Thanks for that feedback. I guess I don’t get the guns yet. There’s this shotgun they gave me and it doesn’t do jack shit from 20m away. Like, nothing. Or next to nothing, maybe. I think it took a little sliver of health out of the Legionary. But then at 5m it kills them in one shot. That’s really not how shotguns work. It doesn’t feel right to me either, just as a gameplay construct. My favorite gun so far is probably the one that you have to hold down the fire button for and it just fires faster and faster the longer you hold it. But even that doesn’t really make me say, wow, this is some nu-DOOM level shit.
Also the enemies don’t react to the gunfire in a satisfying way. I like their stumble, that’s okay. But their death animations just don’t pop. Another thing that Warframe does better. There I feel something every time I make a kill, as it should be.
But hell, it’s rough judging a game on such a limited Demo/Beta. I really, really don’t want to be unfair to it. I feel like that’s one of the “cool” things now, to hate on Destiny (2). But it might just not be for me. Which is a shame because it looks real pretty, I could probably play it with SB people and I could get used to the sleekness of the design. Visually and gameplay wise, as @rye said. We’ll see, gonna play some more now.
Btw., what’s up with the story in the Destiny 2 beta? Ghaul makes some kinda construct that envelops the moon and then says “say goodbye to your light, your light is gone” etc. That… was not a sun. That was a moon. Pretty sure about that. So… idk? What was that thing?
The Traveler is the floating ball in the sky that grants guardians capital-L Light, which granted all of the abilities had throughout Destiny 1. In the lore, the Traveler had originally considered blessing the Cabal with light, but then changed its mind and decided to go with humans instead. Ghaul is pissed and in this game he tries to reclaim what he thinks humanity has taken from him. Wish I could say more but Destiny 1’s story development was a joke and I never read the Grimoire so that’s all I know after 960 hours of play.
I get home in like 90 min so I will be able to answer most of your other inquiries if no one else gets to it before I do.
Light is also what powers your floating buddy Ghost, who rezzes you when you die. Also, in D1 you were rezzed by Ghost after being dead for a long time.
I’m not sure if this will factor into the actual resurrection mechanics, but you see your Light separate from your body in that scene.
Shotguns are the way they are because of how dominant they were in Destiny 1 multiplayer. From the second expansion onwards, shotguns with high range stats that can be stacked atop high range perks were easily accessible to the majority of players, and they were so good that there was no reason to use any other special weapon in PvP unless you were a sniping god.
Unfortunately, instead of nerfing the “high range shotgun” archetype specifically, most of the nerfs have impacted shotguns globally, so anything other than a high range shotgun with a decent roll is unviable in basically any activity.
I also feel put out with Destiny because it’s sparse where other games aren’t. I was expecting Borderlands but not ugly and with good weapons, but Destiny’s much more like an MMO.
I think Bungie has been struggling to make PvP and PvE use the same balance and mechanics. Like Sakurina said, because shotguns dominated PvP, you might not get an unreservedly powerful one in PvE. They obviously think the consistency across modes is important, but it introduced compromises I don’t like. In Halo, the encounter design gives you a power weapon and invites you to use it on the spot. Destiny rarely does this, and even in the co-op activities it’s stingy with ammo for the heavies you already have.
Yeah, they had better put stuff like this throughout the game. There’s a reason the only story mission I can remember from vanilla is The One Where You Get A Sword.
I’m hopeful because Homecoming gives you an exotic right then and there and it ruled.
there’s an encounter where you drag engine parts across a battlefield to fix up and commandeer a fallen siege engine, then ride the thing off a cliff while the game rewards you with possibly the cheesiest guitar solo i’ve ever heard
The sad thing is that no matter how great the raids are, if people think the campaign is meh from the beta, they might never get to play a raid.
I said on the Bungie podcast that Rise of Iron was the “best” time to jump into experiencing Destiny raids. You could grab Destiny: the Collection, use the Spark of Light, and already be at TTK’s level cap, letting you play 3 D1 raids out of the box, and you’re within grinding range of being able to play Wrath of the Machine. No one I pitched on this actually bothered though.
Raids in this game are so good that every other piece of content in the game could suck and it would still be worth the price of admission. How do you get people to take that leap of faith though? How good does the rest of the game need to be to keep people going until they are raid ready?
I’ve watched full playthroughs of Vault and King’s Fall and I find the prospect of doing a raid pretty unappealing relative to the work Bungie expects me to put in. My least favorite parts of Destiny are the bosses, which take an incredibly long time to kill relative to any action game, loot or no. They’re straight up MMO bosses. Combine that with performing in a team with restricted spawning and tricky platforming.
I had horrible experiences doing the vidmaster achievements for ODST despite finishing Halo games on legendary by myself because of the time/social pressures inherent to such an activity. It’s completely exhausting.
I understand that with a patient group this is less of an issue. I have no doubt that y’all would be such a group. But please consider that some people like Destiny but want lower stakes. The original concept about various kinds of activities for different tastes is important to making Destiny work IMO. If you already “know” (i.e. have a good guess) that you won’t like the raid based on watching the raids and participating in what were arguably ancestors of the raid, Rise of Iron wasn’t a good deal.
besides, if you do like the raids it’s still important to have compelling stuff to do when you don’t quite have an hour free or five destiny buddies online, like an mmo but not (…necessarily) so much of a timesink is a big part of the pitch
i’m still quite optimistic that quality encounter design will show up outside the raids this time and that the beta was pretty conservative because, well, look at the original destiny beta
I wasn’t referring to you specifically. There are people I know who would absolutely enjoy raids in Destiny if they had the chance to experience them, but they bail before they can even get to it. The raids are good independently of the structure they are a part of, and part of me wishes they would just put the 4 D1 raids on a disc with 4-5 preset loadouts to choose from. Wrath is the best D1 raid in my opinion, but there is no way I’m getting anyone who hasn’t played it yet to play it because telling them to grind from 335 to 380 light in a dead game is a really hard sell.
I would add that a lot of the best aspects of raiding are intangible and therefore do not translate well to video playthroughs. It’s fun to enter a raid blind and try to solve the encounters yourself. The sense of accomplishment you get is much greater than if you’re just in an LFG group trying to reenact whatever the guides say you should be doing. I’ve bonded way more with people in our silly Destiny clan than I have with people I’ve known and interacted with for years offline because we’ve been through so much shit together in raids (especially the last two in my case).
(That said, it’s totally cool if you still think raids aren’t for you.)
