1. As much as I loved the strength of Halo's shooting and combat cycle, especially Halo 1, ODST, and Reach which I feel are the best in that area, Destiny's 30 seconds of fun are better. The movement modes, the unique classes, even the aiming down the sight make Destiny a better shooter.

Destiny's combat cycle is extremely visceral, although it seems mostly focused around cooperative firefight engagements. There's a lot of stuff that the different Halo games can pull of beautifully that seems completely absent from Destiny.

What kind of stuff? What would you like to see Destiny do that it didn't?

My hope and feeling is that Destiny is capable of a lot more than was asked of it so far. Missions like the attack on the Ketch and battling to the Garden Spire give me confidence that the combat cycle holds up in more Halo-like missions. That we've seen custom animations like the Fallen crawling through the walls in the first mission or Phogath breaking his chains gives me hope that the animation and scripting systems could be pointed more fully at in-mission storytelling. The few cutscenes we got were good. Basically I think all the features from AI to animation to scripting are there, they just need to be better utilized.

2. While I'd put Reach with it's better engine and more motion-captured animations at the top of the Halo series, I was struck by how... inferior ODST's animations were. Cutscene animations were noticeably not nearly as good as future titles, but even combat animations weren't as good either. At one point I remarked to myself it felt like I was fighting posable Halo action figure in that all the enemies felt more like limited motion toys than the alien creatures they were meant to be. It was kinda neat to see how far Bungie's combat animation and ragdoll systems have come since ODST.

Bungie's animations definitely weren't as polished, although IMO Halo 3/ODSTs animation work looks and feels pretty good if you imagine that it's supposed to be like a stop-motion action figure video.

ODST's cutscene animations are probably a bit worse than Halo 3's just because of the smaller team and shorter development time, too. That and Bungie made a big leap forward in animation for Reach. I absolutely love Jorge's very subtle split second look of surprise (in full heavy armor no less!) when the scientist's daughter tells him (in Hungarian) that the three Elites are still hiding in the room with them.

4. Bungie is the king of skyboxes and has been for years and years. Maybe since 2001 when that Halo ring first arching up overhead.

Even the Marathon series has very pleasing skies IMO; the use of space and windows in completing the feel of areas on the Marathon in M1 is sublime, and M2's L'howon is brilliant (and includes day and night variants, hehe).

I don't like Infinity's L'howon sky as much. That might have been Double Aught, though, so clearly not Bungie's fault. :P

I never played much Marathon so it's neat to hear the great skybox tradition extends further than I thought. :)

6. Oddly, even though ODST has a better story, and characters, and cutscenes, I think Destiny does win out on its ending. At the end of the day ODST's story didn't matter one bit.

The only reason that that bothered me is that they tried to make it out as if the engineer was a bigger deal than it seemed to be. If it had been a little bit less dramatic on the "what they know could win the war" stab at self-importance, would that have been less bothersome?

I guess I've just never gotten this complaint. ODST doesn't feel like a story that needs to be felt far and wide within its universe in order to work. Heck, that almost seems like it might make it worse.

Right. It's not a huge bother to me, just in an ideal world either ODST would have been a self-contained story about one team surviving the night... and not tried to link to anything grander. Or, it would have found some better way to shed light on Halo 3's story than it did with that one odd cutscene of Truth finding... Forerunner Stuff. Saving the Engineers didn't resonate or matter much when we already knew Humanity would beat the Covenant and Flood a few days later... Now if ODST had actually been released between Halo 2 and Halo 3... that might have been really interesting! :)

Interesting to contrast, but isn't comparing Destiny and ODST a little unfair to ODST? I mean primarily because ODST was an 18 month development cycle with a smaller team.

Yes and no.

I suspect some of ODST flaws are a result of the smaller team and shorter dev cycle. Some things like the poor quality of the face textures and maybe some of the poor cutscene animations might have been smoothed out by more dev time. On the other hand a lot of my complaints leveled at ODST, like the worse combat animations, would fully apply to Halo 3 as well since the two games share the exact same enemy units. Also, both games cost the same $60 when new. Maybe ODST shouldn't have cost so much, there was certainly enough behind the scenes politics spilling into public view (the aborted E3 countdown for instance), but ultimately it cost what it cost.

To be clear, I'm not saying Halo 3 or ODST are bad, just that in some areas Bungie has advanced so far that looking back makes you appreciate where things have advanced to. I'm not here to slag ODST unfairly. Bungie did a surprisingly good job with it on all fronts. It doesn't feel like a side project which is pretty amazing. I picked it mainly because I wanted to compare the size of New Mombasa to the worlds of Destiny.

ODST remains my favorite Halo game because it offered a "stylized" Halo experience. The concept of film noir permeated the story, art, gameplay, sound, etc. and all those components worked to enhance that concept. The fact that it had such a short development cycle only increases my appreciation for the game. Destiny, too, demonstrates a well-defined concept that informs and inspires those same components.

Agreed. Several times I marveled at how much total darkness Bungie allowed in ODST and at how good the story + setting + music worked.

My one beef with ODST is that it relied heavily on the "defend position" scenario. Too often the situations are defensive, rather than offensive, and These moments stall a good story rather than advancing it. I'm sure Halo 1-3 had these moments, but they were so few and far between that I can't recall any. IMHO Destiny suffers from too many of these defensive scenarios as well.

Off the top of my head, and as a though exercise for myself:

1. Each group of Marines you rescued in Halo 1's "Halo" were assaulted by Covenant troops via dropship.
2. You kinda reverse defended the position at the bottom of the Truth and Reconciliation's gravity lift and again in the lift room.
3. You defend the T&R's landing bay for a few waves while Cortana works on the modulating encryption key.
4. A few times in the Library with the locked doors.
5. You defend that structure from multiple waves right off the bat after you crash land in New Mombasa in Halo 2.
6. The Arbiter has a defend the room section on the gas mining station as the Flood waves attack... Hmm, and on the slow elevator too.
7. You defend the initial Forerunner ruins you land at as the Chief from a few dropshipped waves.
8. The Arbiter defends the Covenant positions against Flood waves on Halo 05.
9. In Halo 3 you defend the dam from a couple of waves after you rescue Johnson.
10. You defend the UNSC base from dropships coming in to the landing bay.
11. You defend the Marine outpost against the jetpack brutes and tanks outside of Voi.
12. In Reach you defend the communications station at the end of the first level.
13. You have a T&R style defense of the Covenant Frigate's landing bay room.
14. You defend the civilians in New Alexandra while waiting for that elevator in the glass roofed building.
15. You defend Halsey's lab under the ice.
16. You defend Keyes' landing zone next to the Pillar of Autumn for a few waves.

ODST had:
1. Defend the area outside the ONI building's access tunnel after driving the Scorpion through the city.
2. Defend the ONI building outside and in.
3. Defend the crashed Pelican on the rooftop.
4. Defend the Engineer at the end of the highway level.

So yeah, it happened several times, but that's from 2001 to 2010. In Destiny many if not most of the mission end with defending a thing, so you're point is well taken. I really liked assaulting the Ketch and the Cabal's warbase, but those kind of missions were unfortunately outnumbered.

Like Destiny, ODST also tells the story in a non-linear way, proving that an engaging story doesn't require a chronological telling. Somehow though, the story of Destiny feels much more disjointed.

It's because ODST's story had several cutscenes with a cast of memorable characters who all interacted with each other while most Destiny missions had a two or three sentence voice over, a few comments by your Ghost during the mission, and a short "well done" sentence or two from your Ghost as the mission ended... The Queen, her brother, and the Exo Stranger were all good but they appeared so little. :(