Post-Beta thoughts: how Destiny can reach its full potential (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Tuesday, July 29, 2014, 08:29 (3562 days ago) @ narcogen

What platform were you playing on?

PS3 and PS4.

For coop, I'd only want to hear my fireteam, and that's how it is by default.

For strikes, where you might need matchmaking if you don't have a full fireteam, you may need to check your privacy settings to allow voice from fireteam members not on your friends list. I seem to remember having to switch this early on, and I seem to have heard more of this from Xbox One users than 360; YMMV. However, I appreciate that the default had that off rather than on.

I'm not sure you follow: I'm arguing that it ought to be possible to enable voice chat even with people who are not in a fireteam. Right now, people who don't want to chat have that option, so they only chat when in a fireteam; people who do want always-on chat have to go through extra interfacing to make it happen, and ultimately winds up serving as a pretty nasty discouragement to chatting, both in your chances of getting someone to agree to join up and, for some of us as noted by kapowaz, taking the initiative to invite (and even if these weren't issues, the system still feels very clumsy for those of us who want to chat by default).

Heck no. The reason the Tower is a tolerable and relatively peaceful place is that the game's built-in emotes are the only communication possible with non party members. What those people are actually thinking as they point, dance, bow and jump around is best left unheard.

What's the issue with having it be an option?

I'm not arguing that you should have to listen to people. I'm arguing that there should be an option to choose between public chat and fireteam chat.

I dislike effects that give information while also obscuring the view

That's an implementation issue. Reach's edge-of-screen effects could be really obnoxious while still feeling fairly vague, but Halo 1's arrows are pretty mild most of the time, only even edging on ridiculous under AR fire (and that could easily be avoided by decreasing intensity when the damage rate is high).

so I was glad that damage indication was mostly restricted to the radar.

Was it? I got the sense that the primary damage indication was the arrows in the middle of the screen. Which is directional, but it doesn't feel like "arrows" with an immediately obvious tail and head. Strictly speaking, they pivot around a center point, but this is something it regularly took my brain a moment to register. It's possible that I just need to acclimate better, but it did not feel very clear.

Radar indication is alright, but it also lacks reflexive immediacy, and it's not visible during ADS.

I also like the relative imprecision of the radar compared to Halo; I just wish it gave a slightly better indication of target elevation.

Yes. I'm wondering how they can do that. It works as well as it does in Halo because they can adjust shape; I wonder if a similar concept can be applied in Destiny, like adjusting the shape of the pizza slices on the inside or outside depending on whether the person is above or below.

I'm also betting there's some performance impact of doing this, especially on the older platforms.

Possibly. That's a common argument, though in PC games which have adjustable FoV, the impact usually barely registers. Perhaps that becomes more complicated in Destiny, which has a fairly sophisticated visibility solution, and where the bottlenecks might be in different places (oh, the eternal cries of "anisotropic filtering is practically free").

Also, ODST did not have any multiplayer included except Firefight, and this may also be a factor. The wider the FOV, the harder it is to sneak up on somebody from the side or behind.

From how Destiny plays right now, that sounds quite beneficial to my ears. This also isn't completely hypothetical either, high-FoV multiplayer already exists in Halo in the form of 2-player screen splits (in the cases of CE and Reach, far higher than what I'm suggesting the FoV be upped to).