So I tried this here "Destiny" game - heard of it? *long* (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Tuesday, July 22, 2014, 18:55 (3777 days ago) @ Leviathan

So I finally got my hands on it last week and with XBox joining the fray now, I can talk about it. The last season or two of this year I've grown steadily more and more dark, seeing the headlines but ignoring the details, watching the trailers but skipping the streams. For a while I thought I might have even been helping with a fan site for a game that might not even interest me ultimately!

I've also been not reading or watching everything partly because I was way behind on Destiny and Halo stuff, but also because I don't know how much I want to know, and I still want to have plenty of things to discover in the game. As of an hour or so ago I'm debating whether I even want to do the story mission in the beta.

So I went in with mixed expectations. My girlfriend watched me start the game. She likes to have some idea of what I'll be babbling about for the coming days/months/years.

Here's her review first. "I HATE IT." This is because during the course of an hour, she bit off all of her nails and continually screamed EVERY time a Fallen jumped me. Like chalkboard-scratching screams. I will say though, it's very helpful for the immersion!

She soon abandoned me. Later that night before going to bed I told her, "So remember the bad guys you were so scared of? Those weren't the 'Flood' of Destiny. No, those are called the HIVE."

She said, "Nope."

You're a more patient man than I.

This interconnected zone on Earth is sort of like a New Mombassa from ODST with many more things to explore and many more activities to do within it. It's sort of like Bungie recorded me a year after ODST's release, firstly wondering why I was still playing it, and secondly, what they could do to make that experience dynamic and re-energizing.

The fact that there are going to be multiple New Mombassas in the full game is staggering to me.

That's a good sign, my biggest problem with the hub in ODST is that I wanted more of it. That gives me an idea: more classic co-op nights featuring ODST? maybe?

This game is great. It took me a while to get into it, to absorb it, define it, and to see where Halo ends and Destiny begins. None of the trailers do it justice. You have to see all of the details and niches that really define its universe to get it. One moment I'm playing this new shooter, thinking "Okay, so it definitely has great gunplay and the melees ares fantastically visceral, but is this really worth all the hoopla?" and the next I'm watching a sunset on the Tower realizing "I could play this game for a long damn time. Shit."

It's been really good to see people say this. I didn't exactly distrust Bungie, but they seemed to be asking us to take a lot of the game's quality on faith, and saying you just have to play it seemed like a possible cop-out, but apparently they were being honest and direct. Really, that applies to most of the rest of your post.