My impressions from the beta (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, August 18, 2014, 23:13 (3546 days ago)

Here are some things that struck me playing the beta. I've tried to keep it to things I haven't seen anyone else bring up or that have only been brought up once. I know a lot of this is negative; it's what stood out to me. I have more thoughts that warrant their own posts. (Also I typed up most of this as I played and made tweaks after the beta ended, and I wanted to at least get mostly caught up on the forum before I posted it.)

- the faces are too distinguished, got anything more doughy, ill-defined, hairy, oily, etc.? no, I am not a looker

- the colors, Duke, the colors! for Exo heads/faces, I like the colors available

- your Guardian seems fidgety and nervous during appearance customization

- what's that on the astronaut's shoulder? when the first astronaut steps out of the lander in the opening cutscene the camera pauses on their shoulder and there's like a circle with a circle inside it and two lines coming off it

- I can't turn off toggle crouch; I am not happy about this

- lights (or whatever those arching things are) on the road to the starting area only show up if you're far enough away

- the sign that's down in the first area that's on the right from where you start out facing and is a copy of the sign that's up has an irregular hole in it, i.e. not like a real hole, it looks like a graphical error

- stuff in the distance when you first get outside again ("The Divide") only shows up if you zoom in or get close enough, and it's pretty substantial

- come to think of it, stuff like the last two things keeps showing up

- if you stand in certain steams of water flowing down you get a watery view of the world, that's cool

- why would I want zoom on a trigger?

- why would I want zoom to take so long? this one I accept more as a design decision, while not being able to have zoom on something that's not a trigger while having "fire weapon" be on a trigger is just bad to me

- I kept thinking the left trigger was for the grenade, why is there not a control scheme that has the gun on the right trigger and the grenade on the left trigger? I can't be the only Halo player that got tripped up by this

- speaking of which, the control schemes seem OK, and I really appreciate being able to swap triggers and bumpers, but why no ability to flip left and right, and better yet...

- why no ability to make a custom control scheme? you've been making console games for like 15 years now, Bungie, and at least some of your games before that had customizable controls, you should've worked this out already... eh, baby steps I suppose, swap triggers and bumpers, next hopefully will be swap left and right, then maybe something to swap face buttons with each other or swap some face buttons with bumpers or something, then fully customizable controls

- no reticle on the sniper when it's not zoomed? is that a bug or is it just to make no-scopes more hardcore?

- actually the sniper doesn't seem to hit anything at all unscoped, not enemies or objects or buildings or ground or anything, unless you're literally three feet in front of it, is that also by design?

- I lost my connection just after I got to "The Divide" and when I went back to my character all my character progression (weapons, progress towards leveling up) was still there but my campaign progress was back to where you first get a weapon, which I found weird, and which I didn't like, especially since I was playing slowly and looking at everything

- ammo collection-- if you're even one round below your maximum ammo capacity for a weapon, even if your reserve is topped off but your weapon isn't, and you walk over an ammo item, you use up all of it, and they appear to potentially fill a lot of ammo-- Halo did this with ammo pickups too and so do a lot of FPSs, but it annoyed me in Halo and elsewhere and Halo moved away from ammo packs over time

- holding buttons to do things instead of just tapping-- good sometimes, annoying other times, and most of the time tapping the button gives you no indication anything happened; when I first had to use this interface element I tapped the button like ten times, wondering if my controller was acting up (because it has been), before holding it and seeing the little circle thing come up

- Fallen writing on some of their equipment-- does anyone have screenshots?

- am I doing something wrong or is it impossible to crouch-jump? if not, I really, really don't like that, that's a basic move that FPSs have had for years and years, and yes, there are double jumps and glides and triple jumps and flying leaps, but if something is just slightly above what one jump can reach I want to be able to crouch-jump onto it, and crouching while jumping makes you slightly harder to hit; I really want crouch-jumps in the final game

- sometimes the reticle goes wide for no apparent reason

- the health bar doesn't show up unless you're taking damage but the level bar is always there? WTF?

- I was told I had the upgrade that enables Golden Gun available, and I enabled it, but I didn't seem to be able to use it until after I'd leveled up again (I had no pistol/hand cannon until right at the end of the beta, well after using the super)

- the volume is too low on the NPCs in the Tower, I was playing at a comfortable and clear volume for general gameplay and when the NPCs talked I could hardly ever tell what they were saying, even turning it up a little above that comfortable level and then a little more I still couldn't make out more than one word per speech snippet most of the time

- I like everything about being a Hunter except for:

--- the super, or the first super-- which is a fine attack, but no area-of-effect game-changer like the other two

--- having a hood when I wear a cape, a helmet with a hood just strikes me as really dumb, and having the cape but not the hood when I don't have a helmet on (in the Tower) also strikes me as dumb; I don't want to have to give up this item that looks cool because it requires me to also look like some kind of redundancy-focused idiot

--- I'm also not fond of my dance, but I'm not sure if I had it because I was a human or because I was a Hunter or because I was both; anyway the dance is just... it's just not that good, I think the robot dance and the spinny dance and the pull up your pants dance and the touch my body dance and all the smoother dances look better, this one just looks like The Carlton; I'm dorky and I don't dance and I imagine if anyone saw me trying to dance they'd think I suck at it, but that doesn't mean I want my Guardian to be the same way

- it seems like in competitive modes we have shields but in cooperative modes we don't... what? I'm having trouble forming a coherent question or complaint, that just seems irritating and really weird

- I've been assuming it won't be in the final game or at least will be possible to turn off, but the "go to orbit" message in the Tower really makes the experience worse

- I didn't have a problem with this but I feel safe in predicting it will be a problem: the special ammo in competitive multiplayer (the Crucible), there's a lot of it and you keep all of it or nearly all of it when you die; this will probably become a problem because anyone can equip a sniper rifle as their special weapon, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's played multiplayer with snipers, and the same thing could be a problem in confined maps with shotguns

- largely separate from the previous point, I'd like to see special ammo appear less often and be announced like heavy ammo, but I don't think either kind of ammo should have a verbal announcement, especially just to say it's about to show up, and maybe even the "ammo is about to show up" textual message could be dispensed with

- I really want to read more from The Handbook of (Un)Conventional Advice

Any thoughts on any of this?