Luke Smith on mistakes made in TDB and improvements with HoW (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Sunday, January 25, 2015, 01:36 (3382 days ago) @ Ragashingo

He's right though - The blunders of Destiny are things that anyone who'd ever made a video game before should have known to avoid. The game looks like a first attempt at what ultimately became Halo, rather than the first new IP for Bungie after Halo: Reach. The core play is great, but the design around that gameplay is just awful on tons of levels. The entire investment game is abusive to the player, the random rolls are abusive to the player, the fact that raid gear is the best gear for PvP is abusive to the player, the way all 3 characters on your account interact, the tower storage, the terrible VO, the incoherent and out of order plot that goes nowhere, the incredibly limited amount of "exploration" possible in the game maps... It's all stuff that Bungie should have known better than to implement in the way that they implemented it. 50 different currencies? Not enough inventory space to hold it all? The many exotics that are basically garbage? Being unable to go straight to the tower from anywhere that isn't orbit? The Cryptarch? It's all so very disappointing.

Now, it's not all bad: Character progression: Nailed it. Art team: Nailed it. Sound design: Nailed it. Core gameplay, super duper nailed it. Raid encounter design: Nailed it (caveat: buggy as hell and way too easy to cheese).

But if I didn't just list your department at Bungie, you failed on some pretty basic game design 101 issues.

No matter how good House of Wolves is, it won't fix Destiny short of providing a complete and total overhaul, and I suspect we won't see that until Destiny 2 at the earliest. Right now, Destiny is the only next gen game that scratches the Halo itch, but that circumstance won't last, and I doubt Destiny holds up to the next one.