But what differentiates a good player from a great player? The scenario you describe where a boss takes a long time to kill presumably will be variable based on this player skill, but it's unclear to me how the gameplay offers opportunity to do optimal or just okay damage. Is there such a thing as a skill rotation (using certain abilities when off cooldown, in a particular order)?

No, your knowledge / skill can definitely make fights go faster. The Forbes write up said they were in the strike for 3 hours, however I've done it on legend in a little over 30 minutes (this was with good people with voice chat). But damage output is damage output. Go try to kill stuff in the caves behind the dried up ocean. You do 1 damage.

I'm surprised to hear you have little to say about the player investment system so far, but you've touched on something I always wondered about: just how much your character's gear level impacts on the difficulty of combat. The answer appears to be: substantially, which is disappointing but not that surprising. What it does mean is that areas of the game will be either trivial (and thus, probably ignored) or impossible (and similarly ignored) at different stages as you level. Again, based on my experience of WoW (a game with millions of players) this leads to 'ghost towns' in the underpopulated areas, whilst everyone focuses on the content they can actually play. It'll be interesting to see how much this affects co-op play in the final game, and whether it might result in areas feeling devoid of (human) life.

It seems like explore mode puts out guys your level, so I think you'll always be reasonably challenged. I'm not sure, again, given the low spread of possible levels in the alpha. I didn't touch much on the investment system, since it's impossible to see how much content is spoils given the low level cap. It most certainly WILL spoil content in the full release, the only question is how much and to what degree. The investment system is a mistake, but nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

What can mitigate it significantly is if there ends up being a large amount non grindy stuff to do in explore mode.

You can shoot that big gun off the top of it to make things a little easier.

I... did not know this.

This made me laugh. :)

There's no voice chat yet, I take it?

Voice chat was definitely in the Alpha, but it is a fireteam only voice chat, which from what Bungie has stated previously will be the way it stays unless you form a party on your respective playform instead of in game.

The bar graphs display a percentage for each weapon. That's not how much it's being lowered, but how powerful relative to par it is. So if you switch to Legend and it says "Machine gun, -33%", that doesn't mean your gun is being lowered by a third, it means that Bungie thinks your gun is ⅔ as powerful as it should be in order to perform comfortably on that difficulty.

You can be on Legend and have it display positive percentages, meaning you are more powerful than you need to be.

That UI could definitely be clearer. The percentages are completely unexplained in-situ; I actually thought they meant something else entirely different!

Your description of boss combat sounds disappointing, but it's hard to say if this is because - as an alpha - the boss encounters aren't fully tuned yet, or if they're actually broken by design. In WoW almost all bosses have what's referred to as an 'enrage timer'; even if you're surviving and chipping away at the boss's health, if you don't defeat it within that time limit, the boss will suddenly and quickly kill all of you. It's a necessary feature to prevent otherwise underpowered characters from being able to defeat a boss, plus it also acts as a 'gear check'; a way of ensuring that players have a certain mandatory level of power before allowing them to proceed. As well as that, by having an enrage timer hanging over you, there's a sense of peril to every encounter: you either win in the next 5 minutes, or you die.

It doesn't sound like this exists in Destiny (yet) which based on your experience sounds like a mistake. Hopefully that's just because it's only alpha.

I'm surprised to hear you have little to say about the player investment system so far, but you've touched on something I always wondered about: just how much your character's gear level impacts on the difficulty of combat. The answer appears to be: substantially, which is disappointing but not that surprising. What it does mean is that areas of the game will be either trivial (and thus, probably ignored) or impossible (and similarly ignored) at different stages as you level. Again, based on my experience of WoW (a game with millions of players) this leads to 'ghost towns' in the underpopulated areas, whilst everyone focuses on the content they can actually play. It'll be interesting to see how much this affects co-op play in the final game, and whether it might result in areas feeling devoid of (human) life.

The tower sounds like it could be frustrating with the way you have to literally walk around to perform otherwise mundane actions. This kind of thing always walks a fine line between tedium and immersion, but whereas in other games vendors and the like exist in a shared, busy place that has many purposes it sounds as though the only real reason to visit the tower is to perform actions that would be easier done with a menu. There's no voice chat yet, I take it? I'm wondering just how many players will bother to hang out in the tower rather than head out and do something more fun in the wilds. In WoW there's lots of reasons to sit around in a capital, but it seems like there's far fewer here.

Anyway, good write up - lots of detail there to absorb. I'd better go get a PS4 so I can try it out when the beta launches.

I hate the Devil Walker. I really hope there is something I'm missing - like with damage types - because it always drains all my ammo when I fight it. I really wish the Devil Walker moved a bit more - it seems like a turret sometimes.

Every time I fought that sucker, I would use all my ammo. When a few fallen would come out of the woodwork, I would get at them, hoping they would drop some decent ammo. Most of the time it was standard.

Good thing grenades are infinite.

I try to farm ammo from the lesser units, kill the ones in the pit and they usually drop something. Entice the ones on the right to come after you and kill them for their ammo. (My directions are from where you start, facing towards where the tank will drop)

If I run out of ammo I revert to tossing the occasional grenade and resurrecting my team mates. Somewhere on my travels to revive a team mate I will run over some ammo.

You can shoot that big gun off the top of it to make things a little easier.

I... did not know this.

I hate the Devil Walker. I really hope there is something I'm missing - like with damage types - because it always drains all my ammo when I fight it. I really wish the Devil Walker moved a bit more - it seems like a turret sometimes.

You can shoot that big gun off the top of it to make things a little easier.

The weapon system is actually pretty fascinating.

I can guess that weapon management like this is going to be a big deal, especially with the different damage types. You’re probably going to have to have a wide variety of weapons at your disposal, using guns tailored to specific missions or specific parts of missions.

I think you're right here. I had barely considered the damage types before you mentioned this. Has anyone figured out what the different damage types do yet?
I've seen weapons with:

• Kinect (standard)
  
• Solar (orange flame)
  
• Arc (light blue spikey circle)
  
• Void (purple swirl)

This could make things interesting at higher levels but I feel like it's underplayed so far.

Explore mode isn’t very fun, because you are doing tasks that are dumb,

I think it's good to relax with, honestly. Just wander around, killing random mobs, hitting random objectives in an unstructured way. Don't think about it too much.

It’s the same thing with commerce. It’s just time consuming needlessly to walk around from person to person. A better solution would be a store menu you can access while in orbit, that has everything from everybody. It would be way easier.

Going to different merchants would make sense if there was some sort of micro-market economy going on but there isn't. You can't sell back weapons or armour. Ships and speeders are just 'discarded' despite being so expensive (and apparently rare in the case of good lightspeed-capable ships) - it felt so wasteful.

You’re reading and you think the game sounds cool, but I haven’t talked about the investment system yet. This is potentially going to be a problem, and make the game less fun. First of all, when you change the difficulty level, the enemies level up.

This happened in Halo to and I never found it to be a problem.

Instead of making the enemies more aggressive, more numerous, and of different types, they become more powerful.

There is definitely some variation on types. On the story mission, you get these white, exploding Hive Thralls that rush you on Legend, while just the standard Thralls are on Brave. I just went in there with a knife on Brave but quickly learned I needed to keep them at a distance on Legend.

This is a problem because your ability to do damage is pretty dependent on your gear and level. There’s an underground space in the game which contains a few enemies that have ??? as their level. Shoot them, and you do 1 damage. I don’t care how good you are, but you can’t kill them. That’s… bullshit.

A lot of RPGs scale enemies with the player. Most obvious when you restart the game with your end-game character (NG+) and the start is still a reasonable challenge rather than everything being rice paper.

Obviously that clashes with Bungie's goals of blocking off certain areas with super-high level enemies, low level players being awed by higher ones, and enemy balance in cooperative situations.

I wonder if the scale could be compressed a bit, at least.

Boss and mini boss design is likewise based on your ability to do damage. Bosses and minibosses have way to much HP.

I hate the Devil Walker. I really hope there is something I'm missing - like with damage types - because it always drains all my ammo when I fight it. I really wish the Devil Walker moved a bit more - it seems like a turret sometimes.

I feel like going to the Tower wouldn't be such of an issue if the load times weren't quite as sizeable [but as a general game design decision, I agree about the shops being easier to access].

Watching the raid some more I felt like a couple things could make it more interesting. Mostly just a legit fail state of some kind. Like a time limit That could really spice things up.

Seems like the little missions in Explore mode have that. It's something I've wanted for a while-- nonleathal fail states. So those generator defense bits, you can not die but fail to achieve the objective and your ghost gives this little "well, we'll get 'em next time" message.

Really excellent post. Thanks for putting a lot of this down, and I think it really helps describe what I've been feeling while watching. I'm still not really sure what to think, and want to get going on the Beta to get a better feel for all of this. Either way, you really elaborated on a lot and spoke to some things I haven't seen, played, or known about. It's also pretty cool to know that you think this is worth buying.

You may like watching the Rampancy vidcast when it comes out next week. You'll get to see a wide variety of weapons (including the fusion rifle, which rocks even though Claude thinks it's bad), game modes, and the sheer massiveness and seamlessness of Old Russia.