My impressions from the beta (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 14:31 (3546 days ago) @ kapowaz

- 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.

Well it's good to know that; it would've been nice to have some explanation previously or officially. I will say, and I thought about adding this, I have a habit, as I'm sure many do, of pushing the triggers all the way in even if I don't need to, which makes the wait to be zoomed in feel slightly shorter than having it on a button you hold, and it kind of feels like I'm actively doing it, like it's a continuous thing, if you know what I mean. It would be great if zooming in took the same amount of time as a a regular or at least slightly slow trigger pull.

- 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.

I don't buy any of that because there's still the default. Not only that, but a lot of games that have customizable controls, in fact I think over half the console games I've seen with customizable controls, have multiple pre-set configurations in addition to letting any button have any function.

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.

Then why did they put a thing in the control setup to let you swap bumpers and triggers?

So just how many practical, worthwhile control schemes are there left?

That leaves all of them.

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?

To me it is. I know about being drowned by choices, I have difficulty making decisions and making them quickly so it's part of my life, and I have seen it in software before. I believe this is different. It's a bold statement but I think anything less than full customization of controls in a game, especially well into the 21st century, is bad UX design.

- 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?

That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about relative importance and immediacy of importance, and to be honest what I'm used to factors into it. Yes, the health bar only disappears if you've been at full health for something like 10 seconds, and the level bar becomes translucent if it doesn't change for a while, but you can always press start to check your level, and if they're going for less clutter, which is a noble goal, they should make the HUD level bar and indicator disappear completely when not in use, like, say, the health bar.
Since I'm on the subject, they could do to make some other elements smaller if they're going for less clutter, there's stuff blocking a lot of the lower left of the screen and I can see it all clearly an on SDTV, they could make it a little smaller and still be discernible-- not by a lot, but some.

- 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).

This is a completely separate issue, unless it's a major, major increase and they make snipers and maybe shotguns not act the way a lot of people expect (the majority of FPS players, I think?). Even with a lot more health, people would still be able to shoot for a long time. (In fact, with more health they would live longer, so they would probably be able to shoot for longer.) The amount of health it would take to balance that so that ammo management and ammo scarcity, well, so that they would exist, would make kill times go from too short to too long, I think. If they want to not have ammo management, or if they want to limit it heavy weapons, I'm OK with that, but then why have ammo pickups, why not just have it regenerate or even be infinite? The fact they didn't do that says to me they want people to think about when and where they're getting ammo, and in the beta I had literally one game where I had trouble finding special ammo, and it was my first (and only) game on the Venus map.
Maybe they could do like halfway between primary and heavy weapons, and have you lose some special ammo when you die, but not all of it; I'm thinking it would be cut in half.