Destiny Impressions - Hot, But For How Long?
Bungie‘s history in the last decade has been tightly linked to the Halo franchise and Xbox platforms, as anyone who didn’t live under a rock could tell you. It is little wonder, then, that there’s an incredible amount of hype surrounding their first multiplatform project, the ambitious Destiny, set to release on September 9th for Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. Recently, I was able to get my hands on the so-called “First Look Alpha” (reportedly less than 10% of the whole game), and these are my initial thoughts.
The first, quite obvious thing is that Destiny looks amazing. It’s not particularly mindblowing for any specific effect, mind you; it cannot be compared to games like Killzone: Shadow Fall or Infamous: Second Son, let alone those forthcoming, on a purely technical level. However, the overall result is still stunning, mainly thanks to the incredible skill of the artists at Bungie, who have crafted beautiful environments; everything is balanced, in a manner of speaking, and one would have to nitpick hard in order to point out flaws (aliasing isn’t exactly canceled by the FXAA solution). Even the frame rate is already solid, hovering closely around 30FPS months before launch.
Once you start moving and shooting, if you played any Halo game at all Destiny’s heritage will be immediately clear. The feeling is quite the same, with things like double jump, the strong punch, the very gunplay and feel of the different weapons (sniper rifles, revolvers, etc.) is undeniably borrowed from Halo. Still, even after all these years, that core gameplay is still quite engaging, as I discovered while wondering around in Ancient Russia with Peter Dinklage as a drone companion.
The main difference from Halo is that Bungie injected some MMO elements in Destiny. You’ll quickly notice damage numbers floating around enemies, just as in most MMORPGs, but there’s a lot more: Destiny has three classes, loot with rarity, levels and the ability to upgrade your own character in different ways. Also, while in the “exploration” mode, it is possible to wander around and find other Guardians with which to join arms against the Fallen; there are even “public events”, in the fashion introduced by games such as RIFT and Guild Wars 2.
As a big fan of shooters and MMORPGs, though, my issue with Destiny so far is that most missions are really repetitive, with a hundred variations of “get me this from the enemies’ corpses” or “clear/scan the area”. Is this fairly common in the MMO genre? Indeed. However, generally MMORPGs can provide a decent story and context along with the mission itself, which is really not the case for Destiny, at least for the open world missions (there will be a Campaign mode of sorts in the final game).
The “open world” in Destiny was somewhat of a disappointment as well, at least for me. We were told from Bungie that it was possible to explore vast regions, a novelty in a shooter, but Ancient Russia was quite small and nowhere near comparable to the huge worlds usually encountered in a MMO game. It’s my sincere hope that the other planets available at launch (Venus, Mars, The Moon) will be bigger, otherwise it will be difficult to shake the feeling that the older consoles have effectively limited the planets’ size.
I’ve also successfully completed the one “dungeon” (called Strikes in Destiny) in the Alpha, and found it in need of some polish. The boss encounters seemed too long, and their damage too high, but then again, this is exactly the time to collect data for balancing purposes. Player-versus-Player activies are conducted in the Crucible, and only a Conquest-like mode was available in Destiny’s Alpha, with two maps: one, set on Earth, was focused on close quarter fights, while the other took place on a Moon base and it allowed the use of vehicles and stationary turrets, scattered through the map. Once again, it is easy to be reminded of Halo’s frantic competitive multiplayer and this activity is likely to be very popular among that crowd.
Overall, my first Destiny impressions are that Bungie has once again crafted a fine game, that much is already sure. Whether it will be enough to withstand such an unprecedented investment ($500 millions between development and promotion, according to Activision CEO Bobby Kotick) and keep lots of gamers addicted for a very long time, though, I cannot say for certain; playing more of the beta (coming on 17th July for PS3 and PS4 users who have preordered) and the final game will shed more light on the matter.