spawns with a strategy we come up with. That sort of grinding went out of fashion and at first I celebrated that, but honestly now I miss it. WoW's quest grinding is actually far, far more tedious and offers even less freedom. At least with the old system I could log into EQ and set about trying to get into or put together a group to farm all sorts of different things in different places, or to even just go clear an entire dungeon with friends. There was freedom in that. Modern MMO's are mostly about following directions.

I enjoyed Tera for a while with it's more dynamic combat, but the questing got to be even worse than WoW, because it not only is there no point in grinding, but if you complete all the quests you wind up over leveled rather quickly and then the fights aren't even interesting anymore. You're just literally doing nothing but following directions and running around. Once I got bored with the questing the only fun thing I did in the game was play a dungeon, which actually did require a party and some tactics. I'd have done that some more, but my GF lost interest in the game and I don't have enough solo time for an MMO.


Destiny, gratefully isn't really trying to be WoW or anything. In fact it seems to have borrowed little from MMO's other than the basic concept of a shared world. I feel like I have more freedom in Destiny than any MMO I've played since SWG. Part of that undoubtedly is because it is consciously not trying to be an MMO, but more of an MMO-lite. Bungie's borrowing from tons of games and genre's, but they are working out their own formula here. Honsetly the closest analogue to Destiny that I've ever seen are the online Phantasy Star games, PSO, and PSU. I would be very surprised if they played no part in Destiny's inspiration.



I'm guessing there won't be any truly unique bosses in the story missions, just named mob bossfights, maybe with some buffed stats and the like. Likely raids will be the only source of truly unique bosses. I don't know how many raids there will be at launch... not many. Maybe we will get more than one boss per raid. I'm sure they will add more raids in time, possibly tied to expansions. In fact I hope very much we get at least one new raid per expansion, but we'll see.

Having said that, bosses aren't the end all, be all of a shooter. How many bosses are there in past Halo games? Honestly not very many. Did it really matter? True, Destiny isn't the same. It needs more replayability for leveling and earning loot. But the real boss fights are very much end game content for Destiny. The game largely has to stand on it's own, apart from them. Otherwise we'll never stick with it long enough to get there, (and I'm sure many people won't).

It's a game that doesn't appeal to everyone, and everyone is entitled to their own opinion on it. Personally, I enjoyed the beta more than I even thought I would. I even really enjoyed building up all three of my characters, playing back through the same story missions. I probably spent the majority of my time just running around solo in exploration, not even doing missions... just killing and looting and exploring. I like killing the dumb AI enemies. It's not the adrenalin rush of killing other players. It's more playing for the satisfaction of the mechanics and rewards. It's more shooting range than going hunting to compare it to RL examples. That's not to say I won't touch Crucible. I'm sure I will, eventually. But for me it's actually the little things that I like best about Destiny. Getting my 5 golden chests, exploring areas I have no business being in! lol Making it into that cave with the screamer and finding out it came out to Devil's Lair was a lot of fun, though it earned me no XP or loot and hurt my KDR... but who cares. Feels like I killed those enemies by the broken up airplanes a few hundred times, and I'm still looking forward to going back there.

But then, this is just my type of game. See you guys in the Tower.

[wittyscorpion]

I share the same sentiment:

1) not a big fan of boss fights (so far, based solely on BL2 experience, but I could be convinced otherwise if very interesting boss fights present themselves);
2) enjoy stomping non-boss AI elements, especially if I can chain/stack things together; e.g.: BL2 Zer0's Critical Ascensi0n stacking through crits after crits;

Destiny's free roaming is quite fun. After having played it extensively I do hope that there are a lot more variety in the final game, in terms of missions and public events.

Even if the PvE are not as great as we hoped, I still believe that 10 times more playability than beta is a conservative estimate. I sunk 30 hours into beta PvE (with only half of Hunter and Warlock's upgrade tree and barely scratched the surface of Titan), so that would translate into 300 hours from final game. After I exhaust that, I still have PvP which I enjoy very much. I can play all day just for the thrill of Sniper Rifle headshots...

[iw5000]

regarding free roaming...

Aug 5, 2014 11:56:09 GMT -5 mannon said:

That's not to say I won't touch Crucible. I'm sure I will, eventually. But for me it's actually the little things that I like best about Destiny. Getting my 5 golden chests, exploring areas I have no business being in! lol Making it into that cave with the screamer and finding out it came out to Devil's Lair was a lot of fun, though it earned me no XP or loot and hurt my KDR... but who cares. Feels like I killed those enemies by the broken up airplanes a few hundred times, and I'm still looking forward to going back there.

After I heard more about Destiny...even though I am not a big MMO fan ( I've never played them, so I must not be into it?) I thought I could get into the open world exploration stuff, because I did really enjoy GTA V. I love that game. I played that for days without even really getting deep into the missions, just exploring around the world and getting into trouble. Breaking into the airport, stealing airplanes, cop fights, climbing mountaintops and finding new areas down in the subways. So I must have some part of me, that like open world exploration games. That feeling I got with GTA V, that's what I was hoping for with Destiny after i got going (at least on the non-crucible stuff)

But I didn't get that feeling of fun. I found the beta world to be pretty bland roaming around it, at least compared to the GTA environment. I guess my question is, did I miss something? Have any of you played GTA V? Is using that comparison a bad one?

[mannon]

I have GTAV and yeah it's engrossing. I love those open world games. Red Dead Redemption is one of my all time favorite games, both for single player and free roam.

GTAV single player is a pretty super awesome guy for just setting you lose on the world and it feels like there are sooooo many things to do, although really it all boils down to driving(and flying), shooting, and minigames. Yeah Destiny isn't quite that so I can see being let down if that's what you were hoping for. Sure I'd love a first person, sci-fi, GTA with decent online (GTAV's online mode is neat, but very grindy and not quite as cool a guy as the single player).

That's definitely not what Destiny is, though. It's an FPS through and through, it's just one that borrows a little bit from other genres. For me it's enough to revitalize the FPS experience a bit and turn Destiny into something different. But I don't bother comparing it to MMO's or GTA, ect. Destiny doesn't cover the scope of either of those kinds of games. To you Destiny may seem like an MMO, but honestly... I don't think it is. Maybe it's a Large Multiplayer Online (LMO?) game, or Moderately Massive (MMMO)... I dunno. I wouldn't call it massive. I like Bungie's term for it, "Shared World Shooter". Number of concurrent players or total players an MMO does not make, else CoD it'self would be one. The fact is you can't interact with a massive number of people in Destiny, just a few at a time.

By the same token the maps are large, but they aren't enormous, and they are only populated with enemies, loot/collectibles, and mission beacons, and a few other players sprinkled about. No NPC's, no wildlife, not many vehicles, no living world. Ultimately it's a first person shooter that offers you a lot to do, if you like the things you do in it as a shooter and want more of it and to do it with friends. The Crucible is there for a change of pace and for some adrenaline but you still have to like the basic mechanics in the game or that'll get boring to. Personally I think I will prefer Titanfall for PvP, but I'll probably play it some and I may get addicted to the headshot hunting, which isn't such a thing in TF.

It may be the game just isn't your flavor. *shrug*

[wittyscorpion]

Aug 5, 2014 13:34:43 GMT -5 iw5000 said:

regarding free roaming...

Aug 5, 2014 11:56:09 GMT -5 mannon said:

That's not to say I won't touch Crucible. I'm sure I will, eventually. But for me it's actually the little things that I like best about Destiny. Getting my 5 golden chests, exploring areas I have no business being in! lol Making it into that cave with the screamer and finding out it came out to Devil's Lair was a lot of fun, though it earned me no XP or loot and hurt my KDR... but who cares. Feels like I killed those enemies by the broken up airplanes a few hundred times, and I'm still looking forward to going back there.

After I heard more about Destiny...even though I am not a big MMO fan ( I've never played them, so I must not be into it?) I thought I could get into the open world exploration stuff, because I did really enjoy GTA V. I love that game. I played that for days without even really getting deep into the missions, just exploring around the world and getting into trouble. Breaking into the airport, stealing airplanes, cop fights, climbing mountaintops and finding new areas down in the subways. So I must have some part of me, that like open world exploration games. That feeling I got with GTA V, that's what I was hoping for with Destiny after i got going (at least on the non-crucible stuff)

But I didn't get that feeling of fun. I found the beta world to be pretty bland roaming around it, at least compared to the GTA environment. I guess my question is, did I miss something? Have any of you played GTA V? Is using that comparison a bad one?

I have never played any GTA games. I do imagine that GTA games offer a lot more variety in terms of the activities you can do.

Regarding Destiny, I don't know how much time you spent on exploration. However, since exploration is meant to be roaming "freely", with no restrictions, if you did not enjoy the first 5 minutes, there is a very good chance that you probably won't enjoy it after playing for an hour.

From my point of view regarding the exploration experience: the fun mostly comes (for me at the least) from unlimited alien killing in a pretty sizable open world. Pounding on different types of enemies, with different classes/subclasses/weapons/abilities, at different topographical areas, forms the basic element of fun;

1) Different enemies (2 species playable in Beta, at least 2 more in final game):

a) Fallen: dregs (foot soldier), majors, shanks (floaty red or green robot like entity), servitors (purple eye), etc.
b) Hive (IMHO more interesting than fallen): thrall (zombie like melee attackers), acolyte (ranged attackers), knights (who can deploy black shields and disappear when health is getting low), wizards (floaty being who can teleport), etc.

2) Different classes/subclasses/abilities (including Super, melee, and vertical movement): these may play similar at lower level, but as you unlock more stuff in the upgrade tree, they can be played quite differently;

3) Different weapon classes:

a) Primary: Auto Rifle, Scout Rifle (semi), Pulse Rifle (burst), Hand Cannon
b) Special: Sniper Rifle, Shotgun, Fusion Rifle
c) Heavy: Rocket Launcher, Machine Gun

All of the classes offer distinctive experiences from each other.

4) Weapon/armor upgrade -> more interesting play experience

Gears have different rarity: white = common, green = uncommon, blue = rare, purple = legendary, gold = exotic. Green and above gears have their own upgrade tree that offer additional abilities (e.g.: last bullet kill -> faster reload, the longer your fire the more accurate the weapon becomes, or successful melee -> reduce super cool down)

5) Different areas offer different play experience, due to topographical differences:

a) Indoor: corridors, big rooms, small rooms, rooms with 2 different levels, caves...
b) outdoor: natural terrains like open flattened space / hills / canyons / shores decorated with abandoned man-made structures like bases / boats / helicopters;

6) Different planets/moons that offer different look and feel: in beta we only had unlimited access to earth and 2 hour limited access to moon. Final game will also offer Mars, Venus, and possibly Europa (moon of Jupiter) and derelict ships in Saturn's ring (?)

I am not a huge of exploration for exploration's sake, but many players are. For these players, just race around with Sparrow is also a quite fun experience. On Moon, we also got to drive "Pike" around which has weapons.

[mannon]

I hope they expand on the special and heavy weapons available or let us give up our special for another primary somehow or something. I know the specials are powerful in their own way's, but they each fill a very small niche and don't always mesh well with the primary and tactics I've chosen. As for the heavy I just think only having two kinds of heavy is kinda dull. How about some sort of slow explosive projectile with an arc? Or maybe some sort of beam or electric weapon, or even a melee weapon. Or maybe even a turret with ammo determined by how much heavy ammo you picked up before you set the turret down?

Anyway... Primary has plenty of weapon diversity, I just think the other weapon classes could use some more beef. Here's hoping...

[wittyscorpion]

Aug 5, 2014 17:05:01 GMT -5 mannon said:

I hope they expand on the special and heavy weapons available or let us give up our special for another primary somehow or something. I know the specials are powerful in their own way's, but they each fill a very small niche and don't always mesh well with the primary and tactics I've chosen. As for the heavy I just think only having two kinds of heavy is kinda dull. How about some sort of slow explosive projectile with an arc? Or maybe some sort of beam or electric weapon, or even a melee weapon. Or maybe even a turret with ammo determined by how much heavy ammo you picked up before you set the turret down?

Anyway... Primary has plenty of weapon diversity, I just think the other weapon classes could use some more beef. Here's hoping...

I am not going to be against the ideas of having more weapon classes That said, I feel that the current lineup is good enough, for Destiny 1.

On the Special side: I don't agree that each only fill a very small niche. On the contrary, I think that they are very important complementaries of primary.

1) Sniper Rifles: besides very fun to use, SR is my go to weapon for bosses. Their crit DPS is second to none. In beta SRs can produce 1600+ damages per shot, while 2nd best Scount Rifles only produce a small fraction of that;
2) Fusion Rifle: although not 100% sure, I believe that these are very good at striping away shields;
3) Shotgun: combined with melee these are great at dispatching group of weak enemies, especially the aggressive ones like thralls;

On the heavy side: sure, I can definitely use more weapon classes. Given the limited ammo though, I am content with Machine Gun to dispatch large group of enemies, and Rocket Launcher for heavy damage on bosses.

BTW, in the wall of text post I had above, I forgot to mention 2 additional aspects:

1) Grenades: each subclass has 3 different grenades.

2) While we are talking about weapons, there is one very important aspect that we have not even had a chance to experience: the elemental damages (Void, Solar, Arc).

[mannon]

Yeah I had a void and an arc weapon, but no real clue as to the effects of such elements. In beta I really didn't notice any difference, but then I didn't get scientific about it.


Sniper Rifles are cool and all, though I had a really hard time using them for anything but long range outdoor shooting. All my SR's had a massive zoom, though the damage was nice. The massive zoom and low ammo pretty much meant I only used SR for bosses or just to dick around with enemies in the distance for no reason.

I actually really like the shotgun, though it is maybe a tad weak over all, but I had a decent one that I really liked and ran with it most of the time. Quite fun to combo with melee, knife, or even a scout rifle shot or two. Although it does seem to rely on a combo to be effective. I guess that's probably intentional. Bungie probably expects anything close enough to hit with the shotgun can be finished off with melee and making it too strong on it's own might make the combo OP...

Just not a fan of the fusion rifles. They do feel okay at dropping shields, but not super duper at it. If I ran one I mostly only used it if I needed to conserve primary ammo for a bit. I know it's a personal thing, but I don't feel like the damage is enough payoff for the charge delay. A weapon I gotta charge up should feel pretty epic and they just don't. Dropping an enemie's shields (when my grenade is on cooldown) or if primary ammo is low are about all I used it for. Part of them feeling weak is the lack of crit coloring, though they clearly do get crits, it just doesn't look like it. But they just didn't really jive with me.


Heavy just feels way too limited at only two weapon types to me. I'm hopeful that was just for beta and we'll get more soon if not at launch. At least one more to give us three.

[wittyscorpion]

Regarding concerns of game content:

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Everything we know about Raid so far:

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Nightfall activities:

Although the number of story missions, strike missions, and Raids are fixed at launch and most likely can only be added through "expansion packs", the "Nightfall activities" are added on a daily and weekly basis. How interesting and challenging can they be? Below is what Bungie (Luke Smith) has to say about it (source: www.ign.com/articles/2014/07/30/destiny-the-endgame-is-only-the-beginning-ign-first ):

So if you're a fresh level 20 you can play the Nightfall daily activity at level 22 and it's going to be hard. It's going to be challenging. But you can get through it, maybe. Maybe if you have some friends. The weekly Nightfall activity is something that pushes all the way out as far as the leveling allows you to go in Destiny. So it ends up occupying at the far end of the spectrum: this extremely high gameplay investment challenge. Like it's both the toughest guys we can throw at you that's going to require the best gear, and it's going to have a bunch of modifiers on it that make it even harder.

Sounds promising!

Also: these activities most likely won't have no-match-making restrictions that Raids are subject to. Hopefully they will form the backbones of on-the-fly "dynamic" PvE fun that don't require elaborated and advanced planning that Raids demand.

[wittyscorpion]

Talking about public events, here is what people were able to do on Moon during beta: