My Beta Thoughts and Feedback (Lots of Text) (Destiny)

by RC , UK, Sunday, August 03, 2014, 14:48 (3573 days ago) @ Avateur

Destiny itself should also copy Halo 2 and allow a Clan screen to show in-game so that you can see who from your clan is online and also to give you the option to invite people to join your clan right from within the game itself.

Seconded.

It's probably just a wish at this point, but it would be cool if the Crucible had a Clans Only playlist that matched clans up against each other somehow.

A permanent playlist would probably never work due to low population. But a timed experience like Iron Banner? That'd rock.

Well, another solution to some problems with vehicles would be the option to hijack.

A lot of Destiny's core design is focused on working well over a network. With all the syncing issues that hijacking has, I'm betting that's why they left it out. I'm sure you've seen people get hijacked from what seem like impossible distances? Assassinations for the same reason.

In one of their old developers presentations, they said something like this: if you've got the choice between two mechanics, and one of them networks better, go with the one that works better over the network.

Reach Co-op and Firefight compared to Destiny: Reach can reach 40-50 enemies in Campaign, easily 24 in Firefight, with rich simulation of physics. I don't think I've seen more than maybe 10-15 enemies at once in Destiny, but co-op is ubiquitous, performant and the game is still fun.

At the same time, this whole "hold Y" to get back to orbit gets really obnoxious very quickly. [...] Regardless, don't make us hold down the button for an hour to back out. Five seconds, tops, please.

I gets longer if you have people in the party with you. Obviously because your decision affects more people; I actually like that.

It also seems like the Beta didn't remember that the last time I was on, I had my party set to Invite Only. [...]I'm hoping that the final product of Destiny won't constantly revert to Friends Only.

That annoys me a little too.

I can't for the life of me figure out why Bungie removed the death-count from the post-game report.

I think it's a player psychology thing: keeping it positive and encouraging and all that.

Maybe 'points per life' would be better than K/D, anyway. Especially in these hybrid slayer/objective gametypes, it'll always be a big positive number and you'll get the bonuses from capturing zones as well.

PointsPerLife = PointsEarned/(Deaths+1)

I really wish I could hover over my friend's ships when we're all just sitting in Orbit so that it can highlight and tell me who they are.

Yeah that'd be cool. Could tell you what ship it is too.

Speaking of Orbit, it can really be a huge time waster. [...] I shouldn't have to bump us into Orbit, and then bump us elsewhere.

Come September, I want you to go compare the loading time of Old Russia-Orbit and Orbit-Tower. Then you'll have a pretty good idea why.

Though, I would like to access the Director from the Tower and just make it one step.

Or take the Tower itself as an example. I have to go back there for every single little thing? [...] Everyone's time just got wasted.

I think people are making too much of this. Would it really be preferable to have your party-mates (or MM randoms) stopping every five minutes to stare at their menu?

Player 1: "Hmm, is this gun better than this one? Let me check out the upgrades. hmm, shiny. Would that really be better in the long run? Should I keep and upgrade it or just get rid of it? Hmm, I completed a challenge, which should I do next? Where should we go to do that one?"

Player 2: "C'mon, let's GO already!!! Look at it later!"

Destiny already makes that 'look at it later' part, a part of the mechanics.

Personally, I leave all the Tower stuff as a batch exercise. Chat to crpytarch, melt down some weapons, check the bounties, have a quick eye over the weapons the gunsmith has. Done.

Your party-dragging point is silly too:
1. You can split your party temporarily.
2. You can have chat be system-level if you still want to talk while some people go there.
3. Fact of life. People get dragged to places they don't want to go all the time because people they want to be with are there.

People NEED downtime, anyway. You can't fire on all cylinders all the time. No one can.

[...] this whole squad party of three thing is extremely and unbelievably limiting for a "shared world" game. [...]

I do wonder if more work could be done to automatically drop you into the same servers as your friends and clanmates. So if you were heading to the Mothyards, it'd put the server your friends were on as the first one to check if it could join.

I occasionally saw that little message in the director saying '2 friends here' or whatever. But, I never actually ran into anyone I recognised.

We also can't communicate with anyone in Explore. [...] It's so frustrating not being able to tell the randoms to stay inside the circle so that we have as many Guardians inside linked up!

Maybe they WANT to be outside the circle? I played a few new characters over the course of the Beta, and I felt incredibly weak in some of the Public events.

I'm opposed to default open voice chat and proximity voice. Opt-in is much better. I'm not sure a menu option for 'I'd like to hear proximity voice/my teammates' would even work since the default is off. I heard there were some issues about non-friend fireteam voice?

Speaking of going into Crucible with teams of six, I'm not sure if this is just a Beta thing, but the party system split my party multiple times.

Happened to me once, too. Incredibly weird to start shooting the people I was fighting with the game before - all while I could hear what they were saying.

Questions on Raids that I hope get answered some time before Destiny launches [...]

Why is the time scale so important? It'll be obvious once you get to the Vault of Glass. It's not really going to swing your purchase, is it?

It's not fun wandering the world, killing a group of enemies, walking ten feet away, and having them respawn. They all just hang around in the same place. At least in ODST's largely empty and increasingly boring hub world, the enemies wander around, patrol, and come after you if they see you.

Agreed. The spaces become maybe a little too safe because I always knew exactly where enemies would be or where they wouldn't be. I'm hoping that either:
A: it was a Beta thing to allow people to smash predictable mobs
B: they use that Always Online magic to mix things up more.

That Ogre really impressed me, by the way. [...]That guy walked his ass up the ramp and came right after me. I got killed, and they're much more difficult when they're coming at you.

That's funny. I just machine-gunned the Ogre as soon as I saw him. The floating Hive thingie (I forget the name) got me: I freaked out that it's shots kept bouncing everywhere, even after it died! I was hopping around like a madman trying to avoid them.

I feel like Bungie should add a compass to the game somewhere.

Yes plox. Even just an 'N' on the motion sensor would help.

= Crucible =

Here I was going to then put in a whole bunch of sarcy responses to your bits on Crucible but it wouldn't be productive. I disagree with most of what you said on it. I think Crucible fun, I want to play it more - and those are the most important things to me.