Topic: The Destiny thread.

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The thing about… the Destiny Alpha, First Look.

Here's another writeup of mine, this time focusing on my experience with the Alpha of Destiny I luckily got into, I was able to spend several hours online and experience a wealth of it's features and general feel. I'll - as always - try to look at the things at hand deeply and maybe from another point of view than most official previews or the marketing staff of bungie. As this is going to be a long writeup again and I know some of you (no offense) might not have the patience or interest to plow through it all, my verdict comes first:

Go pre-order destiny if you're just remotely interested in sci-fi and shooters, if you like the Halo series and/or if you liked borderlands. Full recommendation, even though some things are not as smooth as I expected. I can't wait to play the full game.

Let me start by telling you how this game is built, how the world is weaved together and let me get rid of some wrong assumptions about the game. The main wrong assumption I sometimes read on the forums is that this game is open world. It is not. It is also not an MMORPG. To sum it up, it would be wisest to call it „Borderlands, that controls and plays like Halo and lulls you in like Diablo III". There is no open world where you run around with your mates. There is, however, a clever system of „places" and „destinations" (planets and on those planets different regions) you can travel to. „Travel to" doesn't mean you're flying there with your spacecraft, rather than a loading screen that shows your spacecraft flying there. It's a nice touch but people who thought this might be „I jump into my spaceship and fly from planet A to planet B" - sorry. It's nothing like that (check out „No Man's Sky" for that kind of sensation). If that system bothers you or destroys your anticipation for the game is up to you, I personally noted that I don't care at all because the general system and structure of the game is cleverly made.

You have a central hub area with vendors a vault for your stuff and several people to interact with for messages, quests and bounties. It all feels nice and you can interact with other players there. It all goes out from there though, you typically go into orbit with your spacecraft (again, no flying yourself) and select on a planet's chart where you want to go. Depending on the quests you picked up or what you decide yourself to do, you select - for example - earth and then get a planetary view with it's destinations that are open for you. You also get a small description of what's going on down there and you decide a destination to set out to. Additionally - and I love that feature - you can replay any before visited areas and up the difficulty level for an extra challenge and better loot and experience rewards. Also the areas are HUGE and in there you can run around cooperatively with your friends or randomly matched strangers, the teamplay usually works well even without communication with total strangers since the interface and controls are all really smooth (Bungie's experience shines here) and everything works well. Also in such areas with a given mission, side-missions can occur. Stuff like a boss just walking into your area which you can then choose to fight and kill. It keeps things fresh and I like it.

Since the areas are so large, you can summon a „Star Wars'y speeder-bike" kind of thing to get you around quicker, which is a nice touch. The graphics and the atmosphere in this game are stunning. I'd describe them as truly next gen, even though I noticed that Destiny looked a bit better in early trailers and the framerate is more near 30 than 60. Still, it's a wonderfully pretty game, the kind of game where, if you look at just ONE model of something, you might think „mmh okay nice, but not stunning" but if you look at a whole scenery with all weapon effects going off and day/night cycle, etc… it looks truly stunning, a real looker.

The gunplay and the controls are typically Bungie. If you ever played Halo you know what to expect - and that's a compliment, the controls are as crips and spot on as can be and the weapon diversity is great and well balanced, whatever weapon you choose to use, it feels spot on and just like what you would expect. The sights and scopes of the weapons are all well realized, blend wonderfully into the universe and are an actual, true help aiming. Most enemies have different hit-zones and react differently to certain kinds of weapons, so some tactic is needed here. Speaking of tactics, the boss fights are spectacular. The very first boss you encounter gave quite a few people trouble beating him - judging from what I've read on the forums - but that guy is piece of cake compared to other boss fights wich can take up to 15 minutes. All your knowledge of shooters is asked here. Stay in cover, regenerate your health, try to hit certain bodyparts, use certain weapons for a better effect, get into optimal shooting position relative to your mates playing with you. It's great.

BUT: There is one „but" in that department that - judging from the brief look I got - might not be totally to my liking, still not daunting the whole experience too much, bust still worth mentioning. The classes. It's 3 of them namely Hunter ,Titan and Warlock and they do what you'd expect, the Titan being the toughest wearing heavy armor, being some kind of tank, the Hunter being the roguesque sharp-shooter, revolver and knife guy and the Warlock being some kind of gun-toting battle mage. All nice and well so far, but - I might be wrong about this looking at the late game - the classes don't make much difference to each other in my taste. Basicly the difference is the looks, the armor they wear, the grenade type they have, the way they jump and one special ability and a handful of enhancements of aforementioned skills. For example the Hunter has a double jump, an incendiary handgrenade, a knife to stab and later to throw and the ability to pull out a golden revolver single-shotting tough enemies for lots of damage (about 3 times in the beginning). Through armor pieces you can further boost your effectiveness with certain weapon groups, for example faster reload for scout rifles (think M1 Garand with scope). That is all nice and I am sure it develops well over the scope of the game, but when I heard about the skill system, I was expecting something like group heals for a certain class or a more specialized thing, maybe some protection aura or emp-capabilities to shut down cybernetic units for a certain amount of time. Again, the Alpha was limited to Level 8, you could have a look at the whole skill tree though and so far it appears to me that each class has their aforementioned set of abilities and only further improves upon them. Also, it's not like you get skill points and then invest into the skills you think are good, ultimately creating many different kinds of builds all fitting to the liking of their players, no, you earn experience which will be automatically distributed to the skills via usage (throw many grenades to level up your grenade to give it a cluster effect, as hunter for example) and then you have the possibility to click it and it unlocks. Why do they even bother with the click then? You just grow stronger as you gain experience but don't have too much choice about it - that's what I want to say I guess.

Weapons are a different thing, they are vast and abundant available through rewards, drops and loot crates. Sometimes you get a really nice piece that has certain boni and you can always carry 1 primary, 1 secondary and 1 heavy weapon with you, each slot has a little „inventory" where you can store additional weapons (upwards of 5) that can be easily switched in your character's menue, but for fast access, you have 3 weapons, 1 of each category. I like this system a lot, as you can carry everything you need for certain situations with you at any time. Sweet.

There is also competitive multiplayer. Certain destinations in your traveling-map are kind of „conflict zones" where you're fighting against other players. It's basicly a hopper-system like in the halo games where you enter into multiplayer battles of known kinds, like team deathmatch and „capture the areas" and thelike. Nothing new here at all. More advanced players will basicly wipe the floor with you but this also makes it interesting, because you bring all your equipment and skills with you from the „coop" and „single" missions you did, that means there are not all the same weapons or weapon pickups around the map but everyone is a unique fighter. It will be interesting to see how this develops later in the game. I'm not too keen on PVP battles though because the coop experiences are so vast and awesome. Although, there are bounty missions which also require you to delve into PVP for awesome rewards, so I'll make sure to bring the best weapons I could find and level my skills before playing PVP next.

So, I hit Level 8 with my Hunter today and I came away impressed. Even though, like I said, the game is not as much as MMO or RPG as I'd like, it's still the best controlling shooter experience on the PS4 so far. If you like to shoot things, this your game, I just wonder how long this will stay fresh, Borderlands had a plethora of (often meaningless) skills and weapons/grenade types etc… to keep things interesting, Destiny, at this point, doesn't have that wealth diversity. And I grew tired of Borderlands. It's just everything masterly executed in Destiny and many features seem still be to be missing in the Alpha. Im sincerly hoping for even more awesome in the full game. Replaying missions on harder difficulty is mad fun and generally running around with your friends is. I just wish - and this is my biggest and bascily only gripe with the game - that the classes were more diverse, at the end of the day, all of them do damage and throw grenades.

I hope this gave you folks some insights, if you have questions about the Alpha,
ask!

EDIT: Just played 2 hours+ Multiplayer with my maxed out character. EPIC. Lovin' it. It's nothing particulary new here to see but just honed to such excellence. Im loving it and will be playing this as long as the Alpha allows and then all through Beta up until I waste all my life into the full version of this. Lovely!