Fellow Guardians!

I'm excited to finally experience Destiny when the Beta hits the Xbox on Wednesday. That said, it's only available for a few days, and I have a busier than usual week and weekend coming up.

Given my lack of availability, I'm looking for recommendations or a priority list of things to do, places to visit, etc. that will give me the best experience. I'm a story guy at heart, and I'm eager to simply explore. I hope there's CG water that I can admire somewhere...

Thanks in advance to taking the time to respond. Hope to see some of you in my wanderings this weekend!

Ditto all this.

I'll type up a faq for Xbox people experiencing it for the first time sometime tomorrow.

I hope there's CG water that I can admire somewhere...

The water in Destiny is a massive disappointment.

The shading sucks. The water simply doesn't sit nicely in its environment. Anisotropy doesn't feel right, and the specular seems too strong, especially when viewing water face-on (poor/nonexistent fresnel effect?). I haven't noticed dynamic lights interacting with water in any sort of interesting way. The screen-space reflections carry all the usual artifacts, causing the reflection to change nonsensically as you look around:

I mean, I'm a huge proponent of real-time reflections, but I don't want them if they mean an astronomical sacrifice to visual stability (yeah, my battle against SSR is a losing one, I know).

The water doesn't have the beautiful geometric response of Halo 3's either. It looks like it might be taking the Halo 4 approach of just normal-mapping the water. The way the water responds to dynamic objects splashing in it is short-lived and just plain not that great.

Waterfalls look alright from a distance, but they disappear as you approach and get replaced by a ridiculous animated "wet vision" effect across your screen that doesn't react to your location or view direction.

//===================

Probably my least favourite water in any Bungie FPS.

Get those story missions in. One of the things I really loved doing was setting off on my story journey, but letting other things or other players in the world distract me. Hey, why are they all over there? I should go check it out. What's with that cave? Oh my gosh those enemies are basically unkillable. PANIC! Things like that. Lots of fun. I enjoyed doing the story stuff solo, too. Made things more fun when going in with a buddy later on, too. Different experience and all knowing someone has your back.

I skipped the Exploration mode (mostly because I had no idea where to find it, oops). I'll do that on 360. Definitely get some Crucible in, see how you feel about it. Plenty of opinions to go around there, and they're very broad.

The water animation on the PS3 was not impressive at all. I remember being absolutely in awe staring over the big cliff edges on Halo in H1, checking out the water down low and in the distance. None of that at all in this game. Plenty of other great looking things, though. I assume the 360 will be similar.

Do the Strike on the easier setting once you've level capped and not before, otherwise the bosses are a time sink.

Also see if some friendly DBOers will hop in a fireteam with you to do it. It'll be awesome.