Loot cave (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Monday, September 22, 2014, 11:40 (3714 days ago) @ Earendil

Let's not forget that Halo CE was a huge letdown to the community.

Then right off the bat you're distancing it from the Destiny situation; Destiny has let down some people in the community, but Halo was a wildly successful critical hit outside of a disappointed component of the existing Bungie fanbase. Destiny's response has been quite different (and this forum is actually not as firestormy as I would have expected).

The graphics were different, but technically sub-par.

The game's geometry and animation pipeline was nothing special in 2001, but even in a modern game the particle system would be firmly in "not bad" territory (at least outside of the choppiness of large alpha layers), and the environmental shading was absolutely ridiculous for a 2001 game.

It wasn't really impressively-produced, but it was very impressive.

The level design was repetitive too, with Gamespy saying at the time "you'll trudge through countless hallways and control rooms that all look exactly the same, fighting identical-looking groups of enemies over and over and over...it is simply frustrating to see a game with such groundbreaking sequences too often degenerate [into] this kind of mindless, repetitive action."

It's "repetitive" in the sense of modular geometry, but the actual encounters have tremendous variety, as does the high-level structuring of levels. Destiny also reuses geometry, but it even reuses encounters since the regular patrol mobs are out and about, but the real issue is that almost all of the levels share the same high-level structure. Destiny's campaign feels more like a bunch of variations on the same mission than a structured collection of missions.

The campaign situation in Destiny is not the same as that of Halo. Not even remotely.