My impressions from the beta (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 02:54 (3752 days ago) @ General Vagueness

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?

I think you may have misunderstood what the Mirror layout does — it swaps the left and right trigger, left and right bumper, presumably to make things easier for left-handers. None of the supplied layouts uses anything other than one of the two trigger buttons for fire.

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.

Hundreds of UX designers would disagree with you, and they ought to know. I would say the opposite is true: games not making opinionated decisions about how to layout joypad controls is a relic of the old days of games, and indicative of a lack of strong opinion within the studio about what layout works well. Bungie will have done a lot of research and testing on this, and ultimately decided these six layouts represent the most useful ones.

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

Checking your health is very contextual: since it automatically replenishes, if it's not being shown you can assume you're at full health. If you're not in combat, you don't really need to know about it either. Levelling progress on the other hand is something of a ‘slow burn’ thing that, particularly as you approach the level cap, you will probably be keeping an eye on to see how much longer you have to go. Since there are lots of different contexts in which you might want to look at it, if players had to drop into a menu to view it would require they interrupt whatever activity they're in to check it. You may not find yourself looking at it regularly, but be careful not to confuse your own play habits with the majority: ever-present experience bars are a staple of MMOs and RPGs, and with good reason.

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.

I'd be cool with this; so long as it's relatively available for other players to find.