Too long; do not read (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Thursday, July 30, 2015, 19:22 (3196 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

First of all, I love that story. Sounds like a fantastic moment :)

This is what made me sad about your thread. (The CONCEPT is fantastic. Asking people to think about the things that impressed them... awesome.) You started the thread with "it has very few of these moments for me" - and a huge number of the people who replied agreed. Because they were judging those moments with TODAY'S eyes, and not thinking about the first time they saw whatever it was.

So that's not actually where I was coming from, or the point I was trying to get across. Not exactly. Re-reading my post, I think I perhaps wasn't specific enough. I wasn't just talking about the "oooh baby" moments, but what follows them as well.

With the Halo games, the "ooooh baby" moments I was referring to are moments that I have replayed over and over and over... as often or more than some of Destiny's missions. The point I was driving at was that the Halo games did a great job of presenting scenarios or encounters that were completely unlike the rest of the game. And that made the story missions far more replayable, because you felt like you were doing something totally different every 10-15 minutes.

Destiny, by comparison, repeats stuff a lot more. In Halo you might drive a warthog around the bend and find a clearing with 2 scarabs, a bunch of ghosts and banshees, marines in tanks and falcons, all squaring off to have an epic battle... and then you get to play the battle and it is unlike any other moment in the series! These unique set-piece moments are few and far between in Destiny. In my opinion, that is what leads to so many of the story missions feeling kind of the same as each other. There isn't much to set them apart from each other, with a few exceptions.

I love the world and mechanics of Destiny so much, sometimes my imagination runs wild with all the stuff I'd like to see happen in future story missions... more than "running into another room full of infantry, kill everything, run through a hallway into another room full of infantry, repeat". I like that, it's great. I just want more variety of experiences, and I was curious to hear if any moments in Destiny stuck out to the crew here at DBO the way some of my favorite Halo moments have stuck with me.

So just last night I ran into a situation that sort of fit the 'ooh baby' feeling - but the one I thought you were asking about, not what you're describing above.

I was running through to Skywatch, and I had a bounty that needed a few more melee kills, so I stopped in that room where you pick up your first ship. It's just got a few vandals, and some dregs and shanks, in patrol; I figured it would be quick work to pick up half a dozen melee kills and then be on my way.

And suddenly that Queenbreaker's whatever captain comes out of nowhere and starts kicking my ass. (Almost literally. He came up behind me and whaled on my back.) I'd completely forgotten he's there all the time now, since HoW launched, and I was completely unprepared for him. And he got the jump on me, and if I let him kill me I'd start three different bounties over from scratch.

So a completely banal moment turned into a nailbiter for a few seconds, and my heart rate elevated, and the adrenaline flowed... and it was all completely unexpected.

It's not really a 'favorite' moment - but it sticks out in my memory (at least now, 18 hours later), and it's more memorable for being unexpected.

And you're right - that doesn't happen very often any more... but looking back at Halo, it really doesn't happen there, either. When MCC came out, I played through several of the campaigns, and I found myself playing patterns - I knew exactly where everyone was going to be, it was just a matter of managing the encounters. (I'm not saying this is bad. It's like slipping on an old comfortable sweater; you know EXACTLY where the shoulders are going to sag, you know you have to turn that arm a little to hide the snag on the sleeve. And you love it.) I can't think of any encounters in Halo (any title) that generate as much wonder (or fear, or exhilaration, or whatever you want to call it) as they did the first time through... I think that's because of the familiarity thing.

Which is not to say that you're not entitled to feel like Destiny does a worse job of keeping that interesting vibe going than Halo did, of course.

(I love the battle in Two Betrayals that you pick up the final banshee in, even though I know where EVERY SINGLE ENEMY spawns, and what they're all going to do if I go left, or right, or up the middle, or take a ghost, or snipe from rocks, or whatever. There is almost nothing surprising in that battle any more - but I still like replaying it. Just like I enjoy replaying the Last Array final battle (which shows up in a more complicated form at the beginning of the Omnigul strike, and is just as fun to replay).)

I guess I'm sorry that you find it all the same. I wish I knew why you and I see Halo similarly, but Destiny differently, in this regard. And I'm glad there are still things that keep you interested and playing. ;)