Wednesday, September 10, 2014
Destiny, Day 1.5 - Impressions
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So, Destiny is out. I picked up my copy and got a
fair bit of time in on the first day and a little more this afternoon. Not sure
if I’ll be doing a full review, but I figured I’d throw some impressions up in
no particular order…
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>Great graphics (duh) tight controls, and getting
your own speederbike is pretty rad.
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>Double-jumping is always awesome.
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>As a story-centric player, I'm craving a lot more than what Destiny offers. I don't need 15,000 books of lore or a cutscene every three minutes, but I’m just not getting any good mental hooks for me here… For example, your character is revived from the dead after a long, long time, so… What's up with that? Nobody even blinks at it – including your own character!
And seriously, Light and Darkness? Give me a break,
it couldn’t possibly be any more cliché.
There seem to be plenty of ideas here, but Bungie
just does not deliver on any of them. In another instance, it seems like there
are PVP factions with in-game leaders – a perfect time to introduce a salty
character or two, but they’re just flat questgiver types.
It’s almost like Bungie are intentionally keeping
everything as bland, broad and inoffensive as possible in order to grab as many
players as possible, but it has the opposite effect for me. I want some
memorable faces, I want some crazy dialogue.. some personality!
(Side note: the in-game lore is that actually exists is apparently only readable on Bungie's website? WTF?)
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| Need to get to sleep? I'm here to help. |
>I really, really don't like Peter Dinklage’s
voice here. Even though he’s supposed to be a robot of sorts, he sounds so totally
flat and uninteresting. I don't feel any attachment to him at all, and I wish I
could customize the voice into something peppier. He’s a major drag.
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>It seems like a lot of people are going Warlock, but I went Titan thinking that it might be a little easier for solo play, I’ve been happy with it so far. Punching enemies feels massively satisfying, and it wasn't long before I got some health and stamina increases. Unfortunately, it seems like the devs are expecting me to be using different kinds of weapons that I am – the buffs installed in some of my fancier armor are for gun types I never use. Hopefully that will change later.
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>The farming missions are boring. All you do is basically kill people, pick up X things, or make your way to a certain location and scan something. I quickly abandoned them in favor of the story missions, but those haven’t exactly lit my world on fire, either.
Shooting stuff is fun and Destiny feels great in
that sense – the moment-to-moment gunplay is fab for sure. That said, I’m not
sure how long pure shooting is going to carry me if the story doesn’t pick up.
The armor and weapon drops haven’t exactly been awe-inspiring, either… A lot of
standard weapon types and incremental upgrades, but nothing really wild or
impressive yet.
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As someone who played and completed the campaign in
Defiance, I’ve already seen a game that does
what Destiny is trying to do. My full review is here, and it’s actually free-to-play on every platform last time I checked – PS3/360/PC.
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| Defiance on 360 |
Of course, Bungie has technical prowess that
Defiance’s devs could only dream of… No question there.
On the other hand,
Defiance’s world was always humming, it had plenty of interesting modes and varied
quests, exploring the open world offered its own interesting rewards and there
was enough story to keep me going until the end of its beefy campaign.
With a $500M investment behind it, I’m sure that
Destiny is going to keep growing and evolving (and hey, I’m not even done with
the campaign yet, so this isn't a final judgment) but my first
impressions are of a slick presentation on top of an empty core, and I admit I'm wondering what lies in store for its future...
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Posts
It is indeed a bit odd that 99% of the lore is only up on Bungie.net Perhaps they thought in a co-op game getting time to stop and read things would be just too much of an issue. For instance I know Linda never reads such stuff when playing, so in some ways I like I can go and read that somewhere when not playing, but still it does leave the in game world feeling rather flat and unexplained.
As for the lack of people, I think they've, for once, overloaded on the servers required. The big down time never seemed to happen as feared, especially on PlayStation, so maybe everyone is just too spread out right now and as the inevitable removal of servers occurs things might begin to feel a little more full over time.
Still, I'm enjoying the game immensely. Admittedly I'm always in at least a two person fireteam with Linda, so that will go a long way to keep things interesting.
I'm thinking all they've done so far is created a platform in which they can later bring depth and story via DLC content. Question is how many of us will still be playing at that point.
Hey Steven!
My apologies, I overlooked your comment until just now (ten days later!) My bad!!
Ironically, my full review just went up at GC, so there's that.
I usually co-op with my wife, but we've yet to get her a PS4, so doing solo is dull and there are plenty of issues with the game overall.
I bet it'll be cracking in a year, if it's not totally abandoned by that time...