my final thoughts on the DESTINY beta

With the beta for Destiny ending soon, here are my final thoughts on my experience:

For whatever reason I never felt connected to the universe I was in except for when I was in the Tower, and even in the Tower I never felt fully immersed due to the lack of voice chat. I think the lack of a narrative hurts the missions in my opinion. The biggest issue with the PvE stuff is that the game seldom gives a reason why you are killing the hordes of enemies (except that it’s a battle between good and evil). This severs any real emotional attachment to the battle going forth. Continuing on the attachment while playing, shooting an enemy and only seeing numbers (not blood) pop up disconnects me from my kill.

Another issue I had with the PvE stuff is the level difficulty. I’m a Halo gamer that enjoyed playing the series on Legendary difficulty; and with level 8 being the ceiling of the beta, the game got too easily too quickly. First of all the AI for the missions on hardest difficulty is very predictable (or rhythmic if you’re kind). It was too easy to find patterns on how the AI enemies move, take cover and how far they’ll follow you. And after hitting level 5, the knowledge of this creates an easy game that isn’t difficult but is just long.

On to the PvP side of things, coming from Halo 4 the game at first seemed unbalanced. In my opinion, the focus on power-ups in Halo is what dampened the multiplayer from Halo 3 to Reach to 4. Not knowing if an enemy has a super charge power up or not is fairly annoying; if we use Halo to compare, power ups are shown while the game user has it. So in Halo you know when and when not to start a fire fight with someone. However, in Destiny power-ups are only shown when in use; this forces firefights to have a random unknown (Player B) that could turn the situation unbeknownst to the initiator (Player A).

Aside from the power-ups issue, their is the game control aspect of the game. By adopting the Call of Duty control mechanisms, it ruins the skills that once were in Halo. While looking down the sight in Halo if you happened to be shot it stopped looking down the sight and reverts to normal looking. However in Destiny it does no such thing; so as a result sniping in Destiny is stupid easy. Basically you have until a player unloads a full-clip into you to line up your headshot (or just get two-three body shots if noob).

My final largest issue with the PvP was the fact that you couldn’t pick what in how you play in the crucible. It probably will be change but how it stands now it’s a crap-shoot. You’re forced to play vehicle maps if you don’t like vehicle maps. And domination got old after playing it in Gears of War so often.

And this ends my critique of an otherwise good game. Is it the best game ever that redefines a genre? No. But is it a terrible shooter? No it’s just not great.