Destiny, Schmestiny…. what’s all this hype about anyways?

I was one of the lucky 4.8 million gamer’s that were able to play the Destiny beta. I felt special…as I don’t usually get to participate in beta testing cause I miss the mark.  Gamers alike though were able to wonder across Old Russia, tackled hoards of bad guys and even Devil Walkers, we fought other Guardians in the Crucible, and had a glimpse of weaponry and armor at the Tower. Still, there are some things that brought questions and uncertainty to my mind.  Exploration was buggy at times, their were enemies that just laughed at all the bullets I shot towards them; multiplayer pacing seemed a little of as well. This all stemmed the ultimate question……what will the full game actually be like?

Level Balancing and Enemy OP’d?

One of the things I noticed while battling the higher level enemies is they took clip after clip to take down.  From what I played, the stronger the enemies get, the more ammo I needed to carry as they just soaked it up.  The best example of this that I experienced and I’m sure most everyone else as well, was the Devil’s Lair Strike Mission, which is recommended for Guardians level 6 or higher. You begin by fighting through rooms full of enemies, some of which have ranks well above the beta’s level 8 cap. You then come across a wide field with a Devil Walker spider tank in it.  The name should tell you just how hard it is to kill.  Of course, there are weaker enemies, but the tank is the main focus. It wields a rocket launcher and what appears to be a rail gun that will rock your face off.  Oh, and if that wasn’t enough it was armored like you wouldn’t believe.

Even when I was hitting its weak spot, the Devil Walker required hundreds of bullets, and that was with a teammate of mine hitting this thing as well.  So either it’s just crazy OP’d or we were just awful at the game.  I’m shooting for the overpowered statement.

The Devil Walker barely moves. It slides a few feet side to side, but that’s it. For the most part, it sits in one place and shoots the Guardians that are attacking it. And it takes a very long time to make a dent in its armor.  Myself and a teammate unloaded on it with heavy weapons, special weapons, special abilities, and countless clips of regular ammo, and it still took about 10-15 minutes to kill. What I wonder, then, is if the full game will rely on simply increasing the health of enemies. Hopefully, as you increase in rank, there will be more and different creatures to fight, all with different fighting styles. In the beta, you can see some differences between the individualized, shoot-and-take-cover Fallen and the group-minded Hive who rush into battle. But the full game needs to show that increasing rank won’t just mean running across more bullet sponges, but rather that the creatures’ behavior will also evolve with the Guardian’s increasing strength.

The Crucible

Destiny looks like it’s heavily focused on cooperative modes. The majority of the game revolves around the story and strike missions, but there is still competitive multiplayer.  It’s a Bungie game ya’ll, it felt and played a lot like Halo, especially with the vehicles and map design.  Guardians don’t look like Spartans, nor do they play the same, they can’t sprint, but the Guardians have an impressive double and even triple jump that can be traited. Though the jumping is much less super human like and the movement is slower you come across enemies less frequently.  The pacing of the game felt off to me, as it seemed to take forever to get around the maps. I think with only having a 12 player cap on the matches it really felt off from other games.  Their were only a couple of maps that you could play as well, and the maps were quite large and seemed to have a lot of unused area.  I’m curious to see what the other maps will play like and see if you can achieve the pace expected from a shooter like this game.

Will Destiny be able to pull out an epic story line like Halo did? Destiny, is huge….Each world is open to exploration….There are story missions, explore missions, Strike missions, and the Crucible.  Will the story portion of this game feel disconnected?   So far, it seems like Bungie has the foundation to potentially pull this story off. The struggle between the Traveler and the Darkness, the rise of Guardians gifted with the Traveler’s powers, and the fight to protect Earth are all great points to a story that could be extremely epic…but will it flow well?

MMO classes or not?

Well, Bungie did say that the Guardian classes aren’t related to the MMO genre classes one may be used to.  Their isn’t a healer class, or a tank class, but the Guardians are still meant to be specific and have differences between them.  The Titan class was a brute basically, he wields big armor and has some impressive special abilities that dealt big damage.  The Hunter specialized in stealth and accuracy with the sniper based weapons.  The Warlock was a mix as it dealt big damage, but it also had magic powers it wielded.  All the classes to me played very similar with minor differences, and the weapons and armor seem to be very close with some minor differences and cosmetic looks.   It looks like the classes only differ by stat advantages in certain areas so that begs the question….Will the actual release of the game show us these classes have meaningfully differences?