FunkyPajamas
Member
I wonder if this is somewhat explained by Tycho's post at Penny-Arcade. He said something to the effect of "the game I played is not the game you're all playing". Is this another case of Bungie's Halo 2 New Mombasa demo?
Destiny - Review Thread
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More than both games combined. Especially when it comes to repeatable content provided you play with or are willing to make friends in game.
D
Deleted member 17706
Unconfirmed Member
I gotta say, these last couple of days have really changed my opinion about the game. I'm level 17 now and am really having a ton of fun. I don't know how long lasting it will be, but once you can accept the game for what it is, there is a lot to appreciate. Not that it doesn't have a lot of room for improvement, but I really like what's in this package.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Destiny plays very well. The problem is the repetition, which wouldn't be a visible issue in press demos.
M.W.
Member
180 nominations, 1 award
Also the issue is that Blizzard has the pedigree of having long term updates and major free content and system updates. It is the company that developed WoW after all.
Has Bungie ever shown that they can and will implement large patches that rewrite how a game Is played, on a scale that is the diablo 3 turnaround from Vanilla to Loot 2.0 to Post-RoS content?
I hope so, but most companies fail to do so. It is a a massive undertaking.
Destiny has definitely fallen victim to the hype machine. With the marketing campaign and 'award nominations', people were expecting a AAA title you could put in the same sentence as a Call of Duty or Halo game. In reality, its more of a sci-fi Borderlands IMHO.
If you take it for what it is, its a very enjoyable game. Staying power is key, though. Bungie has a great platform to continue to update their product, and they will need to do so if they plan on making Destiny a AAA IP.
If you take it for what it is, its a very enjoyable game. Staying power is key, though. Bungie has a great platform to continue to update their product, and they will need to do so if they plan on making Destiny a AAA IP.
Neuromancer
Member
We do.
http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html
I imagine Destiny would score very poorly under this system. The Fallen have crates all over the place in Old Russia.
NullPointer
Member
I agree with this, and think the low review scores are a product of bursting the bubble of super inflated expectations. Just finished the "story", and while I enjoyed the combat - and thought it got better as each planet opened up, I really don't know what to think about this game's longevity or promise.
I think I'll hit 20, replay a few strikes and see if they get any better through repetition - but I have a feeling they won't - at least not by much. I'll have more fine tuned gear, but hitpoint-bucket bosses and waves of minions are still whats on the menu, every time. And I have zero interest in multiplayer based upon the chaos of powers and equipment upgrades here - even with the normalized damage.
If I didn't know about the two DLC packs coming I would've had more optimism for Bungie's post release support - in terms of free content and additions - but it seems naive at best to expect anything significant outside of those paid expansions. That's a real bummer.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
First of all, whether or not I have played the game is irrelevant to my point, which is that reviewers are entitled to review the product they paid for and received. As someone else said, it'd be like waiting for the latest patches to review a game, and since games get patched all the time, that makes no sense. Can patches significantly improve the experience? Sure, but that doesn't invalidate previous reviews. If Bungie really wanted players to experience this Raid thing before having an opinion on the game they paid $60 for, they should have delayed the game's release until it was ready.
And for the record, I played the whole of the beta (or alpha, whatever it was called, the one that was also open for PS3 players) including the optional missions, and I was so underwhelmed that I decided to wait for reviews. And guess what, pretty much every reviewer is echoing my impressions of the beta, and those who did beat the game are saying the full game is pretty much the beta repeated 4-5 times. Moreover, there's near-unanimous consensus that the story is terrible (or even non-existent) so there isn't even the incentive of sitting through boring missions to at least enjoy a cool story. With that in mind, I see no reason to buy the game whatsoever except perhaps for very cheap (<$5) during a sale if I'm ever starving for a coop game.
Couple of weeks back I bought The Last of Us Remastered. Never had a PS3, so was playing it for the first time. Spent my evenings that week getting through it and finished it off at the weekend. Loved it. Brilliant, brilliant game. No doubt I'll play a few more times still, but having plugged about 10-12 hours into it I feel like I understand the experience of TLoU. I get it. To play it again would simply be to relive it.
When Halo Reach came out it got pretty much glowing reviews across the board. The campaign was a decent Halo campaign. Not the best, but still very solid, and that came out in the reviews.
The PvP was described in these reviews as 'the classic Halo MP', but truth was it wasn't. It took a while to coax out, but after a few weeks of play, Reach showed itself to be a bit broken. Bungie had tweaked things just enough that the magic was lost, and soon people stopped playing it and moved on, or backwards in my case, to Halo 3. The reviews of the game missed this because it takes longer to judge these aspects.
Destiny doesn't have a campaign like Reach does. Each of its modes of play are based around pockets of activity designed to be replayed again and again. In this respect it bares far more resemblance to traditional PvP content than it does typical FPS campaigns, and as such requires a different approach to criticism.
What we've seen so far are so called "games journalists" out of their professional depth or simply jumping on the click-baiting bandwagon.
Please note that the sites who's reviews mean a damn, notably EG and EDGE, have yet to publish their reviews.
p.s. I didn't actually say its the best game everr, although I suspect it'll be up there. When you build your foundations on The Greatest Game of All Time, then you can't go too far wrong.
Diablohead
Member
I gave PvP one more try for an hour, everyone just sprays you with auto rifles, so fucking shitty.
Diablohead
Member
Every good visible line to use a scout rifle with is blocked with a fucking object, WHY?
I never said big games can't/don't get great user scores. Where did I say that? You're making up points to argue against which I never claimed.
I said that a 0 score and a 10 don't really balance each other out. This isn't an opinion, and it isn't something that needs us to cite various games for. It's simply mathematical fact. Let's quickly create a simple scenario here to illustrate it:
I am now the only person about to give Destiny a legit score. I'm going to score it an 8, because in this alternate universe I like it far more. As the only score given, the game's overall score stands at 8.
Now, I introduce two fanboys. One is burnt up over the PS exclusive content and rates it a 0, and the other is mad about Titanfall still and gives it a 10. The new overall score for Destiny including my one legitimate review is now 6. As you can see the two new scores in fact didn't balance each other out, because now my 8 was weighed less by having to shift the average from 5... something that wasn't true before the fanboys' scores were added. Now add 1000 of each, and then 1000 people scoring it an 8 still leaves it with a 6. It's a pretty simple concept to grasp I'd think.
Finally, I didn't say that nobody could score a game 0 or 1 did I? I was saying that it's simply a lot less likely... much like how Big Rigs is far more likely to receive a score of 0 or 1 legitimately from a user than a score of 9 or 10. A game does not have to be perfect in order to score a 10 in someone's opinion, else no game would have ever received such a score in history (not OoT, not TLOU, not Mario 64, NOTHING)... it simply needs to have no flaws that impact that persons enjoyment FOR THEM. Let's take another game I'd rate as a 10, WipEout 2097. Come up to me and say "what's wrong with WipEout 2097?" and you know what my answer is likely to be? Nothing. It's fucking flawless. Now you probably won't agree with that... but whatever flaw you may see in it, has simply not been registered by me in the entirety of the last 17 years. If it has flaws, they've not once impacted my enjoyment of the product, and so I don't view them as flaws. So a 10 for WipEout 2097 it is.
I don't think I've played a 0 before, in case you're wondering.
ProvenDeadly
Member
Bungie isn't good at making MP games when they actually give an effort.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
I guess you missed Watch_Dogs
I made the mistake of trying to use a scout rifle in the beta. I knew I wouldnt be doing that again
Push on through! Was in the same boat for ages, but then it clicked and I'm having an absolute blast. I'd easily say it's ahead of Reach or H4 already.
BeforeU
Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.
Yeah PvP looks so unbalanced at times.
Believe me, I know. I've put in 100 hours since 2.1, kudos to Blizzard.
Ivory Samoan
Gold Member
Time will tell for sure, Destiny does have a great hook in terms of PvP and gear - the potential for cult like status is there for sure.
Diablohead
Member
They can be rather good, but only on first light and that big mars map with C near the broken vehicles, I can name a good 2-3 spots on every map which would make a good spot for long range weapons but sadly have an obsticle put there like a box or pipe to stop the line of sight, Reach never had this problem....
The rifles need to be bought down a good chunk, again.
This post is incredibly sensible.
Yeah, they can be good. I'll switch to them when I can after I see its a large map. I do the same for my secondary gear. Wish I knew ahead of time what map was coming up so I wouldn't have to collect special ammo again though.
speculawyer
Member
Well . . . as a lot of people here attest and even the negative reviews admit, it does look beautiful and does have very solid gunplay. But expectations were very high due to Bungie's own PR. And what they delivered on story, MMO aspects, loot, level-design, class aspects, social aspects . . . . Meh.
Ollie Pooch
In a perfect world, we'd all be homersexual
I somewhat agree with thsi in that it seems to be more segmented and structured like a Diablo/Monster Hunter style level-based grind than a traditional linear FPS, but it's hard to extract what we actually got from the imaginary game Bungie themselves sold us. That Forbes article posted earlier summed it up well - Bungie and Activision positioned this thing as an epic space faring adventure. They leveraged on Bungie's pedigree with large scale stories and franchises to boost hype for this thing into the stratosphere. When you're bleating on about your game being the most amazing thing ever then it just feels unfinished and patched together, I don't think it deserves high reviews.
So much of it is just wtf-levels of bad decisions.
Why is the story located on a WEBSITE? It should be in the game. Aside from the fact it's a cliched mess, having to use your phone to read it just makes it seem like they couldn't shoehorn it into the game in time or something.
There are so many caves and grottos that are completely devoid of any content at all. Did they run out of time?
There are practically no characters with names, nothing to relate to.
No well-thought-out boss fights requiring strategy or patterns (the closest I've seen is a spider tank that went into a 'breakdown' mode where you could target part of it to deal more damage). Why can't there be a Thardus-style massive boss or something that evolves in stages of the fight? Why are we just shooting mindlessly at them for minutes on end?
There are no NPC's, no outposts, no backstory, a tedious 20-30 second wait to go back to the tower if you want to purchase weapons/decode engrams. Jumping from this to D3 with its near-instant jumps to town/inventory/shops is jarring.
Is this game really just a grind for numbers at the end? I guess in that respect it's pulling from Diablo a bit, but it feels far more dry than that game, and lack of random generated dungeons shortens replayability.
I really haven't had one moment in this game that stood out as epic, memorable or just 'holy shit that was great!". It has zero set pieces. The music is fantastic, though.
I'm really curious to see what content they have for this going forward because if it's just 'cave with monster health dialed up to a billion and no new mechanics' it's gonna get really old, really fast, despite the general combat being superb and satisfying.
PVP is such a joke. So few game modes and they're either a variant of TDM, Domination, or FFA. Where are the creative game modes that Bungie is known for? Hell it doesn't even have CTF.
Nevermind no level editor, it doesn't even have custom games or private matches. No theater. NO SPLIT SCREEN. No weapon drops, only ammo.
If it was just a side mode like I originally thought, this would be almost acceptable. But given the lack of areas in the game, multiplayer makes up a much bigger percentage of the game than initially expected.
RespectThySole
Member
I'm not saying that you specifically STATED that they don't, but you quoted my original post which was in reference to the user reception of Destiny vs the user reception of CoD4. You then go on to say how it's more likely that a smaller game scores higher than a bigger game with user reviews.
I then pointed out to you that is not true because many AAA games have great user reviews. It's not about the size or cost of the game, there are many indie games that have worse user reviews than Destiny just like there are many AAA games that have a much better reception than Destiny. It has nothing to do with the size of the game, it has to do with the quality.
Your argument is so ridiculous. Is the majority of people reviewing the game simply fanboys? It has much more to do with the quality of the game than fanboy wars. If what you were saying is true then why is TLOU, Uncharted 2, SMG, Gears of War and so on not affected by this? Why are the verified user reviews on Amazon so low?
You may have not said directly that 0s are worthless, but it is clear that you're trying to say the 0s are meaningless based on your reaction of them "dragging" down the score.
It makes it less likely? If someone scores it a 0 then they score it a 0, there is nothing that separates Destiny from any other AAA game. If someone didn't like what Destiny accomplished AT ALL then they score it as such just as you score Wipeout a 10. You overlooking the game's flaws is no more credible then them not liking anything in the game. If one is acceptable, then so is the other. If one is not, then neither are acceptable, period.
I'm aware that it doesn't have to be perfect to be scored a 10, but usually a game of such quality meets a certain standard. I can rate PDZ or Big Rigs(as you say) a 10 if I wanted to, but it would be laughable to come up with a convincing review that states why such game is a worthy of a 10(I wouldn't convince anyone but myself). It is much much easier to come up with arguments for TLOU, SMG, etc.
If I gave Fusion Frenzy 2 a zero because I liked nothing the game tried to accomplish, am I less credible than someone who gave it a 10?
-tetsuo-
Unlimited Capacity
They are just getting to where the need to be after a gen overrating everything to hell.
Poodlestrike
Banned
This. It's a very, very good game, but it's wrapped in a layer of bafflingly poor decisions and smothered in grand promises that never pan out. How much the latter two matter to you (the player) determines how much you enjoy the game.
This is true too. So many games are inflated as fuck that it made people think that there is literally only 7-10 and a 7 is bad, but it's not.
NullPointer
Member
After finishing the story I wish I had played the game in Japanese or some other language I don't understand, with no subtitles, like watching anime when I was a teenager.
That way I'd just imagine what everybody was saying and try to weave it all together purely with my imagination and context and innuendo. There's no way I would've done worse. Bonus - the dialogue would be way better - ya know, if I didn't know what they were saying.
That way I'd just imagine what everybody was saying and try to weave it all together purely with my imagination and context and innuendo. There's no way I would've done worse. Bonus - the dialogue would be way better - ya know, if I didn't know what they were saying.
I wish. I've put tons of hours on Reach and it still remains one of my favorite fps games.
I've played like 10 pvp matches in Destiny and I'm already sick of it. It's just shit.
Ah, well I totally disagree there. Destiny has thrown up dozens a fantastic gaming moments for me since I've been playing it.
Had an EPIC level 20 strike on mars with 2 randoms. Can't remember that last time I enjoyed videogame so much.
Haven't got there yet on the campaign, so it was all new and glorious. It reminded me a bit of The Ark from Halo 3. Vehicle combat, drop ships coming in - all hell breaking loose. At one point after finally clearing an mid-level boss, we drove through a narrow valley on our shrikes into a new space where a bunch of low level guardians were having some trouble. We made short work of them then on to EPIC boss fight with a bullet-spongy (but well good fun) Cabal dude.
For my troubles I've ended up with a rare hand cannon with 11 in the clip (my last one had 5). I'm going to totally own with this in PvP.
I was grinning like a lunatic through the whole thing.
edit: I totally agree there's problems with the story-telling, mainly centred on the lack of good characters. There's no Cortana, no Arby no Johnson etc.
Poodlestrike
Banned
Yeah, Mars strike is great the first time through (other than the boss, who like you said, is really bullet spongey). The next time? Less so. And the time after that, and the time after that, and the time after that...
I thought the demo they've played is the same alpha and beta versions that were available to the public? Would've been interesting if they've created another scripted campaign just for the journalists.
Didn't take long for me to see how repetitive the game was. Maybe they were promised that they would be able to explore bigger world than they were in?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9YoJjdEBv8
You got jokes.
Poodlestrike
Banned
They definitely promised that, but seeing one or two levels in press demos doesn't really show the depth of the repetition.
Alrighty then.. I stand corrected!
I don't think WipEout 2097 had any crates though... so it's still perfect. Objectively so now.
I'm not sure if you realised this, but you kinda blew this point up in advance with your Halo Reach example. You've shown that you can take the solidest of foundations, change rather little, and pretty much destroy everything. How you can then claim that changing so much more that it starts to become a different genre can't screw things up immensely is beyond me. Spartan Ops proved that you can create crap in the exact same game as the solid foundation simply by having poor mission layout.
Also, I think your PVP example is also a little flawed. What you've described initially is a game where the user is having hours and hours of fun, which eventually stops being the case when the flaws become apparent. You know why this doesn't really work in reverse? Because if the game is flawed from the offset and people aren't having fun in the first 20 or so hours... what's convincing them to stick around until the good stuff can reveal itself? If the game is bad at the start, then a low review is pretty much warranted anyway because a new player will have to experience this part of the game (and will likely only experience this part), whilst in your Halo Reach example everyone started out having fun, and only later did this enjoyment get impacted, thus cutting down its lifespan.
For Halo Reach, the player had three weeks of fun, whereas for Destiny (based on obviously subjective reviews) many people won't have a single day. It's not comparable.
Now just do it 10 more times to reach that vanguard mark cap.
Well granted, I have't played it again, but I have the Cosmodrome one and I've enjoyed that each time.
I never tired of firefight in ODST, and still haven't from Halo PvP despite playing the same maps literally thousands of times.
Point is that Destiny, like Halo, is centred around a divine combat loop. People are talking a lot about 'grinding' here like it's WoW, when really Destiny is a game about 'playing'. Loot's just a bonus.
Diablohead
Member
The loot here effects ALL the gameplay though, even in 'balanced' PvP mods and skills still take effect and change the outcome, i'd be happy to play all day long if it was truly balanced outside of the iron banner events.
Ollie Pooch
In a perfect world, we'd all be homersexual
Yeah, I am actually making an effort to just enjoy the good bits. That sublime moment to moment shooting gameplay which is so addictive - not because i think it 'should' be good because it was hyped beyond belief - but because I really enjoy FPS games with leveling. It has that Halo 'feel ' which I love.
It's hard to find much of it outside of that very engaging - the patrol areas, for example where so many are 'deploy ghost in random room with dot in it, he spins around 90º four times MISSION COMPLETE. If I have my eye on the prize (ie some XP and possible drops) it's tolerable but then I stop and think "Did i seriously cross this entire boring level to photograph some giant balls in sacks?"
Regardless of how much effort was put into the wonderful environments and atmosphere, that stuff just feels so, so lazy, rushed and incomplete. It's a horrible relic of mundane fetch-quest MMO game design. Where are the surprise moments where you discover some great new area or treasure trove or... something? I think the way they talked it up had me imagining a sci-fi Skyrim adventure.
The core game is built around rewards but it fucks it up so often. I had that wizard fight on the moon following a (super fun) wave of enemies pouring out of the church doors and it was quite protracted, he died, and then left me nothing worthwhile. It's like "Oh..." .. *walks out silently* Then shortly after, one of those little goblins died and randomly dropped a nice armour set for me.
I think this point about it feeling barren really generates so much discussion because people can't figure out if Bungie deliberately designed this to be anonymous, generic and 'you create your own story!' or they simply ran out of time/ didn't know how to do it properly / had a change of approach halfway through development. The single player should have been AAA-level 'stand on its own' quality with memorable set pieces and build, and then the post-game could have been this free-roam leveling fest. That's my feeling, anyway. You can only tell people THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER so many times before they start peering behind your promises and thinking 'yeah, this really ins't that great... is that it?"
-tetsuo-
Unlimited Capacity
The problem is that the encounter design and AI a much weaker in Destiny.
NullPointer
Member
That's how I'm approaching it. The farming mentality is self defeating imho, especially for a new game, doubly so in the first week of release. Unless the idea is to burn through all the content and sell the game back at maximum resell value, pacing yourself is probably the best advice.
The whole idea of progression systems is to give you something to come back to and some kind of rewards to unlock over an extended period of time - not something to sleeplessly fiend, grind and farm with mindless and repetitive exploits.
The whole grinding, farming, "game doesn't begin until the end" thing is just batshit to me, and I don't know why people do that to themselves.
I agree with this, but only when it comes to the boss battles. There are some great open world and mission battles on the way to the bosses though.
Ollie Pooch
In a perfect world, we'd all be homersexual
I haven't played Halo in a while but I'm actually really enjoying the enemy AI in Destiny - there have been the odd moments where they've been pretty sneaky. Maybe I'm just terrible at it
Ah, well our wires have got crossed there. The gist I've taken from the reviews I've read say something along the lines of 'it plays brilliantly but the story is shit and there's not much to it'.
What I've played of Destiny so far is sublime. I've loved every minute of it, and of my gaming friends, Bungie fans and no, they've felt pretty much the same.
If there's people who haven't enjoyed the journey at all up to level 20, fair dos it's not for you. You're wrong, but it's doubtful you'll change your mind.
Iron banner's where it's LESS balanced dude!
I was seriously concerned about balance coming in - especially after the game breaking armour abilities in Reach, but seems to me to be doing very well indeed.
Obviously early days though.
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