Destiny Alpha First Look A Review
First, I want to start off with a little background about myself, so you can understand where my review is coming from. I’m an avid MMORPG player, I started years ago—about 11 or 12—with Runescape before it became what it is today. I played many free-to-play until I came across Guild Wars. While I enjoyed every aspect of GW, I was not satisfied with just one and continued my search. Now, I mostly just play GW2, which is my favorite MMO to date. I have very little experience with FPSs. Ninety nine percent comes from Halo 2-Halo 4 (and all the games in between) alone, so when I saw the announcement for Destiny I instantly thought about how it would take my love for MMOs and combine it with my need to shoot things in the head from Halo.
So the question is: did it meet my expectations?
This is pretty straightforward. It asks you to move the screen so it fits yours, and if you somehow mess it up (like I did), you can go into your settings, by pressing option, and R1 over until you get to your settings to readjust it. Then it asks you to adjust the brightness of the game until you can barely see the logo on the left. When I did that, I thought it was going to make the game too dark overall, but I did what it said anyway and everything turned out fine.
All I can say is “ugh!” The customization for this game is severely limited. Granted, I give them the BotD due to the fact that at E3 they mentioned customization would be limited. I do hope for their sake, and the players, that it is less limited in the Beta or, better yet, the overall release. First you pick your class, for more information on the classes I would check out Destinythegame.com, which has the Titan, Hunter, or Warlock. Now, I decided a while ago that I was going to play the Warlock, so that was the only class I tried out. My boyfriend did try out both the Titan and the Hunter, so I can grant some insight on those.
Next you choose race and gender. Sorry for everyone who does not identify as male or female, but, as usual, those are the only options. Once you’re finished with those hard choices, you then get to pick from a very small selection of faces, hair, colors (you actually get a decent selection for colors) and other features depending on race. I picked a human because I am boring.
I had a lot of issues here because even though we had a selection of faces and hair types, there was no further customization. I was limited to a stock face. The hairstyles were nothing that I would ever choose for a character that I wanted to play, I think next time I’ll just go bald if they don’t update the choices. I also had an issue with the eyebrows being locked to the same color as the hair. I like playing white haired characters, but dear god, do not force me to have white eyebrows. The markings for the humans were also frustrating. Instead of looking like cool tattoos, I would say they looked more like the character got really hyped for an intergalactic football game and decided to put paint on their faces.
The Alpha was 6.8gb, which is a lot larger than I figured it would be, but all for good reason. The game was mind blowingly beautiful. The textures, atmosphere, environment, everything was more than I expected and Bungie did not disappoint.
Now, I want to mention, if you do not like the control scheme, you can change it, but I am just going with the default ATM.
Left stick-walk around
Right stick- look
L1- throw grenade (which I actually thought was my super power for a while lol)
R1- melee attack
L2- scope/(while crouched behind something) look around.
R2- fire gun
L3- run
R3- pull up player stats/join team
Triangle- swap primary/secondary weapons
Hold Triangle- swap heavy weapon
Square- reload
Hold square- interact with
Circle- crouch
Hold circle- (while running) slide
X- jump
X + hold X- jet pack/double jump
Option- menu
Touch pad (my assumption is that this will be start or select on the Xbox)- (click only) brings up mission, summon vehicle (while hold square), go to orbit (while holding triangle).
Up- wave
Down- sit
Left- point
Right- dance
R1 + L1- special ability (must unlock first)
My issues so far:
-no dodge. Even the enemies can dodge.
-limited controls in the Tower. Most of these do not work in the tower and nothing replaces them.
-no tutorial. I’m putting this here because it took me a while to figure some of these controls out; there should be a very basic tutorial just for controls even if you don’t feel it’s needed.
-not utilizing the ps4’s touch pad. Now, I understand that this might be obnoxious because only the ps4 has this feature, but it seems to me that if you are going to put a game on this console you should use it for more than just clicking.
Ghost aka Tyrion Lannister:
Tyrion tells you what to do, what’s so wrong about that? (For those that don’t understand, Peter Dinklage is the voice for Ghost) he gives you missions, summons your vehicle, takes you into space, and becomes a handy dandy flashlight when he feels it’s convenient. We encountered a few bugs with it when we went into areas where we weren’t supposed to be. He is Cortana, just less weird boobs and not in your head.
It's Halo. The map is in the upper left corner. All allies are displayed in blue, teammates in green, and enemies in red. Weapons and abilities are found on the left. There you can find your loadout, how much ammo each weapon has, and the cooldown on your grenades, special abilities, or special melee (which you have to unlock). Top center is your health and shields. Right above your loadout is where player stats go if someone has died, dropped orbs, dances, or whatever. Right center displays items picked up.
Multiplayer: bottom right had a scoreboard.
Once you have the control scheme mastered and understand where everything is on the UI, you will realize that you are playing Halo. Everything, field related, feels like Halo. From the enemies to the weapons and even the characters, you are encompassed in a universe that feels much like Halo, and that is not a bad thing. Bungie is known for Halo, that's their thing; making this game feel nothing like Halo would have taken away from Bungie's very core. That being said, they did have to be different. But if you are used to Halo, this will hit home in terms of game play. Vehicles felt a bit more Star Wars than Halo, but had Halo basis. Pike is the Ghost (and that was the only drivable vehicle that I came across besides the bike (Sparrow) that you get which has no weapons). My boyfriend said there was another vehicle, of which he can't remember the name, that was a bit like the Revenant. Sensitivity of the controller, by default, was perfect for me, but you can adjust that in the settings. Overall, there was nothing clunky about it, if you are used to Halo. So there are no complaints here on my end.
That was until I made it to the Tower. The perspective changes from first to third, which makes it feel like a MMO, but I hate it, and I try to avoid the Tower unless I have to go there. Also, they force you to remove your helmet, so I have to see the god awful character choices that I made continuously.
At first, we were all a little annoyed with the enemies. They seemed...stupid. They always dodge grenades, so don't even bother throwing them long range and hoping to kill something unless they were the red floating things, those were the dumbest of the dumb. Now, some of the enemies were especially dumb. I'd be standing a few hundred feet from them and they would ignore me even if I was shooting at them, but others that were a few thousand feet from me, would be sniping at me. I got over it for the most part, when, like almost everyone, you wandered into the subway, or went for a really long drive and ended up in the cave. Here we found the wonderful enemies with ?? for their level, comforting. The ones in the subway were far worse than the Hive in the cave. You could not do damage to them, your best chance was to a.) not go anywhere near those places, b.) turn around, in extreme panic, and try to avoid eye contact, or c.) be 'tards, like my boyfriend and I, and run in trying to find out what was there. In the subway, was a room with a chest. If you made it through the cave, by screaming, jumping, and crying for mercy, you ended up in the same area as the Devil's Layer mission (well part of it).
The only enemies we came across were the Fallen and the Hive.
On Earth, you can do the first mission, the Devil's Layer (which was pretty awesome but hard), and the open field (which was quite large). My issue was with the random events that would happen that were far too hard for one or two players and very rare did you ever come across other players on the field. At most we came across five other players (and this was during the time that Destiny announced there would be one last event and it never happened). There are too many servers as of now and not enough players. To get instanced every time and play with no one is rather boring. The same with the Tower, occasionally we ran into a few other players (the largest amount for the event) but so rarely that I didn't even know it could happen.
The most amusement we all got for no apparent reason until we knocked it into space and it never respawned.
Of all the complaints I've had so far, the menus are by far the worst. For one, sometimes there are only one or two buttons and you get a cursor, like you're PC gaming, this feature it useless. Not once was I happy with this choice. I would rather be locked on buttons and have to move them around with the directional pad than have a stupid cursor and one button to press. Too much space and not enough content.
The loading screen is your ship in space. You have no control over it and you have to stare at it forever. It changes a little bit and others join if there are more on your fireteam. I wish you could have some slight control over it.
I enjoyed what I could out of the Alpha. I explored every bit of Earth that I could, even went outside the wall and found an abandon highway. I played one round of multiplayer, but if you do not have a good loadout then you were pretty much screwed. So I didn't enjoy that so much. I think the characters are relatively balanced, but the Warlock has a bit of a longer cooldown than the other classes, but with more upgrades you can shorten it.
I loved the aspects that felt more like Halo than the MMO bit. I hate everything about the Tower, and hope they change that around.
Overall, I realize that this was an Alpha and that stuff will change between now and the Beta, and from the Beta to the release. But I can only judge on what I saw. If things keep moving in a positive direction, this will be a great game, that will, at least, live up to my expectations.
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