My impressions from the beta (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 03:07 (3753 days ago) @ General Vagueness

- 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

Bungie have moved to an Aim Down Sights (also known as Iron Sights) aiming mechanic for Destiny. If you've not played any of the Call of Duty console games, this is their preferred mechanism for aiming, using left trigger to aim down the sights, and right trigger to fire.

I'm certain they made this decision for two big reasons: it makes it easier for Call of Duty players coming to the game (important, as it was Modern Warfare that finally stole Halo's crown as the most-played XBL game), and secondly to support the style of weapon they (mostly) incorporated in the game. You'll note that almost every weapon benefits from aiming in this fashion (the shotgun is the only one for which it's not beneficial to ADS).

Concomitantly, throwing grenades is something you'll do far less frequently in Destiny, so it makes sense to relegate this to another button so as to free up the trigger. I've played some Reach and Halo 4 MP this week to remember what it was like, and by comparison the Halo method of zooming (clicking the right stick) feels clunky and error-prone by comparison (your aim can subtly shift in the process of clicking), so I think it was the right decision.

- 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

It's a common saying in user experience that every time you make something an option instead of choosing for the end user, you're shunting off some of the responsibility for your job onto the user. Now, for some cases there are legitimate reasons to leave things as an option (a significant number of people are left-handed, another large group of people prefer to invert the Y-axis and so on), but when you talk about making the entire control scheme customisable, you're asking anyone who uses it to do a lot of work.

Also, most control schemes only swap a couple of buttons, with good reason: certain functions are only really practical in a few ways; fire with a button other than a trigger wouldn't make much sense. So just how many practical, worthwhile control schemes are there left? Is it worth devoting all that time and effort to creating a system for choosing between all of these if only a tiny percentage of your users will ever use them (as opposed to one of the stock defaults), and even then would probably be sufficiently happy with one of the defaults? I for one can think of a load of other things I'd rather Bungie spent their time working on than this.

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

You can't think of any reason why you might want to see what your current leveling progress is? Why would this be contextual?

- 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

This is a common complaint. I'm not sure how it'll be addressed, because I much prefer the idea of guardians’ health pools being increased than this ammo becoming more rare (which would ensure that the really skillful have yet another advantage over more middling players like myself).