Ryu’s Musing’s: Destiny (PS3) Believe the HYPE!!!…NOT!!
Title: Destiny
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Bungie
Language: English
Format: Disk/Digital
Genre: FPS, Adventure, Action, CO-OPSynopsis: You are a Guardian of the last city on Earth, able to wield incredible power. Embark on an epic action adventure with rich cinematic storytelling, unravel the mysteries of our universe, and reclaim what we lost at the fall of our Golden Age. An unprecedented combination of storytelling, personal activities, and cooperative, competitive, and public gameplay are seamlessly woven into an expansive, persistent online world. Venture out alone or join up with friends. Personalise and upgrade every aspect of how you look and fight with armour, weapon, and visual customisation combinations. Take your upgraded character into every mode, including campaign, cooperative, social, public, and competitive multiplayer.
A few provisos:
1) I have never played Halo
2) I have never played FPS on a console
So, I’ve spent 32hours playing the game, more or less straight. At the end of it i have only one conclusion, what a waste!
First thing you notice are the loading times, which on a PS3 are stupidly long, hell at one point i even managed to make a cup of coffee while waiting for a loading screen. While it’s certainly true that this is not so bad on the PS4, they are still stupidly long, which i don’t really understand given how bad texture quality can be.
However TBH i personally don’t really rate graphics as having to be all superb, rather i want the game to be fun. And i have to admit for the first few missions the game it was fun. My biggest problem was getting used to using the controller to shoot, and i was expecting that. However i was disappointed that the game doesn’t utilise the same aim assist that games like GTA5 do, a game i started recently. Where once you go to aim down sights it snaps to the target. That’s a god sent system for people like myself, however as far as i can see Destiny doesn’t have aim assist per say, what it has is increased target boxes. That’s where the hit box of the target is increased a bit, so what would be a miss normally, hits. It’s a nice system, and once you get used to it you can usually hit things, but you won’t be filling the headshot bounties any time soon!
Once you get past this though you get into the missions, and sadly after the first few i was left wondering WTF my Ghost ‘helper’ was doing. Pretty much every mission is the same, go to area X and wait while you’re ghost hacks a system. Ghost naturally screws up (EVERY fucking time) and triggers an alarm unleashing wave after wave of enemies for you fend off. And that’s pretty much the end of the missions, while you do get a couple with slightly different variations, they’re few and far between.
So after a while it gets boring, doing the same thing repeatedly. this is further compounded by the fact that you’re always in the same area. On the map it looks like there’s a huge distance between the missions, but in reality it ends up being a few feet away, through a previously locked door, or even in the exact same room. So you end up knowing the maps pretty well, but that’s only because there’s really only a few maps in the game.
Part of me sort of understands this for the story missions, they’re all linked together and flow a certain way. However once you do a patrol (more on this shortly) it’s the exact same thing, only this time your waves are interspersed with a bit find X or Y ‘item’ and scan it.
So, lets go over the options you have. Each planet has 5 story missions, and a Strike.
Story missions are the usual wave bound fight that i frankly got fed up with by the time i was on my 2nd one on the moon. These as i said consist of working your way to a particular area and then ‘defending’ your ghost from a few waves of mobs. I use defending lightly as it can’t die, but it’s also useless at it’s job and after a while you’ll want to trade it in for a new one!
For the most part these are sort of solo, ‘sort of’ because while it’s possible to solo them you’re always running around with others. Whether they help you or not is debatable, and you can’t ask them for help as there’s no voice chat (i mean come on Bungie, if GTA5 has Voice coms why don’t you!).
Strikes are the culmination of the story missions, you’ve gathered all the data and located ‘something’, now you go in and spank it. These are forced CO-OP, if you’re flying solo or as a duo the game waits till it finds you a 3rd. This consists of again working you’re way to a area and fighting a boss.
Now the problem here is with no voice coms, you’re pretty much screwed. You can’t communicate with you’re party, so you’ve got to hope that the people you’re with have telekinesis and can read your mind when you’re screwed over or run out of ammo. You’re also beholden to the others around you in a way i personally don’t really like. My first strike i wanted to spend some time in the run up, killing mobs, grinding a bit of XP and hopefully my level, as i was close to it, maybe find a new weapon or armour. And yes, i just wanted to explore this new area. However the other two decided to say screw it and ran past everything to go straight to the boss (I’m guessing they were beta players). As a result of this i had no choice but to follow along at their pace, since on you’re own you’ll get ravaged in a strike.
Again, i might add, with no voice coms.
When you get to the boss fight it’s the exact same fight repeatedly. Shoot the boss with a bazillion bullets as bosses are stupidly bullet spongy. As you’d expect bosses have phases and attacks, but communicating these and organising counter offense and defences when you have no voice comes is just a painful experience.
Finally you have Patrols, which are pretty straight forward. You go and patrol the area and kill shit. In the area there’s mini missions to do, usually kill X number of mobs, Kill a named, etc. etc. It’s pretty generic and on the surface uninteresting, but if I’m honest this is where I’ve had the most fun, because it’s only here that a solo player can really have fun. In the story and strike missions COOP play is pretty much demanded, but here in Patrol mode it’s genuinely an optional thing. Except of course when you get one of the random events where they drop a huge ass tank on you and you need everyone to take it down within a time limit. TBH those are just as fun!
The lack of voice coms really cripples the game in a bad way and to me shows that despite all the claims otherwise Bungie aren’t really sure what they’re doing with the game. It’s defo not a single player game, but you can’t really claim it as a COOP game when the features needed for that aren’t really there.
The Tower, you’re hub, is terrible, NPC’s are scattered all over the place resulting in a huge area that almost always feels dead and empty. And the way mission rewards are done is just plain painful: Report to NPC X and get given a voucher to turn into NPC Y to claim you’re reward. Just give me the damn reward as soon as i turn it in, don’t make me run around pointlessly…anymore than you already have.
Now lets talk Loot. This game was hyped as aping, which i have to admit was one of the selling points for me. Loads of guns, or as Angry Joe calls it in his Borderlands 2 review, Gun Porn 
So i have to admit having that in Destiny really did add an interesting dynamic to it for me. Yet sadly this is nowhere near the case. Loot drops are few and far between, early on i think i had 2 guns drop, 1 was weaker than my current and the other was one i didn’t use. So where was my Borderlands-esque weapons? I wasn’t expecting millions of weapons, but i was expecting more than 2 in 10 levels. Granted once i started to hit other planets the weapon drops increased a lot, but they were hardly ever ‘upgrades’, in fact most of my great weapons were given as mission rewards, and my best weapon of all came as a reward for completing the final mission.
The same applied to armour upgrades, which were, thankfully a bit better on the drops, but not by much.
The other problem with weapons and armour was that to get the best ones from the vendors require you to grind A LOT or reputation. You get this from completing bounties, which are essentially daily missions that you do as you go, but it’s a huge amount of grinding time.
Which leads into one of the biggest problems of the game (imo). I ploughed through the first few missions with relative ease, but found i was soon to low level to carry on and had to grind in Patrol mode. This became a a common occurrence, where you’d be able to do the first few story missions on a planet fairly easy, but then you’d have to spend time grinding in Patrol to move on. this naturally becomes more prevalent later in the game when the levels between missions increases significantly.
For me this defines what the game is about, a grind fest.
However the biggest failure and let down comes at the end. You fight you’re way all through the missions to the final one. You think you’re in for an epic scene, but it falls flat on it’s face. You have a fight against the same mobs you’ve been fighting for a while and that’s it. Like a lot of people i found myself saying, “was that it, nah that can’t be it”, but no sadly that was the last fight, a fight that wasn’t even as hard as some of the boss fights. You get a generic, a ‘bigger evil is coming’ moment and given a insanely powerful gun (in comparison to what you were using) and that’s it.
As endings go i rate it even worse than KOTOR2 for levelling the gamer hanging and with a huge WTF moment. All that’s left now is to restart and rinse and repeat your grind for uber gear, and considering the prices of some of the uber stuff i honestly have no desire to try. I don’t mind grind fests (hell i played silly hours with Borderlands 1 and 2), but this one sadly felt like it was sucking my soul out to try and fill it’s soulless body.
Now lets talk pricing. This game is stupidly expensive, i paid £79.99 for the Guardian edition, which included the game, a few bonus items, access to the Vanguard Armoury early, and the season pass for the 2 bits of DLC. What this works out as is £49.99 for the game and £30 for the season pass and bonus stuff (since release price has risen to £84.99 making it £34.99 for the extras).
The ship you get is a skin you only see in the loading screen and has no meaning at all in terms of game play. Vanguard Armoury is nice, but the weapons you get are OP as hell at first and then useless within a level or two, which screams bad balance to me. The DLC, according to Bungie, is going to be ‘expansion level’. However they also claim each DLC will add a new planet, i don’t see 5 missions, a strike, and a patrol map as being ‘expansion level’. While they could add more and have hinted at more, it’s hard to really judge this until the first one hits.
Overall i was disappointed with it and regretted buying it. It has it’s moments of ‘fun’ but the downsides made me want to give up far to often. I was watching a streamer (ITMEJP) and they were basically saying it’s Halo, which is shame as Bungie were trying to move away from Halo. But hey, if you’re a Halo fan lamenting the lack of Halo on the PS3/4 then this is the game for you!
Final note, a PC version is rumoured to be in the works and ‘proof’ was shown in the SteamDB wherein Destiny was listed and given a SteamAPI with a release date of March 2015. However I’ll believe it when i see it
Edit: Just to note, i did play a good chunk in proper COOP mode, the gaming community I’m a part of did a game session where we all had Mumble for voice Coms and it was ‘better’. however as TotalBiscuit (i think it was him) said in his Borderlands 2 review ‘”cancer is better with friends, doesn’t make it a good thing”. He was of course referring to how Borderlands 2 was better with friends, but he still felt it was a crap game.
I think your article is very accurate, however I personally still really enjoy the game, despite the many negative components.
I agree that the inability to converse during game is annoying, and even when I have my mic on during a fire-team gig, the others usually do not. Just last night a couple of players pointed at me to get my attention. I would have felt more comfortable if they shouted ‘hey dickhead!’ over a mic. Certainly would have acquired my attention a lot faster. Moreover, I was playing with a fire-team on the moon, and having read the strategy guide (which doesn’t even come with an index so trying to find stuff is downright difficult), I knew the vulnerability of the behemoth boss we were facing down, and I was unable to convey this knowledge to my team who were shooting everywhere but his/her/its vulnerability.
Additionally, another annoying factor I found is that when you play a mission that requires a fire-team to complete, if there is a slot open on a team already engaged in the mission, you are thrown in there; even if they have managed to get to the end of the map, meaning that I inevitably need to go back and begin the mission again later if I want to get my money’s worth.
What really cheesed me off though, is the sub-class features. I chose to be a Hunter because I love being invisible and stealthily approaching bad guys with a blade. Having reached level 15 on the Gunslinger mode and unlocked Blade-dancer, I realized that if I wanted to use these nifty new abilities, I would have to do everything again; gain grenades, learn double jump, everything I had already done about 14 levels or so prior, which meant more grinding was necessary. Although the continuous appearance of new meat to vaporize is fun, fighting in the same area agaisnt the same relentless nasty’s eventually left me feeling a little tired.
And don’t even get me started on the Crucible. I used to think I was a not half bad player. Either I really suck, and I just didn’t know it, or Destiny is really unfair. I noticed that the one who begins a match is able to decide how to play it; including if the level of a Guardian comes into play, so, say a level 6 is battling a level 20, I think it’s obvious who will win. I had better be level 100 next time I decide to humiliate myself like that again.
Again, really interesting article. Thanks for sharing your opinions.
Yeah the points you raised were in my initial post, but i cut them so as to keep the word count down. To long a post and people won’t even start to read it. So i cut it as i felt i’d covered enough negative stuff already.
I avoided the Crucible from the start, i figured the PvP aspect would be screwed over in some way, as it almost always is in MMO’s, and i honestly have no interest in PvP lol.
And yeah like you i do still find myself enjoying it a little. Enough that i’ll keep it on the console and play it now and again. I just hope that Bungie listen to all the criticism thats being leveled at them and improves it in the next game. But i doubt it.
As for if theres going to be another, thats pretty much garunteed. Activision set aside 500mill for the entire IP, that was 3 games over 6 years. In it’s first 24hours alone it’s already beaten that. Anything from now on is just pure gravy for them. What’s more that only counted what was sold in stores, dosen’t include PSN sales