Destiny |OT5| New patch out Tues., Master Rahool reportedly crying into his robes

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Continued from here
The Allegory of the Goomba
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You're a huge fan of Super Mario Bros. on the NES. You love it. You can't get enough. You run through its levels and know them like the back of your hand. You jump on Goombas like you're tying your shoes. If a Goomba is within a screen length of you, it is already dead. Mario's boots will be meeting its head shortly, and that satisfying jump + bounce noise is the only nutrition you need. You just can't get enough.

Then Metroid comes out. You've heard a little about it, but also don't know that much about how it plays. You know Nintendo made it, and Nintendo made Mario! You also know that upon booting it up that it offers a 2D, side-scrolling perspective, and that, upon pressing some buttons, you can jump. Just like Mario.

You're moving Samus along and you come across a Zoomer. You jump on it. It hurts. You jump on it again. It hurts again. You jump on it again. You die. You shake your head in disbelief. Something must obviously be wrong. You make your way back to the Zoomer and jump on it again. After another few jumps, you're dead again. What the fuck?! At this point, you're beginning to feel angry. How could Nintendo design a game like this? Don't they understand that jumping on enemies is how you kill them?

In the 1980s you didn't have this recourse, but in the modern day your next step might well be to come to an internet message board and proclaim that Nintendo had lost its way and no longer understood the basics of game design. They can't even fucking make it so that jumping on enemies kills them.

Instead of becoming curious when your expectations were not met and attempting to learn the game's systems, you merely assumed it should function like games that had come before it, and became frustrated when it did not. You immediately jumped to the conclusion that you understood what was going on and the developer was to blame for the fact that you weren't having fun.

If at this point you attempted to argue to me that jumping on enemies in Metroid was "how you wanted to play," and I responded by attempting to explain to you that you kill things in Metroid by shooting them, that eventually you receive many awesome upgrades to permanently dispatch enemies, unlike Mario's temporary powerups- would you then say, "don't tell me how to play?" Would that be a reasonable response? I would have trouble holding back my laughter at such a reaction.​
This is how I feel reading the constant stream of complaints leveled against Destiny's "loot system." From my perspective, counting on engrams for progression is equivalent to jumping on enemies in Metroid. Merely assuming that it should function and be rewarding in the same way as other games is a fundamental understanding that will affect your experience.

There are many ways to "play how you want" in Destiny. You could play PvE only and never set foot in the Crucible. You could only ever play with friends, 100% of the time. You could play nothing but PvP from minute one. You could play only as an explorer, if that was what you wanted, eschewing progression altogether- just patrolling the various maps, looking for nooks and crannies, and never even hitting 20 or acquiring a single legendary item if that was how you wanted to play, if that was fun for you.

But misunderstanding the game's basic structure and then complaining that it will not accommodate your misunderstanding, even going so far as to blame the developer for poor design, is absolutely laughable. It makes me think that, from your perspective, all the fun that I've had with Destiny is some kind of crazy magic that cannot be reduced. The idea that because you're not fully grasping the structure of the game, that I'm saying you can't play how you want, is just a joke to me.

I don't need the Goomba example to prove this. If you boot up Madden and immediately run the ball into your own endzone, is your recourse to get pissed off that the game didn't award 6 points to your team because you were just "playing how you want"? Do you blame the developers for not allowing this style of play?

Games have limits. Games have structures. Games have goals. These structures are, whether you like it or not, dictated to the player as the parameters for play. You can't ignore them, and then expect to have a good time... unless you already are!

This is such a simple, straightforward concept from where I'm standing. It's not the kind of thing I'd ever thought I would have to explain.

Closing Thoughts​
In less than 10 mintues, Xur will be here. He'll have some of the best gear in the game you can choose to buy, or not, with currency that you've earned by playing the game.

Remember how Bungie said the Cryptarch had "taken on a personality" due to randomness?

They're right. He's a dick. He doesn't give a shit about you, and he just wants to keep you rolling the dice.

Xûr, Agent of the Nine, is everything that he's not. I hope he's got what you want this time, Guardians- but if not, he'll be back next weekend, and I bet you will too.

This is a bigger game than it seems. The Vex rifle you were all jizzing over from the Hard mode raid is just one of the many surprises Destiny could bust out at any moment. It's your choice whether or not you want to stick around.

I'll be here.

TL;DR: FUCK ENGRAMS, GET MONEY
 
Resurrecting this post from last week now that I've had more experience on the maps:


The Burning Shrine | 9/10 | Best in Rumble, Skirmish
+ Good lines of sight
+ Moving centerpiece creates dynamic gameplay by altering flow, shifting sighlines and height
+ Good height variation and wide hallways
+ Gorgeous environment and skybox
+ Contestable heavy ammo spawns
+/- Intuitive Callouts
- Map boundaries outdoors are too shallow and aren't obvious
- Sunglare can be overbearing at times


The Burning Shrine is Destiny's most impressive map. From the driving pace of the opening theme to the moment you land on the sienna sands, your back lit ablaze by the harshness of the sun, you know you're in for a good game. Bungie labored over this map seeing as how it's the premier map for Destiny's Trial of Osiris event. Each piece of geometry is intelligently designed and refined. Wide hallways allow players breathing room during encounters and promote movement. Long lines of sight are never interrupted with a lazily placed crate or column, nor do they limit the effectiveness of each class and weapon. To take cover in the center rooms, you need to step off to the sides. Heavy ammo spawns are placed in neutral locations allowing players to fight over them. The tallest point on the map which gives you great sightlines has a blinding beam of light passing through to limit its effectiveness. Though combat tends to gravitate towards the interior, the outside offers great terrain to fight around with another high point to help you secure heavy ammo and make a push. They even encorporated the sunglare into the map by giving players spawning on the lower portions a slight advantage to fight their way back into the middle. What perhaps most interesting are the rotating walls, which will periodically cover the long sightline across the map but also allow you to jump on them for extra height over the middle. As mentioned above, my main problems with the map are that the boundaries by the terrain aren't obvious. The gameplay would open up more in this area if the boundaries were pushed back a bit. I also feel that the interior spaces lack distinction that aid orientation and callouts beyond being on the right side or the left (using the sun as the focal point). However, these hardly hold it back gameplay wise.


Shores of Time | 8/10 | Best in Control, Skirmish
+ Good lines of sight
+ Decent height variation
+ Intuitive callouts
+/- Environment; clean and appealing in some areas, messy in others
+/- Contestable heavy ammo spawns
- Some chokepoints too small
- Predictable spawns

Shores of Time is a map that strongly rewards both the individual and the well coordinated team. It's easy to learn with its unique areas, but still manages to have a rich meta game with its counter-sightlines and predictable routes. The terrain portions of the map don't restrict player movement, which lends itself well to mobile encounters. However, this is often overdone, with geometry being inconsistent (rocks in particular) and at times visually distracting. The spawns are also very predictable to the point where you can catch unsuspecting players as they land. The latter could at least be solved with more height variation. One thing I like about the map is that while the heavy ammo by B is openly contestable, A heavy is less so. This could potentially equalize a game in which the losing team spawns at the less desirable position of the map.


Rusted Lands | 8/10 | Best in Control, Skirmish
+ Good opening rush
+ Good lines of sight
+ Good height variation
+ Pleasing environment and skybox
+ Intuitive callouts
- Contestable heavy ammo spawns
- Predictable spawns
- Somewhat oversegmented

Rusted Lands is a consistently engaging map. It has great sightlines and is deceptively vertical, rewarding the player that makes use of the subtle and not-so subtle shifts in height. The terrain lends itself well to a variety of infantry skirmishes, but the pathing does make it a bit too easy to disengage from encounters. However, like Shores of Time, Rusted Lands is easy to learn and enriching to those who take the time to master the angles, jumps and sightlines that make it the well-rounded map that it is. I only wish that the heavy ammo spawns weren't hidden in small areas that effectively limit the way someone can approach them.

Firebase Delphi | 7/10 | Best in Rumble, Control
+ Good opening rush
+ Good lines of sight
+ Good height variation and wide hallways
+ Pleasing environment and skybox
+/- Contestable heavy ammo spawns
+/- Inuitive callouts
- Doors open too slowly and tend to lag
- Slightly too large
- Spawning too far away from teammates
- Cabal ship shows up on radar to troll you

This map is similar to The Burning Shrine in a lot of ways, but it offers a lot more height variation and segmentation. The main atrium is home to an exciting opening rush reminisicent of old Halo maps. The center ring is a hotspot in rumble games, with the player who controls it leading the match. I appreciate how curved roofs and paths are used to influence sightlines, giving the map a more organic feeling. It's not without its problems though. There are occasional lulls in combat which make it play slowly, if not sightly campy at times. You also tend to spawn fairly exposed and far away from teammates. The automatic doors are an attempt to make these areas safer, however they are susceptible to lag, which may lead one to experience inconsistent gameplay. Nevertheless, Firebase Delphi is a solid map that does a good job at supporting a variety of gametypes.


Asylum | 6/10 | Best in Rumble, Skirmish
+ Decent lines of sight
+ Decent height variation
+ Intuitive callouts
+ Gorgeous environment
+ Contestable heavy ammo spawns
- Somewhat cluttered visually and geometrically
- Some chokepoints too small
- Predictable spawns

Asylum is a map that also rewards a skillful player. At first glance, it seems to favor CQB combat, clustering many rooms and corners around 3 main lines of sight. But because those sightlines are so powerful, a player is able to stop others before they even come close. However, Asylum's main issue lies with engagement commitment. The map makes it difficult to tactically retreat from an area to the point where you either have to kill everyone you see or risk getting caught with your back up against a wall. Its flat paths don't offer much for you to tilt an engagement in your favor, so players often shoot from behind cover, which leads to delayed encounters. It's also populated to a fault with decor that can distract the player from an engagement. Still, Asylum holds its own and provides a frantic experience, combined with a lush post-apocalyptic setting for you to lose yourself in.

The Anomaly | 6/10 | Best in Rumble
+ Moving centerpiece
+ Decent height variation
+ Mix of good lines of sight and close quarters
+ Contestable heavy ammo spawns
+ Intuitive callouts
- Too many paths make disengaging from encounters too easy
- Center room and balcony area is visually and geometrically cluttered
- Some chokepoints too small

Anomaly is a map where aggressive, brute force win out over methodological play. It's a standard room-based arena map with long lines of sight interspersed with close quarters, but it pulls it off in an interesting way. I especially appreciate how the heavy ammo spawns are positioned opposite of one another in the most open areas of the map, leading to interesting and often lengthy battles for posession. Unfortunately, once you move into the interior ring, the map becomes needlessly complex. Hallways and escape routes are aplenty and almost always populated by a player with a shotgun. The centerpiece, while visually appealing, is similarly cluttered, restricting player movement and ultimately falling short of its supposed dynamic. Though it does offer more height variation than Asylum, players often run into awkward geometry or walls, which betrays the time spent making the map more visually appealing than functionally smooth. Thankfully, it's much better than the next moon map...

First light | 5/10 | Best in Control
+ Decent height variation
+ Turrets are good vehicle counters
+ Intuitive callouts
+ Contestable heavy ammo spawns
- Linear paths make boring and predictable vehicle routes
- Predictable spawns
- Hazy draw distance
- Gratuitous amounts of dead space
- Some buildings too small


First Light, otherwise known as the map that didn't know when to quit, bore the unfortunate burden of housing the Interceptor during the beta, which was nothing short of a monster. Interestingly enough, not much has changed. At a glance, this map presents players with an interesting space to fight around. Buildings are familiar, yet also mysterious as you duck and dodge around the remains of a lunar base. Turrets make great anti-vehicle and infantry weapons, which sort of dictate the flow of the map. The main problem, however, is that the gameplay doesn't elevate beyond that. If you manage to dodge snipers and vehicles to make your way to the interior spaces, you're met with cramped, often flat areas to fight around. The outer areas are serviceable as vehicle paths, allowing you to whip out your Sparrow on the fly and quickly move through the caves or low lands to make your way from one side to the other. Unfortunately, these vehicle paths are largely linear and predictable, failing to offer the player as much freedom as there appears. What ultimately holds First Light back is that it tries to support this mix of infantry and vehicle combat, but doesn't excel in either. The sparseness of its routes and lack of a true incentive leave it with little to entice players to leave their comfortable sniper perch.



Bastion | 4/10 | Best in Control
+ Decent height variation
+ Wide hallways
+ Less restrictive vehicle routes
- Flat terrain creates ridiculously long lines of sight
- Spawning on the other side of the map from your teammates
- TOO FUCKING BIG!

Bastion compounds a lot of First Light's problems. While the terrain is slightly more interesting for vehicles, the sheer amount of real estate the map boasts makes engagements few and far between. Again, if you dodge snipers and vehicles and find your way into the interior spaces, you're still met with a cluster of supers and grenades. The map also has an awkward half-twist layout that makes it more unpredictable and disorienting than it ought to be. It does manage to have nice height advantage though, but I can't help but feel like it was designed for a different game. Honestly, if you cut it in half it'd be a lot higher on this list.


Exodus Blue | 4/10 | Best in Skirmish
+ Contestable heavy ammo spawns
+ Decent environment and skybox
+/- Decent height variation outdoors; indoors is flat
- Predictable spawning
- Intuitive Callouts
- No desirable position on the map
- Cluttered, inconsistent lines of sight and geometry
- Geometry that is difficult to stand on

Some of you guys on Xbox may not have heard of this map, as it's a Playstation exclusive until 2015. To be frank, you aren't missing much either. Exodus Blue has 4 main lines of sight... and then a copious amount of cover thrown on top of it to break them up. The map rarely changes elevation until you're standing on one of these crates or generators, and the way they dot the landscape creates a twisty-turny design where players are weaving themselves around cover to try and pop the last headshot. The potential is there and the base layout places a strong emphasis on positioning, flanking and team shooting. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that something went awry, as if a tornado passed overhead and dropped your neighbor's yard sale on it.


Twilight Gap | 2/10 | Best in Skirmish
+ Decent height variation
+ Beautiful skybox; mountaneous regions are visually appealing
+ Contestable heavy ammo spawns
+ Big guns that go boom
- No flow whatsoever; cat and mouse gameplay
- Cluttered sightlines
- Copious amounts of cover; superfluous paths
- intuitive Callouts

Not a day has gone by where the irony of this map's disappointment doesn't haunt me. Perhaps this is a good time to note that I had chosen this name for my PSN ID before I had seen this map. Beyond its beautiful skybox during the day, dusk and night cycles, this map is overwhelmingly poorly designed. Too much time was spent piling route on top of route on top of counter route one after the other, leaving the map with a needlessly convoluted design. I've mentioned before that it facilitates cat and mouse gameplay, but does so in a dull, repetitive and unrewarding manor because there's no incentive for being in any particular part of the map at any given moment. The mind-numbing amount of corners create an unpredictable, erratic gameplay experience, like being lost in a maze (only the minotaurs here are player with shotguns). Every good sightline is lazily and deliberately interrupted with cover, forcing players into a close engagement. Like Bastion, this map would benefit from being cut in half. Actually, thirds. The terrain portions of this map had potential to introduce rolling hills with tactical jumps linked to a central complex with a dominant sightline. Instead, it seems like its designers didn't know when to stop building it.


Blind Watch | 1/10 | Best in Rumble
+ Good height variation
+ Decent environment and skybox
+/- Intuitive Callouts
+/- Contestable heavy ammo spawns
- Entire water area is deadspace
- Cluttered sightlines (the pipes top mid in particular)
- Geometry that is difficult to stand on
- Predictable spawning
- Automatic doors tend to lag
- Head scratching control zone placement


Blind Watch is the Sword Base of Destiny. It's a map that appears to be intricate, offering a lot of verticality and many areas for players to fight. Unfortunately, that's the only thing this map manages to do right. From the awkward inconsistency in its pipe placement to the roundness of everything else worth standing on, Blind Watch is as much a struggle with the map as it is the players on it. It's one puzzling decision after another, from placing heavy ammo behind automatic doors to control zones a blink away from one another. Then there's the entire lower portion of the map by the windmill, which is almost completely wasted space (almost being that you'll use it if you fall down there). Actually, 90% of the map is wasted space, considering that most of the combat favors B zone,the hallways around B, and the sightlines that let you see into said hallways. Perhaps representative of this repetitive gameplay is Blind Watch's penchant to spawn you on the same fucking spawn point every single time. The worst part of all this is that should you find less than favorable connection, the automatic doors wont even open. I mean, at least Sword Base was good for oddball...

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Anyway, I'm done. Feel free to counter any points I've listed if you disagree.
 
Rsinart said:
Well I admit I enjoy Destiny alot, but I had a feeling this would happen. I'm lucky enough to work from home and had the past 2-3 weeks to spend way to much time playing the game. But at this time, I am burnt out from the repetitive way this game is played, and how Bungie expected the end game (before dlc) to go. Only so many times I can run a strike, or mission before it just becomes boring. One thing that kept me coming back new gear, but at lvl 27-28 depending on what I have equipped, I don't really have a reason to play. I missed out on the Queens Wrath gear to get shards, and at the current rate to get them (I believe I need like 40) it gonna take forever to get. As far as the pvp goes its only fun for a handful of games. I wish there was matchmaking for the raid or the nightfall. I got a handful of people I play with but no one is on at the same times, or is past the lvl 24 grind.

Anyway game is fun, just was hoping for more content. Gonna be tough not trading it in before the dlc drops.
Click to expand...

I kind of agree, what they are offering now is not enough to keep the die hards with high level to keep playing.

I am not there yet but will be soon when I get a few more exotics etc.

Bungie better start having more new events and add a few new destinations, because I can see how running the same events over and over and over will kill this game for most.
 
Yea I disagree a lot with what's in your post Hawkian. Unfortunately I'm on a bus so I can't go into detail but the game definitely is based around RNG to an extent. You sure as hell can't buy Raid gear at a vendor.
 
StrongBlackVine said:
You must be repping a faction. You can't do both.
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This game DESPERATELY NEEDS A PROPER MANUAL FOR PLAYERS.

People should be TEACHED MECHANICS they are simply not fully aware of.

The "digital manual" is still not available on Activision site despite the game-sleeve says it should be downloaded there.

When you go to Activison Support, the site says how all Destiny help is on Destiny/Bungie pages.

And MANUAL IS NOT THERE.

I even got the access to the Official Game Guide by Prima Games (digital edition), and there are also significant omissions there regarding core mechanics.

There is no mention of:

- Glimmer cap
- Vanguard Mark cap
- Crucible Mark cap
- difference about Crucible and Vanguard marks collection regarding to factions
- etc.

I am completely aware of all those mechanics simply because I learned them on the hard way, but it is not something people should be discovering by themselves once the shit hits the fan.

I learned about all that once I capped my Vanguard Marks and discover I can't do anything before I actually upgrade Vanguard Handlers - and I was playing for the Monarchy. And then I used 3 days of play just to "unblock" those points while all marks I erred in the process were thrown in the dumpster.

This game needs manual. A proper manual. It is insane not to have it.

This is Resident Evil 6 all over again, only on 50X greater scale.
 
I got like five of these Queens Helms in a row this afternoon (when all I wanted was a purple chest piece), they aren't worth shit dismantled and they all blow big time compared to my SKULLBUCKET I found in the treasure cave a few days ago.

I miss the cave...
 
Hawkian

You have more legendaries engrams than I have seen during my entire playtime with destiny...

and I have been farming a lot! You must be lucky with your drops :)
 
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