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Edited by Razzupaltuff: 11/28/2014 1:33:05 PM
9

Where Destiny fails

This thread is a (incomplete) list of where Destiny fails in a way or another, and of course expresses my personal opinion. A bit about myself before I start: I am over 50, have been working as software dev for 25 years, and now work as software project manager. I have been maintaining and modernizing an old 3D shooter game from the beginnings of 3D shooters for around 10 years, and have been contributing to various other open source projects. I have also been playing computer games for over 30 years. I therefore tend to believe that I am having a certain competence in the areas I will be talking about here. I am not a native English speaker, so please forebear with me if I do not satisfy your standards of proper English language and grammar at all times here. :-) [b]TL;DR: Destiny doesn't even deserve the rating "mediocre". It is a plain bad, repetitive, bug ridden game the developer of wich rules over the game and his customers with an incredibly arrogant high-handedness.[/b]

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  • By allowing u to play?

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  • I agree with you in some aspects of your posts but, Hey bro, don't you realize that almost all employees from bungie, are doing shopping right now? Nobody is reading this right now.

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    • Edited by Razzupaltuff: 11/28/2014 1:18:46 PM
      [b]Community Handling[/b] It cannot be denied anymore that Bungie has no interest in not just listening too, but also acting upon valid feedback and justified requests made by Destiny players. Bungie is using a certain forum account named "Deej" to occasionally reply to player posts here. I have also heard Deej in an internet interview done by the Guardian Radio a while ago. The only purpose Deej has is to pour oil on troubled waters. I have seen and heard a lot of statements that have been made with that account here. None of it contains any substantial concession to the players' requests they were made in response too. The only purpose Deej is pursuing here is crowd control. Deej is nothing but Bungie's fig leaf for a community support that doesn't really exist. Looking at Bungie's solo play policy and community handling, it has become abundantly clear that the people at Bungie believe they are having a God given right to force their will, their concept of how this game has to be played on every player, them willing or not. The term coming to my mind in regard of such an attitude is hubris.

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      • Edited by Razzupaltuff: 11/28/2014 1:18:20 PM
        [b]Game Background[/b] [u]Robots (Exos) that have a sex[/u] Why would robots have two sexes and male and female physical attributes? Robots do not reproduce by means of sexual intercourse. [u]Outdated Technology[/u] Why are there combustion engine car wrecks on Venus? Toyota is already selling fuel cell cars. The automotive industry is working on fully autonomously driving vehicles - they are just a few years away. I thought all the stuff on the Moon and the other Planets was created during a "golden age of Human technology"? [u]Outdated Planet Design[/u] Why is Mars a desert and Venus a jungle? Why does the Moon have an atmosphere? This is what people had believed them to be 100 or 200 years ago. Today we know that Venus is not a jungle, it is an insanely hot place with a poisonous high pressure atmosphere. Terraforming? How would "terraforming" give the Moon enough mass to create a gravity that is sufficient to hold back a volatile atmosphere humans can breathe? How can "terraforming" cool down the Venus to make it have water and jungles? The temperature on Venus is a result of its distance to the Sun. [u]Powerless Enemy Races[/u] The Kabal blow up entire moons and planets. The Vex can change the course of time. The Hive have a sword that consumes the Guardian's light and is capable of destroying them in the hundreds in no time. The four enemy races each more or less own a complete celestial body. Mankind just has a single city, protected by a huge, silent, damaged, white space orb. How come city, traveller, and Earth do even still exist? Ofc this is just fiction, but if it was good fiction it would have consistency and credibility and not more childish, ridiculous, tacked together trash like that. [u]Grimoire[/u] Just so much: Reading that psychedelic dribble some terribly bad author has scribbled together on the Grimoire cards in the absolutely absurd assumption he would be writing some really cool, meaningful science/mystery stuff there makes me cringe. There is an incredible lot of ridiculous, childish rubbish in this game. [u]Story[/u] Enough has been said already about the lack of a real story in Destiny. Even what is present right now is pathetic, lack luster and badly written, just like the Grimoire.

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      • Edited by Razzupaltuff: 11/28/2014 12:53:05 PM
        [b]Implementation[/b] The best that can be said about Destiny is that it is a solid shooter with very good shooter mechanics. The shooter part of this game is fun to play. Unfortunately, that's about it. Destiny contains numerous flaws and bugs that make it hard to play in various scenarios. [u]Networking[/u] First of all, Bungie fails to provide robust networking to this game. I have never experienced a game where the networking so consistently fails as Destiny. My internet connection is rock solid. I as good as never have any problems with other online games I am playing. With Destiny, I am experiencing several network failures a day. Other people cannot play Destiny at all because their connection to one of the network services Destiny requires constantly fails. This is not a problem of internet infrastructure or connection: This is a problem of Bungie's server setup and networking implementation. My guess is that Destiny's networking has a tremendous amount of probably DRM related overhead that is error prone and a reason for the constant failure of Destiny's networking. [u]Physics[/u] Destiny's the physics implementation is generic and not well tuned to the game. The most prominent example is where players bounce of surfaces when jumping at them, like the surfaces or the players were made of rubber. When a player is using boost, he is driven by thrust. That thrust should make him glide up sloped surfaces, and not bounce back like a rubber ball from a concrete wall. This is showing an amateurish and lackluster implementation of Destiny's physics features. [u]Raid Glitches[/u] There is a long list of known raid glitches. While Bungie is eager to close every loophole that allows players to play Destiny differently than Bungie wants, they apparently couldn't care less about what makes it impossible for players to play their game even the way Bungie wants it. Instead, Bungie implements features of questionable use like random team chat and trick sparrows. Again, this is saying a lot about Bungie's attitude.

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      • Edited by Razzupaltuff: 11/28/2014 1:32:25 PM
        [b]Gameplay[/b] [u]Gameworld[/u] In their 2013 vidoc, Bungie talked about Destiny offering a "rich, vivid game world players love to return to". Today, Destiny could hardly be less of that. Compared to other good open world RPG games, the game world of Destiny is small, cramped and lifeless - a graphically beautiful, but uninspiring backdrop for what Destiny really is: An endless grinding chore, requiring you to do the same few, simple, boring as hell tasks ("bounties") over and over to maximize yet another exchangeable weapon you got. [u]Weapons[/u] I have played this game a lot (which makes me the typical victim of Destiny's abuse of the brain's reward mechanisms - I am well aware of that ;p). In the course of that I have acquired, maxed and tried a lot of legendary and quite a few exotic weapons. In the end I have found myself using the same weapon combo at least 95% of the time, with two or three weapons thrown in at special occasions. This makes me inclined to believe that most weapons aren't worth the grind; Maxing them is a waste of time, which is intended by the game designers for lack of real content. Bungie also has made it quite time consuming to get the upgrade materials you need to max out a weapon: Not only do you have to farm materials for extended periods of time, you also need special ingredients for the final upgrades in the form of ascendent energy. The same is true for armor, where you need ascendent shards in the end. You only get two pieces of ascendent material per day and character when playing a level 28 heroic daily mission. You have no control whether you will get shards or energy though, and you can get stuck for quite a while until you have your gear maxed out - only to find out it doesn't make a difference and you will have yet another gun that rusts in your (soon too small) vault. What Bungie basically did here was to replace content with endless chores, a worthless upgrade being the only reward our brains are fed with, keeping us forever hungry for the ever same stimulus that will get us nowhere really in this game. The only other source for ascendent materials are raids, and looking at the numbers of people who have participated and who have actually finished the raid, you will notice that only a fraction of the Destiny players had been lucky enough to actually come to enjoy Destiny's "endgame content". [u]PvP Bias[/u] For whatever reason, Bungie has a clear PvP bias. Weapons are getting nerfed whenever Bungie comes to the conclusion they would be imbalanced for PvP play. Very obviously, Bungie couldn't care less about the people mainly using and enjoying those guns in PvE play. Very obviously, Bungie also cannot be bothered to implement a rather simple solution for this dilemma, shown by other (better) MMOs before, and that is to implement separate weapon stats and perks for PvP and PvE. This again would be a rather easy to implement thing and would require a small patch. [u]Point Defense[/u] The only mission element Bungie has found to add challenge to a mission is point defense. This is just pathetic. So many other games have shown so many alternatives to that. Here's just one: Escort missions. More have been proposed in this forum. [u]Artificial Difficulty[/u] Apart from point defense being the only challenge Bungie's mission designers have been competent enough to come up with, they have unnecessarily raised the difficulty bar on already very difficult mission even more, e.g. by putting the team back to orbit during nightfall missions when all players of the team have died. Nightfalls strikes already have a pretty high level of difficulty due to their various modifiers. Forcing the team to replay the entire strike when they die is just annoying. I understand that some people feel this is a part of the challenge, but my opinion is that Bungie used this as a means to increase the challenge for lack of better options. [u]Exotic Weapons[/u] This has led to many, if not most exotic weapons not being worth the attribute. An exotic weapon should be a weapon that, while limited in some way, should be vastly OP in a certain area of application. I only know two exotic weapons that fulfill such a requirement: The Icebreaker and the Gjallarhorn. All other exotic weapons have limitations (nerfs) that hit them so hard that they make them less useful than a good, maxed legendary weapon of the same class, be it the Red Death or Bad Juju with their too small ammo clips, the Pocket Finity with its castrated battery and either insane instability or pathetic range, or the Thunderlord that (despite what the lightning round perk's description says) does not get more accurate the longer the trigger is held, etc. etc. Destiny's game design is corrupted and full of failure where ever you look.

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      • Edited by Razzupaltuff: 11/28/2014 1:27:37 PM
        [b]Interface[/b] Destiny's game interface is lackluster, and despite fixing that being a simple task, Bungie refuses to do so (which takes me back to the arrogance Bungie is displaying in their attitude towards their customers). [u]In-game chat[/u] The random team chat is a feature that I do not perceive as being widely used, and one that I never missed. I cannot see how you would need it, be in during a strike, nor in the tower. Yet, Bungie chose to implement that instead of fixing the dire issues Destiny has e.g. in the raid. Something I would find very useful would be to send text messages to other players (friends) who are online, because I cannot reach them via voice chat unless they are in the same tower instance as I, or already are in a fireteam together with me. This is something Bungie did not deem worthy their apparently rather limited resources. [u]Vault[/u] It would be a piece of cake to increase vault space (and make the vault better structured in the process). Instead, Bungie is giving us a new sparrow we can do tricks with to "satisfy our desire to express ourselves". This is so ridiculous that it is outright stupid. Personally, I give a flying f*ck about being able to do summersaults or barrel rolls with my sparrow. I'd rather have a better, bug free game. [u]Music Volume Controls[/u] There is no way to tone down music volume in Destiny by means of an external mixer, since music and game audio get mixed together before being streamed to the console's audio hardware. Game audio often is obnoxiously loud to the extent of drowing game sound and fireteam cheat during boss battles. You can decrease the overall game volume in favor of chat volume, but that is not a real solution, because the music will still drown out other game sounds. Players want to hear fireteam chat and important game sounds helping them to localize enemies. There also is a player group that simply doesn't like to constantly hear music, or hear music while playing a shooter game. Bungie stubbornly refuses to that group of players, although that would be an easy to implement and small patch to the game. I can only interpret this as yet another expression of the arrogance Bungie believes they can rule over their customers and force them into everything they deem suitable for Destiny. Bungie is patronizing the Destiny players in a really bad way here once again.

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        • [b]Solo play[/b] ''Venture out alone or join up with friends. The choice is yours.'' This is a statement made in an official Destiny video created by Bungie. Right now, Bungie is trying to make it impossible for solo players to play what Bungie calls "endgame content", specifically weekly heroic and nightfall strikes. The reaction of Deej, official Destiny community manager, in these forums is as follows: [quote][i]We don't do this to be mean. I'm sorry you feel that way... Sincerely. I see a lot of these threads, and I'm never quite certain of what to say. Bungie didn't create Destiny to punish solo gamers. We set out to create an experience that would bring gamers together. Many of the challenges you'll find in the Director are invitations to parties. Like many activities you encounter in your real life, there are engagements in Destiny that are designed for teams. I'm a highly social gamer. It's why I play games. I'd love to tell you that finding the right group of people and working with them to take down the fiercest enemies in the game is a total rush. We slope the floor to those experiences because we think they're amazing. What can I do to help you enjoy more of Destiny? You seem like a reasonable guy. I'd bring you on a Raid myself, but I can't see your linked profile to determine if you're ready. I think the best I can tell you is that I am aware of your pain as a person who does not want to play with other people. I will keep making suggestions on your behalf.[/i][/quote] Basically Deej tells us here that Bungie will not change their policy of trying to force players into playing in teams and making endgame challenges impossible to complete for solo players. Bungie is forcing their will regarding playing Destiny on all players here. In my opinion, that is an incredible border violation of the personal sovereignty of the Destiny players (particularly the adult ones). Add to this that every player has paid the full price for Destiny. Now, Bungie is actively trying to deny solo players access to parts of the game content they have paid for and until recently could make use of. Unlike with raids, this exclusion is not forced by basic game mechanics that would require a team of people to work together; It is an artificial limitation put into the game as an afterthought. In my opinion, this at least borders fraud.

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        • Bump!

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