I shall call it an FPSRPG (Destiny)

by RC , UK, Saturday, June 14, 2014, 06:30 (3603 days ago) @ Cody Miller

It's really not an MMO no matter how many people throw that around. The defining characteristic is the 'massive' and the most you'll see in Destiny is maybe 14 at the Tower (at least in the Alpha). It's leaning to a highly cooperative and online FPSRPG but it still ain't no MMO.

The weapon system is actually pretty fascinating.

I can guess that weapon management like this is going to be a big deal, especially with the different damage types. You’re probably going to have to have a wide variety of weapons at your disposal, using guns tailored to specific missions or specific parts of missions.

I think you're right here. I had barely considered the damage types before you mentioned this. Has anyone figured out what the different damage types do yet?
I've seen weapons with:

• Kinect (standard)
  
• Solar (orange flame)
  
• Arc (light blue spikey circle)
  
• Void (purple swirl)

This could make things interesting at higher levels but I feel like it's underplayed so far.

Explore mode isn’t very fun, because you are doing tasks that are dumb,

I think it's good to relax with, honestly. Just wander around, killing random mobs, hitting random objectives in an unstructured way. Don't think about it too much.

It’s the same thing with commerce. It’s just time consuming needlessly to walk around from person to person. A better solution would be a store menu you can access while in orbit, that has everything from everybody. It would be way easier.

Going to different merchants would make sense if there was some sort of micro-market economy going on but there isn't. You can't sell back weapons or armour. Ships and speeders are just 'discarded' despite being so expensive (and apparently rare in the case of good lightspeed-capable ships) - it felt so wasteful.

You’re reading and you think the game sounds cool, but I haven’t talked about the investment system yet. This is potentially going to be a problem, and make the game less fun. First of all, when you change the difficulty level, the enemies level up.

This happened in Halo to and I never found it to be a problem.

Instead of making the enemies more aggressive, more numerous, and of different types, they become more powerful.

There is definitely some variation on types. On the story mission, you get these white, exploding Hive Thralls that rush you on Legend, while just the standard Thralls are on Brave. I just went in there with a knife on Brave but quickly learned I needed to keep them at a distance on Legend.

This is a problem because your ability to do damage is pretty dependent on your gear and level. There’s an underground space in the game which contains a few enemies that have ??? as their level. Shoot them, and you do 1 damage. I don’t care how good you are, but you can’t kill them. That’s… bullshit.

A lot of RPGs scale enemies with the player. Most obvious when you restart the game with your end-game character (NG+) and the start is still a reasonable challenge rather than everything being rice paper.

Obviously that clashes with Bungie's goals of blocking off certain areas with super-high level enemies, low level players being awed by higher ones, and enemy balance in cooperative situations.

I wonder if the scale could be compressed a bit, at least.

Boss and mini boss design is likewise based on your ability to do damage. Bosses and minibosses have way to much HP.

I hate the Devil Walker. I really hope there is something I'm missing - like with damage types - because it always drains all my ammo when I fight it. I really wish the Devil Walker moved a bit more - it seems like a turret sometimes.