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Destiny
Topic Started: Jul 29 2014, 08:19 PM (63 Views)
MikDaTv
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DESTINY

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What can I say about Destiny. After playing the Beta for a few days I believe I have enough experience with the game to at least post some thoughts. My full review will wait for the full game however.

Gameplay
Plays a lot like Halo in some regards but a lot like Call of Duty in others. Your character's movement speed fluidity of motion feel very Call of Duty like, which isn't bad. That's one of the few things I like about Call of Duty. Soap never got caught up on a pebble on the ground because it was just tall enough to register as an obstruction. And the ADS mechanic is something we've all seen and dealt with before.

The way your character moves is still very Halo though. Nowhere is that more demonstrated than in jumping. Every time I made my character jump it just felt very light weight and floaty like Halo 1. In all character navigation is very well done and I never found myself frustrated with my characters movements like I constantly find in the Assassin's Creed games (No I wanted you to jump to that branch not into the hay bale! Why would you do that!).

Weapons work fine. They aren't anything to write home about either for good or for bad. If I had to pick one thing to complain about it would be the hit detection for head shots. Sometimes I would hover my sight right over a guy's head, pull the trigger and get a body shot, and not from very long range either. It happened especially when I was shooting someone in the back of the head. Not sure if it was a glitch or not but it lead to some annoying surprise attacks where I thought I had the jump on a group of fallen but that first shot wasn't a kill shot like I hoped. Other than that one small complaint, I have nothing negative to write about the weapons.

You can select three different classes, Titan (Soldier), Hunter(Sniper), or Warlock (Space Wizard). I played as all three and I preferred the Hunter because it played the most differently. The Titan's special ability was a leap forward ground pound that vaporized any baddies around. The Warlock's special ability was shooting a ball of magic which vaporized any baddies around. The Hunter's special ability was summoning a revolver made of pure energy from thin air and blasting up to three targets with super powerful bullets... that vaporized any baddies around.

All three of them were very fun to play but didn't differ enough in my opinion. I played exactly the same way for all three characters and got exactly the same results. They don't have different rolls to play, they just have different methods of laying the smack down on the bad guys. This will probably change in the full game though as there appears to me multiple skill trees to invest in.

The co-op multiplayer is interesting but not as innovative as Bungie may have lead us to believe. It's like Borderlands pretty much except with three players instead of four. In fact it's kind of annoying because nowhere in any of the menus did I find an option to turn it off. If one of my friends wanted to join my fireteam, they could do it at just about any time so long as I was outside certain areas. I couldn't prevent joining and I was never prompted that someone was joining. All of a sudden someone was there and talking to me through my TV because my headset wasn't plugged in because I was trying to do some solo exploring.

And the few times I did try to team up with a crew to smack down some Fallen we had voice chat problems. You couldn't be in a party and playing the game at the same time which kinda defeats the purpose of the party chat does it not? What if I want to play Destiny while talking to someone who isn't playing Destiny?

Now those negatives aside, the multiplayer co-op was fun. When we did get the voice chat to work we could team up and clear areas with brutal efficiency.

I played one round of the competitive multiplayer which was enough to tell me it was exactly like every other FPS competitive multiplayer ever made ever just with different bells and whistles.


Story
Probably the best thing going for the game right now as far as I'm concerned. Humans have been reduced to a single city on Earth which is protected by The Traveler, a gigantic, smooth, white, egg which hovers over the city silently. Apparently the Traveler had come centuries in the past and triggered the golden age of Humanity in which humans colonized the solar system. They teraformed Mars and Venus and built bases on the Moon. Then "The Darkness" came and beat us back, nearly killing all of humanity. The Traveler however somehow defeated the Darkness in a final battle and then died... or went dormant... the game isn't very clear on that. The last of the Humans built the city under it and have been trying to reclaim the relics of their golden age ever since. (I question the sanity of building your last remaining population center under a giant damaged orb that could crash down at any moment, but that falls under rule of cool I guess)

You play as a guardian, a long dead soldier who is resurrected by a Ghost, your floating AI buddy who travels with you and gives you exposition and opens doors for you. Guardians are individuals who can wield "The Light" some unspecified power granted by the Traveler which is what lets you shoot balls of death from your hands and summon pistols made of pure energy.

Your job is to protect the city from its many enemies and explore the ruins of the Golden Age to try and reclaim our former glory.

In the end the story just feels like Halo all over again. The overarching plot is different certainly, but the details are extremely similar. It's like Bungie wanted to make a new game but didn't want to stray too far from their comfort zone.

Here, I'll show you...

Destiny
You play as a Guardian, a person who is sworn to protect the last remaining Human City. You are a super soldier, who wears full set of advanced armor and is assigned a specialized AI partner who interacts with any technology you encounter in order to assist your efforts to fight against a group of varied and vicious alien enemies. You search through the ruins of the fallen empire of the Golden Age of Humanity, finding ancient AI's and artifacts to help you.

Halo
You are a Spartan, a person who is charged with protecting Humanities few remaining population centers. A super soldier, who wears a full set of advanced armor and is assigned a specialized AI partner who interacts with any technology you encounter in order to assist your efforts to fight against a group of varied and vicious alien enemies. You search through the ruins of the fallen empire of the Forerunners, finding ancient AI's and artifacts to help you.

Technically a different game with a different story and different characters but still close enough as makes no difference. And that's just one example. Everything from your Ghost, a 343 Guilty Spark lookalike to the weapons have a very distinguishable Halo. It's a strange case of the big picture being different but all its components being nearly the same.


Graphics
The visuals are fantastic. I love the amount and the contrast of the colors, especially in the character customization. So many character customizations use only the colors grey and brown in varying shades. In Destiny, not only are there bright colors, but the contrast between them really make them very noticeable.

I only wish that it was a third person shooter so we could appreciate our characters more. It just doesn't make sense to let us customize our characters and then make 85% of the game first person or cover it up with a helmet.

The bits and pieces of armor as well are colorful and make you look different than every other character. Even when you mix and mash different sets of armor, the different colors of the armor bits mesh very well. The details on the weapons are nice and functional as well. The capes and the long coats on the hunters and warlocks look great and i didn't notice very much clipping, if any through the flawy fabric textures.

The backdrops are impressive as well, although those should be since FPS's have been in the business of fooling us into thinking the game is grand and epic with great skybox's for the past 10 years. My favorite view is the one at the tower where you can see the Traveler in the background.


Overall
If I had to sum up in one word my experience with Destiny and it's Beta so far it would have to be "Unimpressed." That's not to say that the game is bad. I enjoyed the Beta a lot and definitely logged a few hours of genuinely fun play time into it. When I say unimpressed I mean that what I've played and what I've read so far does not match either the claims of Bungie or the Hype that's been written about it.

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