Bungie, Let me preface this by saying that I greatly admire your previous work. I'm not sure if I would have ever picked up FPS gaming if I had not been so enamored with Halo: CE. My dad bought it for me as a Christmas present when I was 13 along with the original monstrosity of an Xbox. I didn't ask for it. I had no idea what it was. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the most fun games I had enjoyed up until that point in my young life. There is one particular reason though, above all else, that I will never, ever forget my first playthrough in that game. My house was dark and I was home alone. Up until this point, I had been happily shooting and being shot by aliens of various makes and models. That did not prepare me for the Flood. I was an imaginative 13 year old so, naturally, my initial encounter with your zombie-like walking nightmares scared the crap out of me. It was such an amazing manifestation of game design. Everything, from the music to the skittering sound of the infection pods and Jenkins' helmet tape, came together to create one of the most memorable gaming adventures I've ever had. If I'm being honest, this is really what began my love affair with video games in earnest. Before that, I used to just play a little here and there and it mostly didn't keep my attention for long. You showed me that games could be every single bit as engaging and immersive as the books that I read and loved as a child. Everything I'm about to say, please remember, I have nothing but respect and admiration for your studio. Hell, I even listed Jason Jones as my personal industry hero in a college essay (I'm getting a BS in VG Design). Moving on: This is feedback for Destiny. Deej says you guys are listening and I think I have played the game enough now to give some honest insight into what can make this franchise better going forward. 1) [b]Story.[/b] The Grimoire are nice additions to the game, but, as I know people have beaten to death already, they can't be the sole means of learning about the game world. If there is even a small chance that you take anything I say in this to heart, please, remember this: story, for some players, is EVERYTHING. Story is what fully immerses me in a game world. If I don't feel like I'm playing a part in a game world, I don't usually get all that involved or attached. The main reason I keep playing Destiny is that I have fabricated a flimsy mental attachment to the game world wherein I pretend that I am affecting the fictional universe I play in. I make believe that some day, it will matter that I have killed 10,000 Fallen or 200 Ogres because [i]those things would matter if this game was made to emulate the scenario we are actually playing in[/i]. I know not everyone plays games for the same reason I do, but there are many players that anxiously waited for the next Halo game just to see what happens next to Chief and Cortana. I do have a suggestion for adding Grimoire to the game in a more organic way. Remember how you guys had terminals in Halo 3? Fallout 3 had computer terminals that you could access in the game world to interact with it in meaningful ways. Now imagine that at least part of the lore in the game came from gleaning bits of data found in computer terminals. You can take it one step further and have those terminals that can be interacted with a randomly occurring feature or locked behind a progression based ability to interact with the terminals, kind of like lock picking in Skyrim or the Science skill in Fallout. Perhaps your Ghost must be a certain level to interact with terminals in the game world and you level your Ghost up by doing something like buying him upgrades or making him scan random junk. Destiny doesn't do a great job of making me hunger for more than a new gun. Perhaps you meant for it to be that way. I won't pretend to know, but my suggestion is that you do everything you can to make me anxious to find out what happens next. 2) [b]PVP.[/b] Where oh where to begin? a. Too few maps. I think that's enough said on that. b. The netcode is the worst I've ever seen in a video game. Hands down, no exaggeration. I have had it take 6 or 7 seconds, not super rarely either, for a kill to register on my screen after the kill shot was delivered. Melee trade kills, damage dealt and then reverted. It's been challenging to play more than a few matches at a time, if at all. c. Too few vehicles. I miss the days of Banshees overhead, tanks quaking the ground, Warthog sprees, and that other stupid purple thing that can go to hell because it ran me over all the time and I always died when I tried to use it. Perhaps I am a bit biased. I have been playing BF4 for the last year because Halo 4 didn't hold my interest and I have never been able to stomach CoD. Maybe vehicles do not fit in with your design goals. I will say this: mastering a difficult vehicle in Halo or Battlefield is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done in an online PVP game. d. There is no progression system of any kind for the Crucible. At the very least, there should be a weekly and/or daily leaderboard. Bare minimum. There are no ranks to be attained, no real rewards other than the pure randomness of RNG, and, in my mind, zero incentive to even try to deal with the netcode. It feels shallow and tacked on rather than a fleshed out and planned mode that has been lovingly crafted. e. There is no voice chat for your team. I don't need or want to trash talk the enemy team, but I'd sure like to be able to make callouts to let my teammates know danger is inbound. 3) [b]Interplay.[/b] One of the biggest things that I absolutely adore about Borderlands 2 is that there are skills in the game that can be combined with skills of another class to the benefit of both players. The best example of that I can give is this: The Siren and the Psycho. The Psycho can instantly revive you by putting himself in your downed state and the Siren can revive from any distance by using her Phaselock ability. So, if the Siren goes down, the Psycho can instantly pick her up and she can in turn instantly pick him back up. There is far too little of this in Destiny. The closest I have come to actually seeing anything like this in action is using the Bladedancer's Razor's Edge with the Defender's Ward of Dawn. I would like to see more opportunities in this game to play skills off of one another. I think it could work wonders towards people enjoying playing the game with others to a much higher degree. 4) [b]Randomness.[/b] You already have RNG in the loot system and I'm not against that in general. I think it is good for a game's longevity but I also think you would do well to take things a step further. While not all the content in the game should or could be generated this way, Destiny would benefit dramatically from a randomly generating mission and objective. That is the one thing about Diablo 1 that makes me still play it every once in a while. Every single time I play the game, it is different. It's always exciting to see if I will get the Chamber of Bone or King Leoric's Tomb. I'm not suggesting that all of Destiny should be done this way. You guys can create higher quality missions by hand crafting them. However, it would go a long way towards keeping highest level players happy if there was some way to play an RNG mission, even if it was only once daily, at the end game. In addition to these overall concept ideas I have some more specific things I'd like to say about Destiny: -Why only four shaders at Eva Lavonte? -Why can I not get a new Ghost Shell? -Why do I have to open my slow loading menu to use an ammo synthesis? -Why can't I purchase a new sight from the Gunsmith for my favorite weapons? I might use the same sight for every gun if I could do that and that would in no way negatively impact my desire to attain new guns or continue to play the game. -The Gunsmith is worthless for post level 20 characters apart from buying ammo synthesis. -There are little to no desirable items available for purchase in the Tower for me to spend my Glimmer on. Since I started two new characters and have been buying some things for them, I am safely away from the glimmer cap. However, before that I was buying ammo synthesis just to stay away from the cap. -I have the Thorn. I have the Invective. I have the Bad Juju. The past two times I got the Vanguard Missive, it has given me those same bounties again. For the sake of my sanity, if an Exotic bounty rolls that I have already done and still possess the reward for, don't even show me the bounty. It would be better if I didn't know. -This one is really subjective, but I need to say it anyway. I have not seen even 1 ship in the game that was aesthetically appealing to me. Also, every single one I find randomly is brown. I don't get that. -While we are on the topic of ships, *facepalm*. I mean no disrespect, but I cannot understand why the inclusion of ships are basically a clever way of saying "pick your loading screen". I'm sure there is some kind of reason, but it just seemed so natural to assume that ships would be usable in some way. As soon as I learned that there would be ships in the game, I looked forward to using them. Thank you for reading this if you did. That about sums it all up for me.