Destiny

[Alf-Life]

Metacritic went down from 81 yesterday to a 74 :/

 

I ordered my ps3 copy to England and will pick it up next week when I visit home, but from playing the Beta and reading the reviews, they seem overly harsh and almost a response to the $500m story, which I still don't get how people, especially professional journalists, keep banging on about when it's clearly mostly the marketing budget not dev.

 

Anyway, guess Activision and Bungie care more about sales than review scores, and they already broke even on day one, so...

[Mazy]

Finished the rest of the story missions earlier today. I've enjoyed my time with it and I'm going to go through the Strikes that I haven't tried already and check them out and give the Crucible a more thorough run, but beyond that then I kinda already feel like I've had enough of it for now.

 

It's a solid shooter with a lots of polish on the presentation side of things, but doubling down on making it loot focused where all missions are exactly the same (shoot your way through hordes of nearly identical behaving enemies until you reach a terminal) ended up feeling like a poor move to me. The main draw for me in the Halo games have always been the core combat loop, running outta ammo and experimenting and improvising with all kinds of random weapons, having the diverse behaving enemy types of Halo and terrific pacing in terms of adding vehicle sections to break the monotony of just running around on foot all the time.

 

Obviously this shouldn't be a precise copy of Halo, but when they've gone from Halo which is actually one of the few shooters that feels quite diverse compared to most other shooters around, and the end result is a solid enough shooter but one that also ends up playing like a surprisingly plain shooter with just a sprinkle of that "Bungie" essence then I can't help feeling a bit disappointed. 

 

And it does fall victim to what I feared after playing the beta, it feels really light on content and variation, to the extent where it feels like it could've easily have used 6-12 months more dev time to spice up the experience and make it feels just a tad less copy/pasty

 

Anyway, I bet it's going to be one of those games where the sequel will end up being everything they actually wanted it to be, which isn't the worst spot to be in when it's the fastest selling new IP to date

[Taylor]

$500m and you can't make a game run at sixty.

[Sprony]

I'm at level 11 now so I think I have a good impression of the game. I wanted to share my opinion when I came across a review of Worthplaying. I think they said it better then I ever will. I also don't get the negativity out there but this piece basically sums it very well:

 

Destiny suffers from a serious case of rough edges. A number of elements, from the repetitive mission design to a weak early game, are a lot rougher than expected from an otherwise polished game. There isn't one glaring problem that detracts from the experience, but a number of minor issues hurt the game. Beneath those flaws lies an extremely enjoyable MMO-styled shooter that plays excellently, looks great, is extremely addictive, and has a strong and varied endgame.

 

Oh and it's the first console shooter I want to play competitively and it's also one of the first games that made me want to post a gameplay clip from when I was playing. That's saying something. 

 

[PogoP]

Knight? Wizard? Seriously? Haha. Imaginative names there, Bungie!

[Puddy]

I like the names actually, so damn simple, easy to learn and they tie into the whole science-fantasy vibe.

[2d-chris]

that FOV is killin me :S

[-HP-]

that FOV is killin me :S

 

Kinda agree, and for some reason it didn't bother me at first, but now that I got to level 8 the game is getting a little bit more fast paced and I feel I'm seeing a world through a fucking tube.

[Puddy]

Usually low FOV bothers me like hell (on PC though), but it didn't in this game. It's only sometimes in extreme close quarters that I feel like my peripheral vision becomes a hindrance (people can stand right next to you without you noticing).

 

Wish there was some form of option anyway.

[-HP-]

GT Review

[Zarsky]

Looks like a great game! But, to immerse myself in Bungie's universe doesn't feel like my destiny, I feel like I just need to continue creating my own worlds and stories instead.

[-HP-]

to immerse myself in Bungie's universe doesn't feel like my destiny

[-HP-]

[-HP-]

[Chimeray]

Good point about the "binge playing". People were bitching about Assassins Creed (1) as well and how repetitive that was but I played 30-60 minutes a day for a couple of weeks till I finished the game and that was absolutely perfect.

 

Also worth nothing... New open world-ish IP's tend to be repetitive so not much of a surprise tbh!

Edited September 17, 2014 by Chimeray