Probably not a popular opinion but... (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Thursday, July 24, 2014, 14:50 (3779 days ago) @ Cody Miller

And it lifts the WORST ASPECTS of those systems.

Stand by for hell freezing over; I agree with Cody on this.

Well; somewhat.

The missions are pretty repetitive and get quite dull after a while. There's no real sense of any of them mattering or having any causality. In fact, I have to say the story is mostly lost on me right now. I know there's a ‘darkness’ coming, but does that refer to a specific race, or just all the enemies such as the Hive and Fallen? From the opening sequence it appears that my ghost brought me back to life, but that raises a TON of questions which aren't even remotely touched on. If you were brought back to life centuries later and dropped into a post-apocalyptic Earth defending it from aliens, wouldn't you have a few questions?

I get the impression the various factions are meant to have some sort of distinct personality (at least based on the voice acting) but we're given little else to go on. Why do they exist? What are their purposes? I'm mystified.

When it comes to borrowing mechanics from Diablo and WoW, this is where some of the problems start. I feel a bit as though Bungie have borrowed mechanics from old versions of these games, and haven't learned any of the lessons of them (it's as if they played WoW back in 2008 and based their designs on that). As Fuertisimo says, the returning home to identify items is a completely ass-backwards way of doing things; Blizzard realised this and hence you can identify items from your inventory in Diablo 3. Requiring a trip home just to unwrap your loot is completely absurd (particularly considering the daft ‘return to orbit’ intermediary step).

The grinding issue is one that I feel will be more or less of an issue depending on the individual. On the one hand, you don't want a system whereby it's possible to acquire all of the goodies too quickly (because if you do, you'll burn out and stop playing, which will damage the MMO experience), but on the other you don't want things taking so long you don't feel like you're progressing. The key is to ensure that whilst you're grinding, you're still enjoying the minute-by-minute gunplay. So far this feels like the most polished, triple-A part of the game (unsurprising given it's from Bungie); it's the lack of anything else gluing the experience together that undermines it.

Finally I want to talk about exploration. The world is beautiful, the scenery and environment stunning to behold. But all the same, it feels oddly constricted and artificial. I don't feel like I'm exploring a wide open area so much as travelling on (admittedly quite broad) conduits between hubs which have a very linear feel. I never really minded Bungie putting invisible walls and killzones into the Halo games, but here it feels particularly egregious. If you're selling us an open world, why can't I climb the mountains? And on that subject, why is the land so…flat? For all the bumpiness the world has, it's more or less all of a consistent elevation — it doesn't feel like you're ever travelling up into the hills so much as just cresting a rise, after which the land falls again. Maybe the other zones will amend this, but it feels a bit as though in an attempt to prevent players ‘skipping ahead’ they've put a straightjacket on what could have otherwise been a compelling, immersive world.

We're capped at level 8 right now, which means not only are we not able to experience a lot of the game systems (crafting items? upgrading them with materials?) but we're also limited in where we can go. It may be that travelling to other worlds, and other parts of this world will help sculpt the immersive experience, but I think Bungie could do a lot more to sell us with the smaller scale things; missions that engage and involve more than just Collect X things/Kill Y enemies/Travel to point Z.