There are few games I have looked forward to as much as Destiny, however, the alpha has given me significantly more cause for concern, than excitement. [b]What, I can’t play with my spouse? [/b] There is no way for me to play this game with my wife. Since the game is asking for a reasonably high investment of time, much like an MMO, it’s one game that I really would want to play with my wife. Okay, it’s not entirely true to say that it’s impossible to play with my wife, it’s possible, and would require the following: 1) A new gaming set up of a second PS4, TV, and PSN+ subscription. So to play with my wife, we are probably looking at about an investment of $900-1000 This isn’t reasonable and Bungie is AWARE that people who live together like to play together (if the local multiplayer in Halo is to be believed anyway) So, this game specifically prevents siblings, spouses or room-mates that share a PS4 from ever playing together, even if they (like us) have other consoles like PS3s and Xbox 360s etc. This is a very poor position for a multiplayer game. Local Co-Op can’t really happen, so this might be enough to cause me just not to want to have the game since I would never play it enough solo to justify it. [b]In the Alpha, the game world was shallow and mostly dead[/b] While gorgeous looking, the whole world felt like it was all looks and no substance. Doors are all mostly dummies that cannot be interacted with. The environment is invulnerable to all things. The spawning rotation of enemies is so predictable that players around me literally farmed the dropship and mowed down the enemies as they landed. This stretches further still. And while I was playing the game, I kept finding myself comparing it to Borderlands. This may not seem entirely fair, the scale of Destiny is hoping to expand significantly beyond that of Borderlands, but at this point, it’s doing so by stretching itself very thin. Borderlands fills their game world with NPCs, interesting environments that you can interact with, and more. Old Russia is pretty, but very boring. By the way, could the ghost have been voiced any more blandly? I get it’s a robot thing, but when I hear that voice work,… ugh, just not exciting. The directing leaves a lot to be desired. [b]The Experience Point Grind[/b] The missions are bad… they are repetitive, and poorly thought out in terms of adding vibrancy to this world that they plan to persist for a full decade. You have no real reason to want to do the missions outside of grinding the experience to get from level 4 to level 6 where your first “dungeon” opens up (and bounties, but we will get to those). A story-based mission that says “hey go do these 10 things for us in Old Russia” at least would give SOME level of reason to explore the mostly empty region. But even that level of immersion is missing. [b]A dungeon by any other name… [/b] At level 6, you get to jump in to a matchmaking system that puts you with 2+ other people to enter a strike – which is essentially a dungeon. You have a number of objectives and boss fights to get through to achieve the final goal. The first such strike was “Devil’s Lair” … And I can’t say it wasn’t fun, but wow, not at all the experience to sell me on the whole concept. Tip: Do NOT create dungeons where an experienced player can just run through ignoring enemies leaving inexperienced players to fall prey of the enemies that were aggroed by the run through. Force the team to deal with all the enemies and move forward at a controlled pace. The “speed run” people aren’t going to like this, but there are many play styles and run-and-gun will be the only viable one in the way the game is currently designed. I, for example, am very much a sniper-style player. I love surveying an environment, picking off enemies. I don’t like running and gunning in FPS – this play style should not be punished by game design. (it’s worth noting that 2 of the boss fights did reward this style… drawing the attention to accurate shots and then jumping out of sight was very much what the mechanics were for those fights) Next up, the boss fights. The large walker boss in Devil’s Lair… what a snooze fest. Horrible design. While I did appreciate that my style worked nicely for this fight (and the final fight) by virtue of the fact that I could pick off the occasional adds that did spawn from my vantage point… but enemies where the “challenge” is knocking away a billion hit points without falling asleep is just not a good design. The laser-grid hacking event is hectic, and perhaps the most fun, but also incredibly rough on people who aren’t overly skilled FPS players. The sheer numbers of enemies, the brutal damage output, makes this fight one where a strong FPS might be forced to carry a couple of less capable FPS players. This should be considered. The fights should not be too susceptible to a group being carried by a veteran, and a truly frustrating experience for the newer FPS players. Ironically, Halo might often be a game which your players come from due to the name and they may well have played Halo for the story – meaning that their FPS skills may be average at best! It’s interesting to note that Left 4 Dead 2 seems to have found this balance. Certainly a veteran can completely dominate a map, but the AI director can speed up or slow down enemies to ensure that every fight is competitive but not overly frustrating. I wonder if such a system would make sense in Destiny. If a group is just annihilating the first wave, perhaps the second wave hits harder. If there are struggles vs. the first wave, then the second wave might not escalate in the same way. [b]Crucible, and the potent placement of PvP… [/b] I admit this happily. I don’t like PvP. It’s rarely balanced, often a complete clone of a previous experience and given far too much importance in a game… I am a starcraft 2 player btw, occasionally mess around with MOBAs like Heroes of the Storm, and am a competitive Magic player. So competition isn’t a problem for me, it’s specifically PvP. That first paragraph there can DIRECTLY be applied to Destiny. It’s poorly balanced, it’s uninspired (the maps are not only generic, they are generic with the addition of game-breaking elements like a gunship which just shreds players in a single shot) and is overly important to the game. I am not sure if all the PvP experiences in Crucible are 6v6. But the map I got was about capping bases and building points for every second your team controlled one of the 3 bases. I can’t say for sure, but I would guess that we will have capture the flag variants, and many more of the traditional PvP fare. Crucible is intended to be a very large part of your experience with Destiny. Certainly you could just completely ignore it, and should I play the final version, I may very well do exactly that, but just based on what I have seen, they seem to expect that at least half of your time with the game might be spent doing PvP. Half the bounties are dedicated to Crucible. Many of the vendors reward you for doing PvP. The justification for this PvP btw… you are “honing” the skills of your guardian. If this were true, it might be a neat addition to the game. Effectively running 12-player strikes where the objective is your opponents, not some boring boss fights. Assaulting a base (so 6 attackers and 6 defenders), with specific “training” inspired mechanics. Something of this type. There is place for PvP in this game – but the traditional PvP maps from most every other game means that Destiny is asking you to believe they will somehow do PvP better than the dozens of eSports quality FPS games out there. And it doesn’t and likely never will. [b]Bounties? More like life goals!![/b] Good god, are there some plans that these bounties are going to be daily things? Because if so, they are insane. When I first saw bounties I thought, COOL, maybe there will be some objectives in the game world which I can hunt down – a mini boss, or whatever. Nope, these are just more grind… extraordinarily time-consuming grinds if truth be told. Kill 10 elite dudes from each faction? You can camp their spawn, along with most everyone else in your area, I suppose, but that’s anything but fun! Lower the rewards, lower the investment in time and make these things so they are something you might actually DO on a daily basis. Maybe even include… I dunno,… say a bounty! Some named enemy who spawns in the world somewhere. Perhaps even make it so you might need a couple of people to take him down… [b]World events… or, how I ran away from a thing that could not be killed… [/b] Okay, these are real time event things where say, a walker drops from the sky and we all have to band together to bring it down… Can’t say a thing about them because they were made utterly impossible by the fact that alpha was so empty. 5 of us entered a futile battle with the thing, learned pretty quickly we had no hope, and wandered off. This isn’t a fair test of these events. I am sure with a populated world they might be awesome things to get involved with. However, it does bring up one possible “adjustment” that could be made to these. Could they perhaps be scaled? If there are only 10 people in the area, spawn it at a weaker setting with lower rewards… if 8 of the 10 show up to kill it, it might actually be beatable? I don’t think it’s that important honestly, because if my observations were typical, we just mostly ignored the events… [b]Sure, it’s just alpha…[/b] Almost certainly the game beyond level 8 (the Alpha cap) may be much, much more immersive and better. However, the 5 level sample we have currently been privy to does little to engender much confidence that the game hasn’t stretched itself far too thin. Superficial, no innovations in gameplay, just a very pretty FPS with delusions of grandeur. What a disappointment.