Destiny needs to be Skyrim with guns... (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, December 08, 2014, 23:01 (3878 days ago) @ tadboz
edited by General Vagueness, Monday, December 08, 2014, 23:07

...which is what I expected to get, due to the ambiguity of the marketing.

In Skyrim, there are so many side quests (and even main quests) that you never run out of things to do unless you play all day, every day. I never had to grind, I never had to play the same thing over again, and the world felt very, very open.Just by doing things, I got good gear (without RNG!) and all the super awesome weapons had specific tasks associated with them or could be crafted.

Crafting! Why am I sitting on nearly 1000 Sapphire Wire right now? Because I can't make the gear I want! One of the rewards I should be able to get in Destiny is profiting from the fruits of all my romps across the star system--namely, crafting with the unused junk I found! Argh!!!

Crafting both isn't necessarily as easy to build in as it might sound and isn't necessarily a good fix for a lot of issues. The big thing that comes to mind is ensuring certain things are still rare or hard to get.

I thought each planet in Destiny was going to be like a slightly downsized Skyrim overworld. Bungie needs to get rid of kill barriers and leave the climbing of mountains and such as a risky feat the player can attempt, if he or she so desires. If you get stuck on weird geometry while climbing somewhere way off the beaten track, well, that's you catching your ankle in a gap. Too bad. But at least it feels more REAL than "Turn back" flashing in your face.

There's more than just getting stuck to worry about. You can get stuck and almost be able to get out but not quite, which is really frustrating and can lead to a lot of wasted time (not so much in Destiny with its respawn system, but I had this happen in a darkness zone once, so I tried a bunch of things before killing myself and having to restart the whole big area). You can see things and see through things that you shouldn't. You can get stuck in such a way that you should be able to get out but can't because a piece of geometry is solid from one side but not the other. You can be clipped into geometry, which looks hard to believe. You can be in an endless fall even though you aren't going anywhere. You can fall through the world, which ruins immersion right quick. You can even crash the game. (If you ever tried to get on top of the roof of the first house in Reach and were frustrated you couldn't, it's because you were being saved from having the game crash, in an admittedly inelegant way.) It all depends what specifically happens with the geometry and the engine and your character. Possibly the most telling thing is that even with the invisible walls and the immediate and quick kill zones all of these things except the game crashing are still doable for players that are determined or unlucky. If they opened things up more these things would happen more and I and others very well might be put off exploration that even kind of looks like it goes out of the map proper, which would mean missing things that are hidden deliberately and missing a lot of the fun of exploration.

Conversation would be nice too. I feel like they could have pulled a page from Mass Effect (or even the shittiest, most basic JRPG you can think of) and had a way for you to learn more about the universe by talking to NPCs. Hell, it could've been voiceless text and I would've been happy. Even if all the civilians in the FWC hangout had to say was, "Get out of my face," it would've been something. Maybe they could put the Grimoire in-game too! Ugh.

I'd settle for a way to make them say something or even just encourage it, like the use key in Half-Life or swapping weapons in Halo.

Pretty much everything you said, Cody, I agree with. I love Destiny, but I would love it MORE if it had avoided mistakes in game design that have been known to the community for, in some cases, several YEARS already. I feel like someone allowed their "vision" to trample common sense in some of the design choices we were left with.

It feels like opposite to me. There's a vision there that got beaten up by the realities of making an MMO-style game, on four different consoles, using three different hardware architectures, with two of them being much less capable than the other two (and maybe deadlines and contracts, again).