Any thoughts on what they showed? (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, July 20, 2016, 22:27 (2836 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

Haven't had time to watch it myself yet... how was the stream? Don't think I've ever seen so little discussion about a Bungie broadcast here. I'm guessing it was uneventful?

First we saw some new armor and guns. They're getting a tad more creative, but still well within the established "look" of each class. They go on for goddamn ever about how amazing the new gjaller-bicycle is and show the preview trailer for it twice because why the fuck did they show it twice? Ugh. Anyway, it's a lot of time spent on a cosmetic thing that in no way indicates any sort of gameplay or plot element. Frustrating. Even more sad is the fact that DJ simply never sounds excited. He's like "let's watch it again because when I see something awesome I always want to watch it again on the internet" but it sounds like "fuck I'm bored. This is boring. Am I done yet?" I get that he was hired for his writing and not his on-camera persona, but they could really benefit from finding someone who enjoys being filmed to host these things. Deej just seems so uncomfortable and, for lack of a better word, disengaged from it all.

There was a cool bit where they showed concept art for the gjaller bike. I'd enjoy a bike like the second one they showed. Mmmm... Gjallerharleyhornbike.

Moving on from my editorial commentary:

So we saw how they changed the familiar areas of the cosmodrome. I was a bit surprised at how much of those areas had changed. They started inside the wall at about the same place the player begins the game at (where dinklebot "rubs some sticks together"). More explorable, a bit more free-roamy in this area (you can jump down to an area that in vanilla would kill you, for example). Lots of shanks are cutting apart the wall; it's unclear why, but they've certainly been busy. Also wherever they used a cutting torch, the metal is permanently glowing hot now, which seems like an oversight. It looks cool though, so I'll say they use some kind of glowing nano tech to cut the metal rather than a normal torch.

From the wall they walked through the fan tunnel. Fans are now frozen in place but, this being a test build, the shadow of the fan is still rotating, which was weird to see. Also lots of glitchy illumination textures in here - they talked about those on the stream. Test build, test build.

Into the Divide. The entire divide is updated with snow, welding shanks, the new enemy variant of the fallen called splice fallen or something like that (I forget, even though they said it like 50 times), and some new changes to the existing map. We see the new player for Team Evil, which also has a name, but I forget it, too. Some acronym that starts with S. SHIMA? Someone here will fill it in for me. It's just like a red arterial nano-growth. It looks pretty cool, but doesn't do anything that we can see. More just a change in the map geometry rather than an interactive thing.

They they went into the rocketyards. Again, totally redone. Here we got to see an actual hole in the wall that the welding shanks had opened up, which led to an entirely new play area that they looked at and shot into but did not enter because they weren't supposed to go into there in this stream. There were enemies inside including a yellow bar named dude (I couldn't read the name cause of resolution issues with my stream).

Back to the rest of the rocketyards. They didn't mention it, but there was a visible door/hallway thing they walked past at one point that appeared to have fallen trip mines inside of it. They moved into the sepiks prime strike area, which has also been fully redone. We they some invisible spicers and showed us a few more fallen splicer troop variants. It's similar to the changes between original enemies and Taken versions. Nothing wholly new, just variations on existing units. The map, however, had some new pathways opened up by the changes which make it more interesting to traverse, so that's cool. They went up to where the spider tank spawns in the strike and ended it there (no splicer tank appeared, much to my disappointment).

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Here are my thoughts:

- It was cool to see the growth of the map and refinement of it. Very interesting. I actually really dig this sort of iterative map design. That being said, I think it was stupid how Deej said "see? When we told you that this would be a living world, we meant we'd periodically update the maps." So stupid. A living world does that on its own, not as a result of paying $$$ for expansion packs. This is just a new static world dropped on top of the old static world. I also resent the amount of time and focus spent on the gjallerbike. It made the entire ride along feel more like a bad infomercial trying to convince us to pre-order than a real effort to show some pride in their work and share some of the upcoming xpac with us.

Unfortunately, even though they were "showing us" the map changes and updates, they spent almost no time looking at them. The only thing they really examined was the SHIMA (or whatever it's called) the first time they saw it, but they spent no time zooming in, showing attention to detail (which you can tell was there, but want to see), or discussing the type of work done by the artists. I recall one of the rock designers in destiny 1 posting a whole thing about how he studied geology to ensure everything looked perfect... that was really interesting! But with this it's like "oh there's snow and then these shanks are busy welding stuff apart, there's one. Okay let's move on." What are we moving on to? The whole point is to show these changes! Grrr. So many times I wanted them to just stand still and look at the stuff, and discuss things I saw, like how it was snowing at the start, or how the guardians are making tracks in the snow when they walk through it. That was really cool stuff. Like I wanted them to shoot the snow with different guns to see if it reacted differently to bullets vs. solar weapons or something. But none of that happened.

We did see some cool stuff from the concept art and how those concepts translated into the game world. This is a gorgeous game. I just with the "let's see how the world has changed" actually examined the world instead of simply strolling through. It felt like more time was spent shooting enemies than showing off the changes, and it also felt very, very ad hoc. I do not think they had a plan on what to show beyond "sell moar gjallertrikes."