A message from KidTsunami RE: The Alpha (Destiny)

by kidtsunami , Atlanta, GA, Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 10:11 (3610 days ago)

Overview
I play a lot of games by myself nowadays because of scheduling and this was one of the most amazingly connected experiences I’ve ever had. I haven’t figured out voice chat on a PS4 and was amazed at all the interactions I still had with fellow players regardless of that. I’d say that I never went more than 5 minutes without seeing another player and sometimes they joined up with me, sometimes we just tore up a public event waved at each other before speeding away on our sparrows, or we just ignored each other altogether aside from hearing distant fire over the hill.

I also loved using or seeing others use the sitting emote during a Strike as a “come on, lets get going”.

Gameplay
The game felt smooth. It’s less floaty than Halo and while the weapons are varied I can tell that they want almost every gun to have an immediate punchy feel to it (Are they hit scan?). The 3 slots for the guns plays really well. I felt like I only began to understand how you can maximize your armory by switching weapons before certain engagements. While I was fine running around pinging everything with my pulse rifle in the explore mode, I could see how switching to context appropriate weapons would make you the fiercest guardian. And regarding the ammo, you almost never run out of Normal ammo, occasionally run out of Special Ammo, and rarely have Heavy Ammo.

Weapon/Ammo Management
So you end up using your Normal gun when engaging regular enemies and when you run into a shielded enemy or one with just a ton of XP bring out your Special. I prefer the Fusion Rifle because it tears into shields really well. But since you can carry I think up to 9 weapons in each “slot” you can arm yourself appropriately for almost any engagement (i.e. you’re entering a building and arm your Shotgun in your Special and Auto Rifle in your Normal, emerge into the wide open, get out your favorite sniper and Pulse Rifle).

I think Heavy Ammo is for regular engagements that are overwhelming you (and your Special weapon just can’t bring down the bigger enemies quickly enough) and DEFINITELY for any Strike/Raid. It’s great to wield your heavy weapon at just the right beats whether they’re during a climatic battle or just another mini-boss.

You can buy/loot consumable items for your inventory. One of the things you can buy is consumable ammo. That way, you can go into a strike with 5 heavy ammo packs and refill your Heavy ammo at exactly the point you want to. I have a feeling that strategising and gearing up for Strikes is definitely going to be a thing.

You can see the purple consumable ammo here:

Strikes
I played through the one in the alpha about 10 times (9 really).

The Strikes were really focused and a lot of fun as coordination was pretty important to success. The times I got matched with people I had to carry I could really tell how important a solid team was. You can see what happens when someone leaves during the post activity screen. You lose their Name/Banne.

Yeah, my PC friend watched me get whomped in the Crucible after I promised him I’d quest more while broadcasting.

I can’t wait to try strikes out with people I can talk to.

Another fun part is given the whole share-world nature of the game, when you start a Strike, you basically rock up just outside of the “lair”. This means that there are a few groups of enemies to get through before entering the Strike officially and during that time you’ll run into other fireteams that are just exploring or are maybe on their own way to a Strike. It really makes the game feel active and populated.

In this video (3m21s) I took you can see us start outside and then work our way inside. It shows how I use certain weapons on certain enemies to take down their shields if necessary before switching back to my normal weapon. It also shows how I use my Rocket Launcher when faced with the mini-boss. It ends showing an Alpha bug where a Fallen Captain spawns in the level geometry and is kind of stuck until another guardian hits him with a sniper rifle.

Exploring
Explore mode blew my mind with it’s lack of loading screens. Which is amazing since I ran around for a few hours and never really found the “end” of it. You can end up running through even the area where you were just on a Strike fighting a different set of enemies and maybe finding other routes around it.

It appears that there is a lot to exploring the game. I sat down to take a vista screen shot on the edge of a cliff (which I went to because of some random mission I picked up while exploring). And I could hear the muffled sounds of an enemy and see that there was one on my radar (the radar mostly gives you the direction of enemies around you even if they aren’t attacking or moving).

I looked over the cliff and noticed a little ledge to jump down to. When I got down there I was looking into a blasted part of the cliff containing this lovely fellow. I believe a few other DBOers must have stumbled on him.

He definitely killed me in the time it took take the photo, but it was worth it. I think there’s some loot in the background there to the left.

I can’t wait to rock the explore mode with a full fireteam (3 people). The ability to call in your sparrow any time means we can hilarious yell “Mount up”, jump off a cliff, call it in and speed away together. Also emotes still work on vehicles meaning you can point and wave from your vehicle. So totally possible to say “charge” and point forward while boosting.

In this video (1m52s) you can see me notice some stairs leading underground and exploring the abandoned underground area and coming out the other end in a new area.

Competitive
The only mode available in the alpha was “Control” which was a territories variant. At the beginning you get the usual Map intro:

Followed by a hilarious and awesome team intro where you kind of land and one of your team members proudly plants a flag in the ground. You can see people in a variety of “landing” states. That’s me on the left woefully ill-equipped for the battle ahead.

Combat is fast and movement is very important. The double jump skill and using it to get the upper hand on your opponent appears to be the key way to succeed with the game.

Everything has “level” effects nullified when you’re playing. So if you’re a Lvl8 playing a Lvl4 and you have a powerful Lvl 8 weapon, it won’t do any more damage than the Lvl 4’s gun. It’s really about the gun you prefer based off it’s magazine size, reload speed, “impact”, and range. I didn’t realize this until the end of the alpha so I was using the same 3 burst rifle I was using in PvE and was doing really poorly. After observing my teammates and enemies more, I could see they were using much more appropriate weapons than I was. So it’s probably worth a trip to your inventory before each match once you know the map and make sure you’re equipped with an Auto Rifle and Shotgun if you’re on a smaller map.

Given that there were only 2 maps and 1 mode I don’t feel like commenting on PvP that much.

The Tower
You know the deal, you can buy weapons, decrypt items, buy gear, get quests and rewards among other things. I also found the soccer ball to kick around.

The environment is amazing to wander.

In this video(0m47s) Here is one of the rooms in the tower. It mainly has class based NPCs to talk to.

Enemies
Enemies had varied approaches and different tactics to learn:
Bum rushing
Throwing up a shield forcing you to flank them
Berserking
Telegraphed snipers forcing you to be mindful of cover and staying mobile
Area effect throwing wizards
Cloaked melee focused approaches
Cloaked sniping approaches.

The level of an enemy definitely indicated the feasibility of taking it down. So at Lvl 8 I could get overwhelmed by a bunch of Lvl 6 enemies if I wasn’t paying attention. Lvl 8’s put up a solid fight and Lvl 10 and above get into the don’t even try area.

Personalisation
There are a ton of ways to define who your Guardian is and we were able to explore a few of them.

Here’s my Guardian btw, a Female Exo (robot) Warlock

Yes, I have a purple face.

Your Ship
So your ship appears to be a cosmetic piece of “gear” effectively. I was able to purchase a bright red ship (the most expensive in the Alpha) and was able to flaunt it during what I’m guessing are loading and matching screens.

The screen when matchmaking is looking for Guardians to match you up with whether it’s for a Strike or the Crucible. The planet you’re orbiting appears to be wherever you were last (one of the Crucible maps was the moon and you would orbit the moon at this screen).

When you’re doing a strike it shows you in low orbit whatever planet the strike takes place on.

Appears when each of your fireteam connects, their ships zoom into formation before you descend to the planet.

This is what it looked like when we were zooming to the Moon for some PvP.

Art

The Views
From the tower looking out over the wilderness.

Environment Processing
When running around exploring I began to notice that whenever Bungie was playing around with lighting (either making something very bright or very dark) they were inviting you to check it out. There appear to be weird monsters, massive caves, and treasure chests hidden everywhere. Here’s an example of where I was running around and I noticed that they were highlighting an entrance to that structure.

Time Of Day
So far there definitely appears to be a time of day on Earth where a full day (Sunrise to Sunset and back to Sunrise) takes 2 hours in game. It actually has an appreciable effect on the graphics and when you emerge into the wilderness after running through a building you can be impacted by seeing that it’s now sunset after having entered midday.

vs

Yup, me getting sappy with my pops...

Sony
PS4 UI

So when navigating the PS4 it looks like games have control over their landing pages. You can see how it pulls in some leaderboards before you even start the game up.

PS Vita Remote Play
I tried out PS Vita Remote Play and it was amazingly smooth. I actually captured the gameplay on my PS4 and so you can watch it here (4m30s).

The Controller
Feels a bit small, but definitely has better triggers than it’s predecessors. There’s a light on the controller that’s actually kind of hard to see if you’re holding the controller normally. Games do fun things with it like in Towerfall’s local multiplayer changing to the color of the character you’ve selected. In Destiny it changes to Red if you’ve taken too much damage and changes to Yellow when your super is activated. I never noticed it without specifically looking for it.

The Friends
I have no friends on PS4 so I’m definitely buying Destiny for XBox One where I have plenty of friends to play with.

Bugs! (It IS an Alpha)

The Frozen Devil Baron
During one of the strikes around the mid point when you’re waiting for your ghost to hack through some defenses it climaxes with a few fallen captains you have to beat to trigger the end of the event. Well not sure what happened but the end was triggered before we beat the Fallen Captains and they ended up having almost everything about them deloaded (AI and Collision stuff). So I ended up pointing at Naksis, The Devil Baron and sitting with them and just took a few cheeky screenshots.

The Stuck Fallen Captain
The end of my Strike video shows a Fallen Captain stuck in the environment and unable to return fire.