So let's compare new $60 games to Destiny... (Destiny)

by Jabberwok, Thursday, October 30, 2014, 17:07 (3676 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I have to take issue with the assertion that Skyrim's missions are not repetitive. While there is a lot of unique story, a lot of it also ends up translating into fetch quests to fairly similar dungeons. "Want to be a powerful vampire? Go to this dungeon and bring me the item inside." "Want to study music and poetry at the Bard's College? Go to this dungeon and bring me the item inside." ..wat.... Being a bard is...killing more draugr in more dungeons? Really??

But I'll definitely concede that it's more varied than Destiny, and one of the reasons I went back to playing Skyrim again, is specifically the misrepresentation of the expansiveness of Destiny. They really did more or less say 'If you can see it, you can go there.' A promise that was broken within my first 10 seconds in the Cosmodrome. Maybe they were actually playing an Elder Scrolls game in that part of the interview....

GTA 5: 20 times larger map? 50 times? 1,000,000 times more story and plot? ∞ times better voice acting?

Skyrim: 100+ hours of voice acted, non-repetitive story missions, PLUS a map that takes literal hours to walk across.

Assassin's Creed 4: Massive open map, more than 60 hours of only semi-repetitive voiced story missions and gameplay.

These are games that are more than worth the price of admission. But to be fair, there are other games that don't match this at all:

Titanfall: Literally zero story. Great gameplay. Each map is roughly akin to a destiny area in size.

I'm sure there are others.

But the fact is that Destiny was billed as a massive, open world(s) to explore, with quotes like "if you see mountains in the distance, you can go there" which are just patently false. Am I having fun playing it? Sure. But the game was sold to me as HUGE and EXPANSIVE but it's really not.

Graphics: Amazing
Sound: Incredible
Gameplay: Fun
Story: Basically none.
Mission Design: Terrible and repetitive. Mission 2 features you literally walking back through part of the end of mission 1. So dumb.
Voice Acting: Generally good acting completely overshadowed by how god-awful Peter Dinklage is as the primary signposter. Stunt casting at its worst.
Size and Scope: Far less than advertised, and made to seem even smaller because so many of the missions in the game are all the same. Why are the weekly nightfall and weekly heroic strikes always the same strikes? That just forces us to play the same mission over again, which is boring as hell. It's like game design 101 to mix these things up. Why is so much of the game text-based instead of voiced? How come there's zero backstory and zero in-game plot to motivate your actions? There's clearly been loads of stuff written by Bungie about the game world and its mythos, as evidenced in the grimoire cards, so why is ZERO of that in the actual game?

Instead of being the game I was planning on playing for the next 10 years, Destiny has turned into the game I plan on scrapping as soon as the next moderately interesting game comes out. For me, that'll probably be The Division.

As for the xpac, you're getting your $20 worth if you believed that the $15 per xpac you paid for CoD was worth it. Think of it like this: If you could buy two movie tickets for $20, you'd get about 4 hours of movie out of that. So if you get 4 hours of gameplay from it, you're even.