Hopes and Fears - Des2ny and You. (Destiny)

by Mad_Stylus, Friday, March 31, 2017, 21:02 (2576 days ago) @ Harmanimus

The core gameplay of Destiny 1 is solid. Powers, running, gunning, etc. all felt very satisfying. That can stay.

Things that can be improved is a longer list.

Narrative. Give us a story. The trailers show promise because we have a premise, an immediate plot. D1 had stuff going on, but it was so large picture nothing was done with it, among other things. We also have an actual antagonist with Gaal, but the shortcoming of previous Destiny antagonists was that all they were was a name. Oryx had character, but it was flat and two dimensional villainy. The Codex does not count, because you don't see any of that "depth" in the actual game.

So yeah, good on them for this basic premise. More importantly, have our villains be characters. Have them speak, give them a motivation beyond conquest for its own sake.

Then theirs the actual context, the game world. See, we're going to be playing D2 a lot, by design. Thats not a bad thing to have a grind. Problem with that and D1 is that we have so little gameworld to go around. The individual planets are TINY, not even touching how they're further divided into bubbles. I was expecting something more like Halo's expansive levels. As railroaded as they were, they felt truly large in scope.

Second part of that is enemies. I could do some levels, some strikes, by rote memory. I go so far down THIS hall, and I'm already aiming to headshot the two Fallen around the corner before I see them. I doubt they'll do something like Warframe with entirely randomized, procedurally generated levels, but just do SOMETHING so I don't sleepwalk through the game on the second playthrough.

Weapon balancing could also be looked at. I mean, everything is balanced, don't get me wrong. But its so precisely balanced, to the point where a lot of guns just didn't feel rewarding at all. None of them really had a special something, because well we don't want to overshadow scout rifles or something.

Part of that I think is applying PVP changes to PVE as well. The values for the two game modes are so exclusive, they're probably better off giving us a set arsenal of crucible only weapons. They can do whatever they want to those things, and leave the weapon type as a whole unmolested.

Also, character creator, while we're at it. More options. And let us actually rotate and zoom in the creator. How anyone forgot those functions in this day and age I'll never know.

Finally, obsolescence. Every Destiny update made all the previous content trivialized. People only went back for nostalgia, trophies, or specific quests. Heck, I was trying to do a fresh Warlock and I found myself having trouble with quest-specific strikes and such. No one was doing them. They could not be done because it was outside that quests popularity window and the quest was designed with multiple people in mind. Not everyone has a good friends list to help them out.

If only they could add a simple chat function, right?

I'm going to wait a month or two post-release to even consider D2. Too much pain in the rear piled on a good shooter build. Trailer is good, but it doesn't reassure me in the slightest.