Destiny |OT2| The Last Guardians

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Zoba said:
i really wish this game didn't come out on last gen. nothing against you guys who are playing there though. just feel like bungie spread themselves too thin and lost out on reaching the game's potential. it feels like they ran out of time and half-assed a lot of things. i really enjoy the game , warts and all, so it bothers me that a lot of the issues may not get fixed until the sequel.
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Definitely agreed. I mean my biggest issue with the game is lack of content which I don't see last gen being the reason. The multiplayer levels also don't compare to Halo for me either. Don't know what happened to their level design but there's not a single multiplayer map I can say I love like say Blood Gulch.

I know they're adding more content but after I reach level 20+ this weekend I basically only really have 2 immediate things to do: get strange coins to buy the exotic chest piece I want, buy warlock bond from iron banner. Getting better weapons and other armor won't be a necessity for me till I attempt vault of glass.
 
Anyone want to blast through some story missions on Hard lvl 22 or Hard lvl 26? I'm level 24 right now, but I still haven't beat the campaign. I'm on the second Mars mission.
 
Tawpgun said:
Yeah, me and homeboyd did the weekly strike, sepiks prime with arc damage booster (fucking fallen use arc...)

it was insane. MAYBE at our current 21ish level it would have been possible with 3 people. We ended up getting to Sepiks Prime but there was just nowhere to hide, and when one 3 shot burst from a dreg can kill you, you kinda need to hide lol.
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That's just the weekly strike too, those nightfall ones are much harder by the looks of it. I'm not even high enough level to do it yet, but I'll be taking another run at the weekly strike tonight. Hoping for good gear.
 
gatti-man said:
BL1's gameplay doesn't even compare to Destiny's imho. It's a bigger game and has more loot variety but actually playing it, Destiny is far more fun. The shooting is more rewarding.
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This is true in my experience. I find Destiny to be an ultimately hollow experience with a lot of empty calories, but the empty calories taste good. Shooting people is fun, which I never had in Borderlands, and its all very pretty and non-taxing. Something you can do without really thinking with a couple of friends, even on higher level 22 Strikes or PvP.

That's a back of the box quote there. "Easy to play without really thinking about it!" - some guy on NeoGAF
 
Navid said:
Have played quite a bit of this now, so figured I'd share my thoughts on it so far...

The highlight is definitely the core mechanics of how it plays, as you would expect from Bungie it controls and feels really good in terms of movement and gunplay. Enemy AI usually also works quite well (though there are also some issues with them getting stuck in to same cover and peek routine or running over each other when they are in number in a small space) with how they move out of the way of your grenades and attempt to back off when they have taken damage in order to recharge their shield.

The game also looks stunning thanks to it's art which helps it greatly visually speaking because technically this isn't really doing anything great, overall it's definitely showing its cross-gen roots compared to other titles already out. So it's impressive how well they compensate for those shortcomings by having a nice stylized world with great art to back it up.


Overall though it seems I'm somewhat lukewarm on this, and that comes down to what the game delivers in terms of content and in terms of structure and presentation, so I'll go over the main negatives for me so far:

- Mission structure is very repetitive, boiling down to almost the same 'go here, activate this and wait for waves of enemies to turn up'. It's a real shame that they didn't put imagination and thought into how they designed the missions, especially with multiple players in mind, for example; Having multiple points of interest on a divergent path mid mission forcing the strike-team to split up, or making a scripted sequence where one team member provides covering sniper fire while the other people move a object across a space. Even something simple like a countdown timer can help mix up how a mission plays.

- This repetitiveness carries into the enemies, despite being completely different species they are conform to almost the same setup with grunts, leaders and heavies that all play and behave pretty much the same way to each other with slightly different weakpoint locations... would have loved more imagination being put into each different race and faction, and it seems like a missed opportunity unfortunately.

- Another main complaint is the sterility of the world, they have created these lovingly crafted and beautiful setting on each planet and yet they all feel like empty backdrops that you simply move through with little to no effect of impact upon as you play. In theory the other players should be proving to the feeling of a living environment but in practice it hasn't worked for me so far, would have loved being able to interact more with the world.

- Finally, the story or the lack of it I should say... really disappointing how throwaway and how badly presented it all feels, especially considering how seriously it seems to take itself. So far nothing that has been presented in the story has made me care about any of the events or characters I have encountered which is unfortunate all things considered.


Here is to hoping that the Raid will address some of my mission structure complaints.
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Very nice write up.
 
JetBlackPanda said:
upcoming_events_inline.jpg


Red = Crucible
Purple = Raid
Yellow = ???

Any ideas?
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I think yellow is a strike isn't it?

I was playing with Lookatmego last night and we were talking about all the possible areas that could open up and how cool it would be if they would bring new areas and strikes and raids every so often, I hope bungie offers awesome post game support as it could really drive the longevity of the game!
 
they could have done so much more with the bosses. one thing i mentioned the other day during a boss battle was that it'd be cool if there were turrets stationed on the map. maybe you have to use it to take down the boss's shield while your teammates shoot him in the eye. they could even have bosses that move from the "boss arena" into different rooms. maybe your team takes turns shooting down an object on the ceiling with the turret for it to fall down and break the floor, thus opening up another part of the mission. who knows - maybe some of these things have found their way into raids.

i don't mind replaying content, but bungie's gonna have to bring more variety to the table if they want to keep it interesting.
 
Venus and Moon look absolutely hideous on the PS3. Seems Bungie stopped giving a fuck about the last-gen versions after they were done with Russia.
 
ViewtifulJC said:
I'm trying to hammer down all the big problems that I think could be fixed in future revisions and updates. Feel free to comment or add to the list.

-The socialization stinks, flat out. There's no way to communicate with the 1-3 randoms you may run into out in the field. You need to get close, then press R3, then press options, THEN press invite to Fireteam, THEN press send invite, and hope they join. God forbid one of you enter a darkness zone or your fireteam is filled up and maybe you just want to talk to them. You got 4 emotes they could fit on a d-pad and that's the extent of it. There's a clan feature, but its currently has NO actual in-game usage and is essentially pointless.

Ideas to fix this: Proximity chat on/off. Make it so we can actually communicate with other people in game more easily. Put SOME kind of in-game clan system, so we can easily and freely see how many people in your clan are online and maybe they would like to play together.

-The loot is boring. There aren't many weapon types, and the variety of machine guns simply don't cut it. The main weapons don't have much difference between them, there's nothing like Critical Hit Chance or elemental damage or anything really interesting about them except higher attack numbers and magazine. You still get a lot of garbage white/green/currency/items that have nothing to do with your class, you can beat Strikes/PvP and get nothing. The post-level 20 leveling system is tied to armor, but the armor drops are totally random and more chances than not, they're awful. You can grind in Strikes and PvP for hours and come out with barely any advancement, if at all..for a loot game its just not a very good loot game.

Ideas to fix this: More, better guaranteed loot for performing certain tasks. I should not come out of a 15-20 minute Strike with nothing to show for it. I should not go several PvP games in a row with various K/Ds and points and get an uncommon gear for a Warlock I'm not using. Loot drops should be tailored to your class, and your level. I shouldn't even see another white item once I'm post level 20.

-The mission design is uncreative and highly repetitive. Practically every story mission plays out the exact same way: there's an unskippable exposition dump that you don't really understand and given very little reason to care about, you fly off on your ghost to whatever location the arrow tells you do, fight waves of enemies until you get to press square at certain intervals to spawn even more waves of enemies. There will be a big yellow guy at the end, so kill him and his wave of enemies. Ghost will then say something no one knows anything about and can't possibly care about it either, then you dance around for 30 seconds. Rinse and repeat for 20 hours. The "final" story mission feels like all the other story missions, and when its over you shrug your shoulders and wonder how this game took 5 years to make.

Its like playing Halo, but with worse...everything. Worse encounter design, less interesting weapons, zero dramatic stakes or narrative cohesion whatsoever, no sense of character, the exact same pacing every single time out. There's one interesting part where you get a sword, and there's the other interesting part where you kinda storm the beachhead, fighting up the hill into whatshisface's ship with some great music, and that's it.

Ideas to fix this: Difficult, actually. The entire structure of this game would have to be reconfigured, but that's not feasible. I guess the only thing they can do now is add more story missions and make them more interesting. Maybe a platforming challenge or a puzzle or some interesting NPCs to interact with or some flying missions or fuckin' SOMETHING besides the same damn mission they've got here.

-Unskippable cutscenes/exposition. Its bad enough the storytelling in the game is so awful, but the fact that you can't skip it either? The fact that if you ever get disconnected, you have to sit through that again? Why? There was already a 30 second load time before I even got into the game, you can't be masking those.

Ideas to fix this: Skip button, done.

-PvP is merely competent. It has about the same amount of features you'd expect in a mid-tier shooting game like Timeshift or Singularity. There's few maps, a few bland gametypes with nothing to really call their own like UT's Assault or TF2's Payload. There's no custom games, no Forge or Theater or ranks or easy ways to invite people like Bungie's previous Halo titles, just an odd derivative mix of Halo's movement and floaty jumps and CoD's kill streaks, unpredictable weapons, and ADS.

Ideas to fix this: More modes. More maps. Custom games. Maybe a Crucible ranking system separate from the leveling stuff.

-No Map Vote. This is for PvP as well, but it may be an even bigger problem for the Strike playlist. Its very easy to start to playing the same maps and strikes again and again and there's no way to change it. I don't want to play this map, my team doesn't want to play this map, the guys on the other team who stuck around just played this so I'm sure they don't want to play this map again, either. So why can't we do anything about it?

Ideas to fix this: Map vote, duh.

-Exploration is limited and unrewarding. If you played through the story missions, there very little unbeaten paths to see here. There aren't any interesting NPCs with unique quests hiding out there, or secret levels/missions you can activate. There are mountains back there, but there's no way to get to them through a combinations of lots of invisible walls and kill zones. Public events rarely happen, and its not like its easy to run into someone and team up with them anyway. All the available quests are rudimentary, uncompelling, and have you backtracking through areas you've seen again and again so you can press square at this random object or stand outside and scout a random area. There are a very loot chests placed around the environment, but chances are you won't run into something interesting. They built a sizable, pretty environment and there's nothing to do in it. The same shit you were doing in the Beta or at level 1, you'll be doing post level 20 and the story mode complete.

Ideas to fix this: Unique NPCs per planet with interesting missions you can do outside the story. Better quests in general, like find the Golden Vox Battlemaster hiding out in...oh God does anyone remember what any of the areas in the game are called? Some funny goofball stuff ya know, it such a self-serious game that thinks its derivative sci-fi universe is more unique and interesting than it really is, some levity missions will flesh out the world a bit I feel.

-Strike bosses are boring bullet sponges. They have one or two attacks at the most they repeat for 5-10 minutes of shooting shooting shooting, and then waves of enemies come out to distract you from its one dimensional encounter design and hopefully give you ammo. You peak behind cover, keep hitting him with shots, then go back to cover when he's looking at you until a teammate distracts, rinse and repeat until he finally goes down. Then you get a green sniper that's worse than everything else and a blue engram that ends up being a Strange Coin.

Ideas to fix this: IDK, quite honestly. They have so much health because they got to accommodate this leveling system somehow, but the battles themselves have all the complexity of the Cyberdemon from Doom about 20 years ago, but take waaaay longer and thus makes it feel like a grind instead of really intense encounter. The Raid boss better have all sorts of moves if he's gonna take that long, I mean some real attack patterns you gotta learn, stuff he brings out when his health is at the halfway mark, or the 1/3rd rage mode that speeds things up, SOMETHING, Bungie.
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I also would add:

The best way to get loot is by buying - This feels counterintuitive in a game like this to have the brunt of the endgame focused on grinding out rep to be able to buy these weapons from shops, instead of finding it. I know it's possible to actually have this stuff drop, but in all the time I've been playing I have seen 0 exotics and got 1 legendary, which was an engram that didn't even give me one. It doubles up on your other points about chests in the world not being great, loot distribution being random as hell in PvP, etc.

Ideas to fix - Really not sure, since the only reason the majority of the NPCs exist is solely to have you get rep for their storefront of weapons.

Weapon elements are clunky to manage - So far there was really only the one strike on Mars that actually dealt with what element the gun was using, but expecting it to come into play in the raid/level 25+ strikes and missions expose how awkward this can be. If an enemy has a Solar weakness, I only have a really outdated sniper rifle that does this damage, and if I swap to it I lose half the ammo on top of fiddling in the menu during a firefight to get it out. It's total luck of the draw that you'll get good weapon drops with varied elements, as I'm currently decked out only in Void because the best drops I have all deal that.

Ideas to fix this: A new NPC merchant that enfuses weapons with elements/changes type. This gives you more freedom to be able to vary up your damage ranges in your default weapon setup instead of fiddling around.
 
Why the hell am I getting high level gear for Hunters and Warlocks when I'm playing as a Titan? It's an utter waste of Legendary engrams.
 
Poodlestrike said:
For me it goes Strikes >>> PVP >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Story missions.
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This I sort of agree with. Although the PVP is really nice. Love all the maps I played so far (only did Control yet, for the bounties).
 
gatti-man said:
BL1's gameplay doesn't even compare to Destiny's imho. It's a bigger game and has more loot variety but actually playing it, Destiny is far more fun. The shooting is more rewarding.
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I think that's the part of the FPS RPG destiny really nails. I liked the idea of both Borderlands games, (The stat progression of an RPG + the fun gameplay of an FPS = Addiction) but they feel flat in that the stats almost had too much of an influence over the gameplay. Guns started feeling really weak as enemies took far too long to die, making everything feel slow as molasses. Unless you were unreasonably lucky with drops, SMGs could feel like plastic toys.

Destiny has a heft to it no matter what. Punching dregs in the face and watching them instantly crumble to the floor is so satisfying, and even the more powerful enemies feel reasonable in how quickly their health hits the floor. The stats still matter (they've been shifted over to account for things like cooldowns rather than raw damage, so there's less effect on how fast enemies die) but they don't get in the way of shooting bad guys being enjoyable.

Still, it would have been nice to see a world as large as Borderlands, or one with such obviously defined characters. I was ready to dive into Destiny as a Universe, but at this point the only thin I care about is the progression.
 
Question, does it really matter for basic PvP stuff if I end up picking the weaker armor for the light stat?

Also does it make it so that I start getting better armor with light stat once I'm equiped with one of them? So far the only legendary thing I got was a sniper rifle, and I don't really use the sniper much in PvP.

Edit: also do you stop earning crucible rep once you join a faction?
 
Got a legendary engram...TURNS INTO 3 FUCKING ASCENDANT ENERGY.

Iv had only two legendary engrams so far. Neither can I use. Bungie either up the chance for them or don't do it all.

I'm honestly pissed. This is fucking bullshit.
 
Papercuts said:
Weapon elements are clunky to manage - So far there was really only the one strike on Mars that actually dealt with what element the gun was using, but expecting it to come into play in the raid/level 25+ strikes and missions expose how awkward this can be. If an enemy has a Solar weakness, I only have a really outdated sniper rifle that does this damage, and if I swap to it I lose half the ammo on top of fiddling in the menu during a firefight to get it out. It's total luck of the draw that you'll get good weapon drops with varied elements, as I'm currently decked out only in Void because the best drops I have all deal that.

Ideas to fix this: A new NPC merchant that enfuses weapons with elements/changes type. This gives you more freedom to be able to vary up your damage ranges in your default weapon setup instead of fiddling around.
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is why it's usually good to decide who uses what weapons beforehand. you do encounter some switching, but if you're at least spreading the responsibility you'll have all the bases covered.
 
I was stomping of people last night in Crucible.
Salvage, and I am getting slaughtered.

Are stats disabled? This dude took 3 people meleeing him and wouldn't die.
 
Danomeon said:
What information do we have about Destiny Raiding, and this first raid in particular? How large are they going to be? How many bosses? Will they be unique boss models, or recycled/upscaled enemy models from elsewhere? Have they talked about this at all?

I'm so divided on the game. I love the core gameplay and the idea of an FPS with such a sizable group PvE endgame, but I'm wondering how many legs level 20 and up really has.

I'm concerned the boss encounter design is going to be like the strikes: Take an average enemy, give them one or two special attacks, and beef their health up so high it takes forever to kill them. That's boring boss design, and doesn't do anything to elicit teamwork or problem solving from strike groups. Destiny took a whole lot from MMO endgames with regards to its progression systems, maybe they should look at their dungeon bosses as well.
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I think for the raids they could do some really cool stuff incorporating class specific abilities in order to beat bosses, like say for instance you need the Titan shield on boss a to protect everyone from an AoE blast at a certain point, or you need to get a hunter to stealth past a point to hit a switch and open a weakness up on boss b etc.. Could be some cool stuff coming if they know how to use the players abilities and encorporate it into fights, reminds me alot of raiding in WOW.
 
Daemul said:
Why the hell am I getting high level gear for Hunters and Warlocks when I'm playing as a Titan? It's an utter waste of Legendary engrams.
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Because Bungie hates you.

Seriously though, I've seen a lot of people talking about this; I haven't gotten any Legendary engrams yet, but for greens and blues it's never given me anything that couldn't work for my class. Seems to be only Legendaries, and if so, it's pretty bullshit.
 
just to add to the Borderlands Vs. Destiny thing. I love both games BTW.

however I feel like Destiny rewards my skill as a player more then Borderlands does.

timing of grenades, jumps, and cover are much more important in Destiny.
 
Zoba said:
is why it's usually good to decide who uses what weapons beforehand. you do encounter some switching, but if you're at least spreading the responsibility you'll have all the bases covered.
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Exactly.

Things like this is why I think it may be a good idea the raids will not have matchmaking.
 
Bunta said:
Anyone running the weekly heroic strike, or want to? PSN is Daraman.
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I'll be up for doing it when I get back from the gym, could be an hour-two hours. I'll add you anyway, if you're on I'll drop you an invite because despite there maybe being less loot for these, I still want to do the heroic strikes for the fun of it.



Can someone post that web link to the site where you put together fireteams again please? Getting even a group of gaffers together to do strikes is a right pain in the arse.


kanuuna said:
PSN: JARRRNO
Anyone want to blast through some story missions on Hard lvl 22 or Hard lvl 26? I'm level 24 right now, but I still haven't beat the campaign. I'm on the second Mars mission.
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I'd be up for this, again, once I'm back from gym. I'm actually at the same spot right now on Mars, level 20 with a lil light. I'll add you when I get back.




Got 24 kills 3 deaths in my lastest skirmish on Twilight gap. Absolutely spanked the poor fuckers lol I kinda wish my Titan was a guy so I could refer to them as "The Mountain".
 
everyday math said:
Got a legendary engram...TURNS INTO 3 FUCKING ASCENDANT ENERGY.

Iv had only two legendary engrams so far. Neither can I use. Bungie either up the chance for them or don't do it all.

I'm honestly pissed. This is fucking bullshit.
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yea same thing happened to me earlier. they finally gave me a legendary rocket launcher, but its blast radius is terrible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1OjUWw43co#t=3m55s "Getting loot is really damn exciting". I think they meant frustrating.
 
How are the servers situation in this game? is it separated like other MMOs?

As in US has their own servers and EU different servers?

Also If I buy a US ver. will I be able to play on EU servers or vice versa? (PSN account is US based)
 
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