Destiny "Alpha"

[Danimal]

I hate to cheat on Divinity right now, but I'm downloading as we speak

Right here with you on this one. Probably the best RPG I've played since Baldurs Gate 2.

[greggsand]

Burnt out on Halo, never played borderlands. I like Destiny.

I've yet to have more than 2 people on any map with me, but I'm glad it's not necessary to proceed (so far). The "upgrading" needs some polish as I'm not sure what I've got or what should be hoping to get. That also ties into the base as I only go back there when the game tells me I should. All this taken with a grain of salt as it's the beta.

[Teal]

So...help me out here. I DL'ed the beta (360) last night, and have played a few missions. It's REALLY pretty. But...what's the big selling point of this one again? It's fun and all, I like it alright, but...it feels a lot like Halo, honestly. You have aliens. You have a 'Flood' type. You have this little 'ghost' thing that talks to you and does computer stuff (Cortana), and then there's this hub with a whole bunch of online people running around, where you can get guns and armor and stuff. Then you pick a spot and go do a mission where other people may or may not be doing the mission you're doing as co-op.

Okay.

Is there some competitive stuff in this that I'm just not seeing? It's one of the more strange 'betas' I've seen, really. It IS fun, but hardly seems 'groundbreaking' and worthy of all the breathless hype it's gotten.

What am I missing?

[TCrouch]

The seamless integration of an MMO environment with an action shooter game. That's what you're missing. No game out there just seamlessly blends you into a level with other people randomly, and it has loot generation and upgrades of both skills and weapons/armor. You use skills and can morph them into something else. You learn a grenade at level 2. Use it a lot and you get a variant on the grenade that you can choose to use or not.

Find "green" or "blue" weapons and use them, and you unlock upgrades that gives you different scopes, barrels, boosts for reload or kills, any number of things. You get up to a high enough level and go into Strike missions, which are essentially MMO "Raid" type missions where there's zero hope of you completing it solo. The one Strike in the beta is a hell of a tough match the first time you run up against a Devil Walker.

There are random world events where a boss may spawn out of nowhere, and suddenly you and 6 other players are hammering away at this mammoth enemy in organic teamwork that nobody has to go "hey, want to play a game?".

At its core, it's a shooter. If you expected something other than a shooter that might feel a bit like Halo, you went into it expecting something entirely different than it is. I didn't like Halo because it was a linear level-by-level shooter. Destiny blows it up to the Nth degree, where you can run a few missions (like you did), and you may or may not get it. But the technology behind the seamless merging of dozens of different players out "in the wild", non-forced interactions that occur out of nowhere, changing level settings up to "Hard" and getting veteran mobs to shoot at--the IMPECCABLE controls, which Bungie does better than any other developer out there, I think...endless possible loot drops leading to that magical "just one more mission" cycle where you're trying to replace your helmet or chest piece with a better version, etc. Weapon swaps mid fight, finding out you're out of ammo and scrounging a battlefield for the telltale little colored boxes.

Oh yeah, and jetpacks.

So yeah--the tech is what's groundbreaking. They took a shooter-style game and wrapped it in an always-online MMO environment. If you aren't looking for an MMO experience in an action game, or a game of Borderlands with strangers and no join game/drop in-drop out co-op, you're certainly going to go "meh".

And judging by your impressions, I doubt it's going to change for you, so it may not be what you're looking for. The hype is entirely justified, IMO. I had ZERO interest in this and had it preordered for my son. Then I find I can't stop playing it, personally. And that's WITHOUT the whole Crucible thing, which is where competitive multiplayer happens. You get Vanguard or Crucible points, gather enough of those, and trade the marks for big gear in the full version.

The whole pull is the character and loot/ability progression aspect more than the minute to minute aim-and-shoot mechanic.

[Spooky]

Thanks for the explanation Terry. I was feeling the same as Teal about it. I don't think I'm much of a "character and loot/ability progression" gamer. Maybe this one will change my mind...?

I played the Beta for 15-20 min and wasn't understanding the hype.

[TCrouch]

If you're not much of a progression type player (this is much more common in MMO's, so it's understandable), it likely will not suddenly grow on you in a big "Ah hah!!!" moment.

I think what's impressive is I'm an MMO gamer coming to an action game. It's like they threw some skill-based shooting into my favorite genre. For somebody who doesn't play MMO's, it likely won't register how impressive the tech is for something like this. Everybody's sending data back and forth to the server in real time, and almost all MMO's have a big delay to them, or they use engines that have area-of-effect attacks so that even if you have some lag, you can still hit stuff.

Not this. This is pinpoint, zero-lag, action gameplay in an MMO environment. That, to me, is what makes it amazing. Much like the FPS genre was absent on consoles until Bungie showed developers how a controller could work properly, the true "action MMO" game is still MIA on consoles. This changes the landscape of all of that. 5 or 10 years from now, there are going to be a dozen games that borrow heavily from this, and always-online persistent shooters with a lot of gear and character development will just be expected.

[Teal]

I did the 'devil mech' mission, and it sure took a helluva long time to kill that SOB. But I finally had a few other guys jump into the game and help, and have begun to sort of understand the 'feels like Halo AND Borderlands' thing. I have never played anything resembling an MMO (unless you count Test Drive: Unlimited...lol), so I don't have any grasp of the 'tech' you mention. So no, it doesn't look terribly groundbreaking. That said, I never said it wasn't fun, or seamless, or any of that. It's a good amount of fun. I just didn't understand why there was so much hype surrounding what, to me, essentially, is an always online shooter that feels like the offspring of Master Chief and Handsome Jack.

Given your explanation, Terry, I guess I won't. But the game's still fun. I like the progression stuff, and the loot stuff, to a degree. I like getting new weapons and trying them out. So it does that really well.

[tjung0831]

This game was one of the main reasons for me moving on to the next generation console. I think I preordered it back in February and now I just went ahead and already purchased from PSN. Halo was always my favorite shooter so this is a no brainer for me. This will be the one game that I will be able to play with my sons and we all have a good time.
There is a lot of hype because it's Bungie and I think they have really delivered with this one. It looks to be a great franchise going forward.

[TCrouch]

I did the 'devil mech' mission, and it sure took a helluva long time to kill that SOB. But I finally had a few other guys jump into the game and help, and have begun to sort of understand the 'feels like Halo AND Borderlands' thing. I have never played anything resembling an MMO (unless you count Test Drive: Unlimited...lol), so I don't have any grasp of the 'tech' you mention. So no, it doesn't look terribly groundbreaking.

That is the biggest reason. We are just NOW seeing MMO's on PC that use action-oriented engines--I'm talking Elder Scrolls Online in April and Wildstar in June, and some things like TERA last year or year before to a certain extent. And in those games, Wildstar uses the 'hit the big patch of ground, as long as the enemy is in that area, you hit" model, and it works. Elder Scrolls uses actual hit boxes, and it has some latency issues where stuff can happen that doesn't match up with the timing you see on screen, but it works to some degree. The game is still fun. TERA uses a 1-click, 1-hit mechanic along with the Area-of-effect attacks.

But MMO's before this latest batch used the "World of Warcraft" formula--you select a target, hit an "autoattack" key and then mix in special attacks like a quasi-real time system on top of a turn based core engine, as everything happened on timers.

So the groundbreaking part is the fact that Bungie is skipping all of that and making a highly skill-based MMO with the most real-time engine I've ever seen on a project this big---on consoles. I know it sounds like I'm beating a dead horse here, and I know you already get it. But I cannot convey properly how impressive the tech is under the hood on this thing.

We provide a service here at work that we may have a couple of thousand people logged into at once, and it gets bogged down and requires server restarts and has cache issues sometimes. I can't even fathom the servers required to run a game like Destiny with MILLIONS logged in. I think that's what has me frothing at the mouth so much for the tech and "groundbreaking" hype stuff. It's just staggering to contemplate, what they must have invested.

Because this is a BETA, and it's more polished than 90% of the MMO's at launch. I haven't seen massive lag spikes, I haven't had random disconnects. None of the frustrating "Beta period for upcoming online game". It's just rock-solid.

But Halo meets Borderlands is exactly what the actual gameplay is, if Borderlands included armor upgrades and had weapon customization and deeper skill customization, really.

[Teal]

Based on that description of MMO's up to this point...I'd say there's a good reason why I didn't play 'em. lol

But this? This I like.

And really, seriously...the visuals on the 360 are pretty damn amazing. Everything runs at a good clip, and the presentation gives a 'bigness' and presence to things that are supposed to be...well, big and present.

Seems like they copied the movement of the aliens from Halo-the dodging and all. I like the 'double jump' thing, too. The guns are tight-really well done, and they sound amazing. I'm finding myself gravitating to the beta when I turn the machine on, and that's a good sign.

It's not something I'd buy a new system for, but I'd definitely buy the game for my current system.

I didn't want to give off the impression that I didn't like it, or that I wasn't impressed with it. I do, and I am. And now, at least by way of explanation, I understand that the hulaballoo was about...

EDIT: Oh, and the 'hub' requires that another game be brought into the comparison stew...Mass Effect. That's the feeling I get in the tower.

[tjung0831]

Based on that description of MMO's up to this point...I'd say there's a good reason why I didn't play 'em. lol

But this? This I like.

And really, seriously...the visuals on the 360 are pretty damn amazing. Everything runs at a good clip, and the presentation gives a 'bigness' and presence to things that are supposed to be...well, big and present.

Seems like they copied the movement of the aliens from Halo-the dodging and all. I like the 'double jump' thing, too. The guns are tight-really well done, and they sound amazing. I'm finding myself gravitating to the beta when I turn the machine on, and that's a good sign.

It's not something I'd buy a new system for, but I'd definitely buy the game for my current system.

I didn't want to give off the impression that I didn't like it, or that I wasn't impressed with it. I do, and I am. And now, at least by way of explanation, I understand that the hulaballoo was about...

EDIT: Oh, and the 'hub' requires that another game be brought into the comparison stew...Mass Effect. That's the feeling I get in the tower.

I mentioned that as well on the first page!

[TCrouch]

2PM "Log in to stress test!" started...

..and they unlocked the moon. No idea if they did anything about the cap yet. New story mission unlocked, at least.

[tjung0831]

2PM "Log in to stress test!" started...

..and they unlocked the moon. No idea if they did anything about the cap yet. New story mission unlocked, at least.

just beat it....it was awesome!

[Pete1210]

From Bungie's Community Manager ("Urk"), posting on NeoGAF forums:

Destiny's pretty big. It's the biggest game we've ever made, by far, and we're sort of known for making games you can play for months, years, and even decades if you're a little bit...dedicated.

With Destiny, we're looking to exceed what we've done before, not just in terms of scale - the Moon is our smallest destination - but in terms of scope and breadth of activities. That's true for day one, as you expect, but it also means we want Destiny to have super long legs.

If we're fortunate enough to have you playing months after launch, you still find lots of compelling stuff to do. That will manifest itself in a myriad of ways, from straight up content to cool activities we've yet to show off.

We think we did a decent job supporting Halo, post launch, but we were only ever able to cater to the competitive set. That left a lot of players out in the cold. That made a lot of the team grumpy. We wanted to do better. So, Destiny is philosophically built support every type of player, and all modes with ongoing activities and events. We look at it quite a bit like television programming, as opposed to a singular film, as we had in the past. We think it's gonna be pretty great, but we wanted to test out a bunch of our new stuff with Beta, to make sure we could flip knobs and levers live, reacting and responding with lots (and, ho boy, did we see LOTS) of players online and playing.

Beta was water wings. Level 8 is nothing. You barely scratched the surface, and it seems like some folks had fun with what was there.

If you did, good news. More soon.