Destiny - Review Thread

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I only read the Gamespot review but it sounds like Halo's repeating corridors again.

Go here, have your ghost scan something, and defeat the incoming horde is like 90% of the entire game.
Halo had weapon variety, vehicle sections, and better set pieces to fight around.
 
Well I have a bit of a bias because im a franchise fan, but ShadowFall is very much a better overall game. People get hung up on a couple of setpieces and just all out label the game as being terrible.
I tend to not defend the game here on GAF as its sort of pointless. Hit up the official thread though. Plenty of people liked - loved it.

You can hit up the OT of Destiny and find that plenty of people like/love Destiny. That is the way this game is played though isn't it?
 
People need to learn that when developers release 'betas' these days they're actually just demos and wholey representable of the full game. It's all PR speak to make gamers feel special.

Betas were initially used to fix core gameplay mechanics and graphical glitches. But a project as large and expensive as Destiny (and most AAA games) already has extensive internal testing for those purposes.

Still, a lot of useful information is captured in a beta which will go on to inform the online component such as playlists and it's really helpful in improving multiplayer network performance.
 
i expected heavier narrative from this game. i was dissapointed. but tbh, shouldve expected it from the beta (or alpha or whatever they called the ps4 event after e3)
 
After this along with BF 3+4, "it is just a beta" is a remark I won't be feeling.
Except those are two good examples of where the final game wasn't completely representative of the betas. BF3 had tons of fixed issues in the final game and also offered far more than just Rush mode. BF4 beta was a bit bigger in scope but was plagued by all sorts of performance problems, leading to a panic of how insanely demanding the game would be in the full release. It turns out the final game ran absolutely fine(excellent, in fact), but it did admittedly introduce a bunch of other issues not seen in the beta.
 
Exactly. I honestly think mass expectation sort of worked to Destiny's detriment, whilst Titanfall was comparatively mostly let off the hook. Reading many of the captioned paragraphs from reviews on metacritic, one common theme in the closing paragraph is a line similar to "not as epic as we were hoping". Which says a lot. It may well still be epic, addictive and fun, but it didn't live up to the massive expectations some of these journalists had for the game, which they probably wouldn't have had for the majority of other games or shooters out there. I don't personally think it's fair to dock points from, or condemn a game for it not meeting such lofty and near impossible hype, instead I think the game should be reviewed for what it is.

What do you mean by Titanfall being "let off the hook"? Titanfall was announced and released within like a seven month span and was exactly the game that Respawn said it'd be and that everyone expected it to be. I don't see how it's in any way comparable.

And even if you completely ignored the hype that Bungie themselves created and went into the game completely blind, there's not much "epic" about Destiny. You travel between planets but you never actually fly your space ship (despite Bungie's previous game having space travel/combat). You always get booted back to orbit and then have to go through extremely long loading screens after every mission. It never feels seamless. The environments (while nice looking artistically) are completely barren with nothing to explore or do in them.

In Destiny you're doing the same tedious "defend waves of enemies" mission the entire game and there's never really any high points or epic moments that stand out.
 
Except those are two good examples of where the final game wasn't completely representative of the betas. BF3 had tons of fixed issues in the final game and also offered far more than just Rush mode. BF4 beta was a bit bigger in scope but was plagued by all sorts of performance problems, leading to a panic of how insanely demanding the game would be in the full release. It turns out the final game ran absolutely fine(excellent, in fact), but it did admittedly introduce a bunch of other issues not seen in the beta.

BF4 was not fine at launch at all. It was terribly broken. You couldn't play conquest for weeks.
 
Seems like a lot of content was cut. Has anyone noticed there was a cutscene with the voice of the traveller that was cut in the final game?
 
Hehe, am one of the few who didn't like the beta and cancelled my pre-order and told my friends not to buy it till reviews kick in. Now ill just w8 a month and buy it for 20 bucks.

Well, no offense, that is a really silly thing to do.

Guess TF was a much better game after all it is scoring 10 pts higher. Reviews are rather meaningless these days.
 
What do you mean by Titanfall being "let off the hook"? Titanfall was announced and released within like a seven month span and was exactly the game that Respawn said it'd be and that everyone expected it to be. I don't see how it's in any way comparable.
And TitanFall did get knocked for its lack of content by many, so again, it was not 'let off the hook' whatsoever. There's obviously a big push right now to try and invalidate the disappointing Destiny reviews anyway possible. Crying double standards is one convenient way of doing that, implying that people just aren't being fair to it, even though the reviews seem to accurately reflect what a lot of people on here are saying about it.

BF4 was not fine at launch at all. It was terribly broken. You couldn't play conquest for weeks.
Which had nothing to do with performance issues the beta had. I never said the final game was perfectly fine(and specifically mentioned that the final game introduced issues of its own), but the point is the beta was not representative of the final game for several reasons. Tons of people were absolutely convinced that the final game would be incredibly demanding based on the performance they were getting in the beta, but the final game was quite amazingly optimized.
 
8/10 I agree with every reviewer's complaints to be honest. I expect good things as far as future content though... too much time and work to not have more content to show. However I'm not sure I expect my mind to be blown or anything. A good start would be to get all the social/clan/lore content into the actual game. Is there really anyone alive who thought that'd be ok!? There has to have been problems that occurred and forced them to go this route.
 
Regardless of reviews I'm absolutely in love with the game. The aspects that are important to me are perfectly refined. The poor story telling is really my only major complaint but everything else is just wonderful. I haven't had this much fun with a shooter in a long while.

This is a very Bungie game in the sense that it is distilled to the basics but those basics are handled very well. This is exactly how Myth The Fallen Lords was designed. Back in 1997 the RTS genre was alive and well but most attempts were bloated and focused on adding more to the formula. Myth came along and eliminated things like resource management and base building instead focusing on the core strategy. It worked brilliantly.

Destiny may not have the "depth" of other loot based games or the narrative panache of typical story driven games but the core gameplay loop is damn well done that the end result is still a ton of fun. I mean, I've been playing Diablo 3 prior to Destiny and the difference to me is shocking. Diablo 3 is a good time waster and there's a lot of stuff in there but engaging enemies is not in any way thrilling. You just walk into a crowd and start spamming attacks. Maybe on the hardest difficulties there's more to it but as it stands there's nothing exciting about the actual minute to minute combat. Each encounter in Destiny, however, feels so damn good to play.

They're just going to ignore or spin it. Bungie and Activision already made bank so do they really care about what the reviews say about their game?
I really don't think Bungie's employees would look at the situation with such a detached point of view. I think they care very much what people think about the game.

And TitanFall did get knocked for its lack of content by many, so again, it was not 'let off the hook' whatsoever. There's obviously a big push right now to try and invalidate the disappointing Destiny reviews anyway possible.
There's so much less content in TitanFall than Destiny, though. It's the most bare bones game I've played in a long time.
 
Reviews are rather meaningless these days

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I for one am shocked that a game that wasn't purpose built to impress reviewers by front-loading the game with the best content... isn't being well received by reviewers.

People say this game "is playing it safe" or whatever the fuck misused maxim they feel like spouting, when the fact is Bungie is holding back the most engaging part of their game (high level nightfall activities and Raids), because they designed them to require high level gear, and they aren't just going to spoonfeed people high level shit without earning it. TRUE GAMERZ these days claim they don't want to be babied by getting cool items through microtransactions, and claim that they tire of faux-exciting setpieces, yet Destiny has the same metacritic as fucking Call of Duty Ghosts. The excitement and tension is derived from you dying if you don't play well.

Hard difficulty strikes and the Endgame content specifically is meant to be a challenge, and the vast majority of people I've seen review games for a living are paradoxically not very good at them. Ergo they play on normal difficulty and release their review before the endgame, ergo they breeze through all the waves of enemies because the difficulty is too easy, ergo they shit on the game for being "boring" when it wouldn't being fucking tedious if they were actually challenging their own skill.

Destiny was never going to be engaging on a story level like The Last of Us or something. As big as the games budget seemed from the outside, a developer can't devote the same resources to every aspect. Why anyone thought a game with environments this big and a bazillion guns and armor pieces they had to model would also be a scripted roller coaster ride is beyond me. They built the game from the very beginning to be "how well can you and your friends work together to make this boss' health bar get lower". It's not Bungie's fault if you don't like that for what it is.

Destiny may not have the "depth" of other loot based games or the narrative panache of typical story driven games but the core gameplay loop is damn well done that the end result is still a ton of fun. I mean, I've been playing Diablo 3 prior to Destiny and the difference to me is shocking. Diablo 3 is a good time waster and there's a lot of stuff in there but engaging enemies is not in any way thrilling. You just walk into a crowd and start spamming attacks. Maybe on the hardest difficulties there's more to it but as it stands there's nothing exciting about the actual minute to minute combat. Each encounter in Destiny, however, feels so damn good to play.

Once you REALLY dial in to the "grenade/super/bullets" loop, it becomes so evident how polished the mechanics are.
 
Well, no offense, that is a really silly thing to do.

Guess TF was a much better game after all it is scoring 10 pts higher. Reviews are rather meaningless these days.

Just because someone is using reviews as an indicator of whether or not they'd enjoy a game does not mean that they're exclusively basing their opinion off the score itself - that would imply that they aren't paying attention at all to the content of the review, which often explains exactly why it doled out that particular score.

These reviews aren't just meaningless numbers being thrown around, they pretty clearly explain the pros and cons of the game. Most of them do a good job of justifying that score, particularly the gamespot and polygon reviews.

Assuming that this person judges all games exclusively on the number isn't necessarily true. This person might have read the reviews and thought, "I agree with those criticisms, this kind of game does not sound like it is for me." I doubt they just went "10 points lower than titanfall? Objectively bad!"
 
If this is getting terrible reviews, how bad are the reviews of order 1886 going to be...
:(

What the ...

This has to be a joke. The obsession with The Order is just unhelpful at this point, if the game turns out to be good some people will probably start hurting themselves.

How Destiny and The Order relate is beyond me, they seem like polar opposites.

It's actually pretty weird.

OT I think the reviews of this game are similar to early reviews of MMO's the game does not even start until you hit level 20 so I would expect someone who is reviewing the game at level 6 to have a completely different opinion than someone who is actively doing strikes, dailies and crucible.... with a different set of abilities than the starters set.
 
It's actually pretty weird.

OT I think the reviews of this game are similar to early reviews of MMO's the game does not even start until you hit level 20 so I would expect someone who is reviewing the game at level 6 to have a completely different opinion than someone who is actively doing strikes, dailies and crucible.... with a different set of abilities than the starters set.


A lot of these reviewers experienced level 20 and weren't too pleased: you can reach endgame in about 10 hours if you power through the story.

A common complaint amongst the reviewers are bullet sponge bosses, which is a problem prettymuch exclusive to the endgame itself. Right around level 20 strikes it starts getting rough the amount of time you'll chip away at a baddie's health. The mars strike with the
lieutenants, the tank, and the warlord is the worst.
 
Games tend to still build up from what is shown in the demo and have variety. Never really got that except maybe a bit of a challenge boost from Venus and the Sword of Crota mission.

Fundamental mechanics and all the technical stuff, yes, that stuff tends to be concrete. But the game being an endless loop without any attempts to even mask it? Not so much.

As for stuff that was already known functionally in the beta and being criticized: just because they were already known issues/elements doesn't mean they no longer factor in when looking at the main game.

Typically demos show some of the best parts of a game to get people to buy them. Just like trailers show the most epic scenes. We knew after the beta that there were only four more locations and there was nothing more in Old Russia than what we played. Honestly I don't know how anyone could've expected more after that. But part of the problem is Bungie itself. They are vastly overrated. They created the Master Chief. Which actually was a fluke. Halo itself is not that interesting, see ODST or Reach. MC is the real deal. Cortana. Those are great characters and that's why you care. The main protagonists in Destiny are completely forgettable. But back to Bungie: Each Halo was only six hours long and 50 % of their missions were tiring, badly designed wave after wave shooting with backtracking. But it was ok because you wanted to see more of the story. And the other missions had epic battles with vehicles, tanks, aircrafts and cool enemies with varying tactics. That part is completely absent from Destiny. Killed by being an alittlebitMmobutnotreallybutstillenoughtocvonfusepeople thing. Titanfall feels more like Halo than Destiny because of those epic battles.
 
They built the game from the very beginning to be "how well can you and your friends work together to make this boss' health bar get lower". It's not Bungie's fault if you don't like that for what it is.

You make it sound like its a person's responsibility to enjoy Destiny. And its not a critic's responsibility to make consumers feel better about their own opinions, you seem pretty damn resentful over critics saying the core gameplay is good, but the tedium and loot itself makes the game really uneven.

Gamespot dude played it for 40 hours.
 
There's so much less content in TitanFall than Destiny, though. It's the most bare bones game I've played in a long time.

People knew exactly what they were getting with Titanfall though, more or less content really depends on the game.. Destiny is supposed to be an MMO-type game, a genre that "requires" more content than any other.

I think the main problem comes from Bungie hyping it up saying there was some amazing story that's on par with GoT, Star Wars etc and that the beta was only a small piece of the pie and that there was tons more content then when the game came out that wasn't even remotely true. Respawn said exactly what you were getting with titanfall and never tried to hype up their "campaign" as if it was something amazing that rivals some of the best movies/tv shows or anything.

It makes sense to me that if you over promise and under deliver you'll get points knocked off your games review.
 
I'm having a good time so far, but I'm only just on Earth. Competitive was enjoyable the one match I played too.

Story is a huge snooze.
 
OT I think the reviews of this game are similar to early reviews of MMO's the game does not even start until you hit level 20 so I would expect someone who is reviewing the game at level 6 to have a completely different opinion than someone who is actively doing strikes, dailies and crucible.... with a different set of abilities than the starters set.
That's logical, but it seems that some of the sourest opinions are from people who are high-leveled. Professional reviews have trended downward so far as the reviewers have progressed farther. And it feels like a similar trend is happening in some communities; some of the sourest opinions seem to be from the first-in-line-for-the-raid hardcore running out of steam.
 
Hard difficulty strikes and the Endgame content specifically is meant to be a challenge, and the vast majority of people I've seen review games for a living are paradoxically not very good at them. Ergo they play on normal difficulty and release their review before the endgame, ergo they breeze through all the waves of enemies because the difficulty is too easy, ergo they shit on the game for being "boring" when it wouldn't being fucking tedious if they were actually challenging their own skill.

They built the game from the very beginning to be "how well can you and your friends work together to make this boss' health bar get lower". It's not Bungie's fault if you don't like that for what it is.


Have you played the endgame strikes or read the reviews concerning them? The complaints aren't that they're boring because they're too easy. The complaints are that they're boring because the bosses lack serious mechanics that require team cooperation and replace interesting abilities with overly large health pools. It seems less and less like it's about "how well can you and your friends work together to make this boss' health bar get lower" and more and more like "how long can you and your friends repeat the two-step process of fighting this tank until this war of attrition ends".

I loooooove the core gameplay. Adore it. When you're smacking dregs in the face and they crumple to the floor like clay pigeons? It's so satisfying. Taking down a baddie with a reasonable amount of health feels like felling a juggernaut. The guns handle so well, and the art style is gorgeous. But these strike bosses, man. They're just boring.

They don't challenge the group in any meaningful way. Once you've figured out how to dodge that one significant attack, it's just a lengthy series of repeating the same thing until they've died. For example, the Mars strike has two bosses: one a tank, the other a warlord. The tank's only threatening attack is its cannon, the warlord has adds and a missile barrage. You deal with both in the same way: hide behind cover when they bring out the big attack, then pop out and shoot them. Duck back behind cover when they bring out the big attack again, then shoot 'em again. Rinse and repeat for 10-20 minutes until you get to move on to the next boss.

These are not fun and interesting mechanics. These are really boring.
 
Someone who played vanilla wow i do not understand the issue of these bullet sponge bosses, would you rather they was 1 shot kills?

Maybe a balance between one shot kill and one million.

Maybe make them actually interesting, like...different attacks or something, like other video game bosses do, I hear.
 
Honestly, you can't review or rank Destiny without playing with a group of friends. I find that when I'm playing with two other competent individuals, my enjoyment of the game skyrockets. This definitely isn't a game for the antisocial.
 
I think the main problem comes from Bungie hyping it up saying there was some amazing story that's on par with GoT, Star Wars etc and that the beta was only a small piece of the pie and that there was tons more content then when the game came out that wasn't even remotely true. Respawn said exactly what you were getting with titanfall and never tried to hype up their "campaign" as if it was something amazing that rivals some of the best movies/tv shows or anything.

Why did you believe the games developer about what the game is about? They are ultimate biased source lol.
 
Honestly, you can't review or rank Destiny without playing with a group of friends. I find that when I'm playing with two other competent individuals, my enjoyment of the game skyrockets. This definitely isn't a game for the antisocial.

Social people that don't have gaming friends are sorta fucked then.
 
They're just going to ignore or spin it. Bungie and Activision already made bank so do they really care about what the reviews say about their game?

I don't think this is how it works. The creators of the game surely want their work to be appreciated by the critics, but more important than reviews is whether people will like the game or not.
 
Someone who played vanilla wow i do not understand the issue of these bullet sponge bosses, would you rather they was 1 shot kills?

Meh, it is a valid criticism imo. You just sit there for X amount of time popping in and out of cover to fire 1-5 shots, rinse/repeat. Not like we are talking about significant mechanics here. I think everyone would prefer better mechanics less bullet sponge.

Social people that don't have gaming friends are sorta fucked then.

Welcome to current gen, only partially kidding. I think we are gonna see more and more of this as the generation goes on.
 
Someone who played vanilla wow i do not understand the issue of these bullet sponge bosses, would you rather they was 1 shot kills?
They're great fun too as, once again, the positioning and moment to moment action is responsive and fun. You don't simply stand around waiting for bars to fill so you can press a button. You're actively engaging with the game.
 
Hasn't Bungie been adamant in saying that Destiny is not an MMO, though, meaning it wouldn't make sense to compare it to one?

It seems to switch between whatever defense is more convenient at the time. "its NOT a MMO tho so of course the socialization isn't good" and "well its a MMO so of course the bosses are boring bullet sponges and the quests are rudimentary what did you expect?"
 
Are you just going to continually post gifs in response to people or are you going to actually contribute something to the discussion?



Oh really.

How can reviews possibly be meaningless? That's like saying movie critics are useless. Do you just expect people to use Twitch to figure out if they like a game or not? Reviews always have been and always will be a crucial element to the success of any game outside of the AAA sphere, and even then they still matter.
 
Hasn't Bungie been adamant in saying that Destiny is not an MMO, though, meaning it wouldn't make sense to compare it to one?

They have daily quests, a color-coded loot system, weekly events, raids, and instances. It's very clear they had mmo's in mind when making this game.

Not to mention, pre-release there were interviews in which they compared the game to WoW and EVE(ha).

Bosses in diablo clones are stat/level checks. They need to be spongey.

Not saying they don't, just saying if you fight a boss and the only thing you get out of it is that it took a shitton of time to kill rather than thinking about the tactics you had to use to beat it, it's not ideal.
 
Someone who played vanilla wow i do not understand the issue of these bullet sponge bosses, would you rather they was 1 shot kills?

This was something I didn't have a problem with, either I came back a bit later with better gear, or found that some enemies are much more susceptible to specific weapon types
 
Not surprised by the Destiny reception. Guessed a 75 metacritic score myself in that other thread.

I was originally really hyped for this game. Halo was one of my favourite series back in the day, and Bungie was doing something big and new and the things they were saying sounds great.

But then I played the beta. The gunplay was good. The skyboxes were nice. But... that was about it. There was nothing in it that particularly grabbed me. I remember just cruising around big empty Russia doing essentially the same missions over and over just under different pretexts.

I was still kind of looking forward to it though. But then I found about the level 20 cap, which seemed like a sign of scarce content, and then there were the rumours of there only being 5 places or so. And that Russia was the only place on Earth you could play. Needless to see I lost pretty much all interest in the game, and decided to hold off on getting a PS4.

I'm happy to see that Bungie is not getting rewarded for doing a poor job. I hope the poor review cause them to reflect a bit. Hopefully it lights a fire under them, and we can get something better in a Destiny 2.
 
Why did you believe the games developer about what the game is about? They are ultimate biased source lol.

I didn't believe it, I don't even have destiny because I could see this coming from a mile away.

I was just pointing out that there being barely any content in Titanfall at launch compared to Destiny doesn't mean destiny should necessarily have a higher review score because there's alot of factors to take into consideration when rating a game.
 
They built the game from the very beginning to be "how well can you and your friends work together to make this boss' health bar get lower". It's not Bungie's fault if you don't like that for what it is.

Turns out my friends are pretty good at pointing their gun at a bigger version of a regular enemy and holding the trigger for ten minutes. They just think it's fucking boring.

The boss mechanics are nothing to write home about.
 
Oh really.

Yeah, completely. Have you read them? Here's the links if you haven't.

http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/destiny-review/1900-6415863/

http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/12/6138497/destiny-review-no-fate

They both highlight similar points: the fundamental gameplay and art styles are gorgeous, but the story missions themselves are largely deprived of story content and settle into a loop of repetitious gameplay. Once you get to endgame, the repetition of strikes becomes more and more tedious as bosses simply increase in health rather than becoming substantially more difficult, which makes things feel like a grind. They also complain about a lack of setpiece moments.

Hell, you can even gain that from the synopsis.
 
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