After years of cryptic hints and teasers under the codename Project Tiger first details of Bungies next game leaked in November 2012 revealing concept art and some plot details about the game. Going by it's working title Destiny, Bungie wanted to "build a universe" that would "take on a life of its own. Many months later after the game's plot details leaked Bungie started to be more open about the project until it was finally shown off at the PS4's reveal in February 2013, they went onto say during the reveal how they wanted Destiny to appeal to the widest audience as possible convincing not only hardcore players but also casual players to get involved with Destiny. This was the beginning of the Destiny hype train and with it being the studio behind the much loved franchise Halo everyone boarded.
Fast forward a year and seven months later the game finally released and whether or not it lived up to the hype is a question many gamers are starting to wonder. Despite the fact at it's core Destiny is a solid first person shooter it's nothing like what they gave us with Halo Combat Evolved back in 2001 which many people say revolutionized the FPS genre. The problem I think Destiny has is not the fact hype got us worked up so much that nothing could meet our expectations but the possibility that Bungie bite off more then they could chew with this game, where there big ideas and thinking outside the box unknowingly lead to the games mixed reception.
During the time between Destiny being shown off at the PS4 conference to it's release in September 2014 Bungie made out like Destiny would be this huge space exploration game where your character would search the solar system, jumping from planet to planet in a massive well told story about not only you but the entire galaxy, in this game we would be able to explore massive maps and locations where we would do missions fighting enemies together and pushing the darkness back from once it came. In the end what we got was a decent first person shooter, with a short story and only 3 planets, plus one moon to explore, not to mention there's only one location per planet/moon and the missions feel repetitive at times. This is not something many gamers expected the game to be and when you think about what gamers expected from the game to what we actually got it's not surprisingly to see why many people feel a little off put by the final product.
Now part of this is our fault, every time a highly respected studio like Bungie reveals their newest game we all automatically board the hype train, take GTA4 for example and what happened at the end once the game came out? It crashed and burned many of us to this day but at the time it was gold dust with it's high sales, over the top perfect reviews and our dedicated game time, that is until our hype wore off and we realised we were playing something which really, at the end of the day was not really a game which felt like it came from that franchise. Many months later people realised that GTA4 was not the game they thought it was and people finally started to state their real opinions on the game.
With Destiny however I feel like Bungie had so many ideas for this game, ideas they spoke about in interviews before they knew if there studio could pull it off and when it became obvious they couldn't they still rolled with the hype they had built up because they didn't want it to hurt sales I mean why would you more sales mean more money. For example let me take you can a few weeks ago when news broke out over the fact that the there would only be one location per planet and we couldn't explore the entire solar system only a few planets, that news about the game didn't come out until near the games release, why didn't they tell us this before and say "Hey guys, you'll only have one big map for each Planet you visit" as long as they were honest back then people wouldn't of let their imagination run wild of what to expect from the game. Again this could come back onto us and we would only have ourselves to blame for our rapid imagination on what the game could offer I mean after all this is the studio which brought us Halo which changed how we looked at first person shooters but at the end of the day with the way Bungie worded everything in their interviews what were we supposed to think, they lead us on.
I'm going to go through a few things in the game which I feel Bungie let us down with. JUST TO POINT OUT - This is just my opinion on it, use the comments if you disagree and please explain wise, this is a place for discussions after all
Peter Dinklage as Ghost - Many of the criticism from the beta was Peters performance as Ghost, your AI follower, now obviously this wouldn't of been a big deal if he wasn't the person who basically told you everything you needed to know in the game and the person who told you were to go like a flying sat nav but he was. The performance was apparently supposed to get better in the Beta, instead all we got was a robotic synthesizer to try and make him sound more robotic but come on, this is a product of the Traveller, the thing which threw humanity into the golden age and yet it comes out with an AI which sounds like it was made in the 80s. I'm sorry but the only reason it was added was because of the complaints to try and hide Peters lacklustre performance. These are the same guys remember who created Cortana in Halo, an AI who came off more human then the Master Chief and Destiny is most likely set way beyond Halo's time. The best thing they could of done here was to find another voice actor which could of taken a more human approach to the character while giving us someone to like, something where we'd want to hear him speak.
The Crucible - Now I'm not the biggest fan of competitive multiplayer games these days because in my opinion I think they all look and play the same thanks to Call of Duties success years ago but I went into this expecting something different and boy did I find it, however though it wasn't the kind of different which ended up being good. The fact that you can use your weapons you've found in the campaign during the competitive mode is ridiculous, who the hell thought it would be a good idea to do this when loot you find in the campaign is levelled, meaning if you go into a match level 6 (example) and you are against someone level 12 it stops becoming about skill but instead "my weapons are better then yours" since that higher levelled player would of gotten weapons based around his higher level. Apart from the weapon problem you also have the fact that different classes Hunter, Warlock and Titan will obviously have abilities which make one better then the others, again given that a certain class could have the unfair advantage especially if again you are a lower player. In the end those issues aren't my main problem with the Crucible, if I don't like it I could easily stop playing it right guys?...WRONG. The problem I have is that you are forced to play it if you want to gain points and unlock high levelled weapons and armours back at the Tower. If there is one thing I hate in a game is when I'm forced to do something I don't want to.
Worlds and Locations - As we've discussed above it's disappointing to see that there isn't more locations to explore in Destiny, the only one we have on Earth for example, our starting off location is Old Russia. Now this would be fine if there was other locations to explore but there isn't, once we finish with Old Russia it's time to leave and head to the stars to find our next quest. Even if the other planets like Venus, Mars and even the Moon had only one location least we would see that Earth has been fully developed instead but unfortunately we are stuck in the same location. Earth would of been a perfect place to show off different environments and what other locations look like after so many centuries. Alaska or the North Pole should of been our snowy location, London should of been the urban location with us trekking through the ruined cities, the Amazon rainforest or what's left of it for it's green theme and maybe even North America to see what damage Washington has suffered. In the end there is probably one main location we should of been able to visit and that is "The City" the one we are bloody protecting. I mean how can us Guardians not take a wander around the place we are fighting for, surely for the place being attacked all the time by many forces outside the walls I can get involved with ridding the place of the odd enemy here and there which gets through.
The Mission Structure - The thing I've noticed while playing the game is that the story missions are pretty dull after you get half way through the Moon and it's not surprising after the missions seem to follow the same structure for almost all it's missions. You start a mission, Ghost tells you where you need to go, you get to the location and after fighting through enemies and deploying Ghost to examine something you are told you need to go somewhere else, so you make your way there fighting through wave after wave of enemies until you get to the place, you are told to enter and again after fighting some more you get to the dark spot where you can't re spawn, after fighting once again you are at the last place. Here you deploy Ghost again and big shocker, what happens? We only have to fight through wave after wave of enemies while Ghost either does something like hacking into a machine or we come up to the big boss, hell sometimes it's both. Once Ghost is finished and we complete the level. Now I wouldn't mind if it was once every so often but every mission seems to follow the same structure.
Exploration - This is a minor problem for the game but when it's a game about exploring you need to point it out. Despite having this big maps for us to explore the only actual purpose they hold is to house all the 5/6 missions for that location. It seems like there's a chunk of the map for each mission (see where it's divided into sections with different names) where you will be heading to and in the end you would of explored the entire map, meaning if you want to go and explore the world for hidden locations and places you haven't looked at yet you won't really find much on during patrol. The only big things to do is find chests (and the golden ones), grinding to improve your level or find dead Ghosts scattered around.
At the end of the day I feel like for what Destiny was hyped up to be, it should of kept for another time, a time where they would be able to do most of the things they wanted without it being watered down and finally not meeting our expectations. In my opinion I feel like Bungie should of just made huge world on Earth with a smaller yet still fairly large map on the Moon where we could explore with friends doing missions and a variety of side missions around the map. Yes part of this idea might seem like typical things you would expect to find in a game such as Skyrim or the Witcher games which Destiny is not supposed to be but I believe Bungie, with their talent would of been able to make it there own and from there with Destiny 2 would of been able to add other parts of their idea they wanted with better and newer tech. What we have gotten in the end was an idea in which Bungie bit off more then it could chew and half way through development they realised they wouldn't be able to achieve it at the current time, the idea unfortunately was simply too big for them to make. This is what in my opinion lead to the game being the way it is, not a bad game or a game hyped up far too much but an idea which Bungie couldn't fully evolve into what they wanted. Bungie tried to add too many things to the game and because of that it made everything seem a little lacking, if they just stuck to a few ideas and add other things like the competitive multiplayer as DLC they could of made the game seem more rewarding.
The friendly folks over at Razer recently sent us their full size Kishi Ultra mobile gaming controller, and this thing didn't disappoint.
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "Upon finally finishing Devil May Cry 5 recently - after it spent several years on my “I’ll play that soon” list - I considered giving it a fittingly-named Late Look article. However, considering that this was indeed the final piece I was missing in the DMC puzzle, I decided to instead take this opportunity to take a look back at the entirety of this genre-defining series and rank the entries. What also made this a particularly tempting notion was that while most high-profile series have developed fairly evenly over time, with a few bumps on the road, the history of Devil May Cry has, at least in my eyes, been an absolute roller coaster, with everything from total disasters to action game gold."
Me leaving it out should be telling of my thoughts on it. Better than 2 as a DMC game.
Still a good game though.
3,1,4,5 to me, never played 2. 5 gameplay is amazing but level design was really disappointing to me, just a bunch of plain arenas, the story felt like a worse written rehash of the 3rd and the charater models looked weird ( specially the ladies ). Another problem with 5 was that there was not enough content for 3 charaters so I could never really familiarize with any of them
2.
Dmc.
4.
5.
1.
3.
God DMC2 was an awful game.
And in case this isn't obvious it goes worst to best
Order changes depending on your focus. I tend to focus on gameplay/fun factor, so...
5, 3, 1, 4, 2.
I really didn't like 4 but commend Dante's weapon diversity. The retreading of old ground was pretty unacceptable to me.
But even then... Still more enjoyable than 2 for me
TSA go hands on with the beta for Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, but how is the game transitioning to the post-stylus era?
I will never fault someone for falling for the hype, we have all done it and it's really not our fault when we are presented something from someone that sounds too good to be true.
But I have to question why so many were excited about Destiny? I really didn't see anything appealing about the game besides it being from the makers of Halo, which I always thought was a fun game but nothing spectacular. Not to mention the game was developed for ALL systems. Nothing good could come from that at all. That right there should have sent warning bells that this game would offer nothing different from what we have already experienced before.
Not to mention an always online type of game where many on here protested and hated but now accepted for this game. Top it off with the very lackluster gameplay of the beta where a lot of gamers (a lot on here too)said it was nothing special. How could anyone still be hyped for this game?
It baffles me that Titanfall received more criticism as over hyped even though everything about the game was made available to the public and reviews well before the release, but Destiny got a super pass even though nothing was revealed for the longest, the game beta was lackluster and reviewers were not offered a chance to review the game until after launch.
I'm sure all those ideas you mentioned that Bungie wanted will be implemented over time through DLC and microtransactions. I mean how else is that 500 million going to get spent?
What worries me is what happens "if" the game drops off in users? What happens when a CoD, BF4 or any other top exclusive comes out and knocks this out of the way? Will Activision and Bungie still support and implement the ideas they originally had? Why should they if the user aren't there?
I never had high hopes for this game just because I saw nothing different about it. If this game was only developed for next gen consoles then maybe the hype could have been justified, but now it remains a Borderlands clone made by Bungie.
Is that pic of the frownie face the interface for the AI from the movie Moon?
When Destiny was beta I spent at least 12+ hours a day on it, and tried to get all uncommon equipment. Now the game is released, and I don't feel the same hype as I did back in the beta. Bad game? No; could be better? Yes. I do agree with a lot of your points however some things I will voice a second opinion on:
Voice acting - Since I still have a ways to go in the game I'll hold opinion until after I complete the story. So far I have a positive response on the voice acting and I feel it fits since it is a robot (again I'm still early in the game so if it does change I don't know at the time).
Crucible - My biggest complaint (and I'm sure I'm not the only one) - the same garbage from the beta carried over to the full game with the loot/drops. I remember doing a capture mission, our team won (I came in 3rd with at least a 3000+ score) however the 2 people that did absolutely nothing at all (not even capture a point or got a kill) gets 2 (not 1, 2) legendary items while the rest of us received nothing. That alone killed any chance I had in playing multiplayer. Outside Iron Banner I will NOT go back in until they fix this. People can argue random loot tables, luck of the draw, etc. the fact is the lazy gets better equipment than the ones who actually put in the effort. It's one thing if they actually did objective(s) and other stats were minimal, but to do absolutely NOTHING and still get (again) 2 legendary items proves this system is broken and needs fixing.
Worlds and locations - Again I'm still low in the story so I'll hold judgement until I complete the story. So far from what I've experienced I do agree other locations would be nice, even if they started out as a strike mission first then later opened up.
Mission structure - This I can agree with 100%; waves of enemies, boss, done. No puzzles, no missions with minimal to 0 fighting, no alternate routes; fight and protect him examining something. I do agree they need to at least make it different than the same thing over and over.
Exploring - From what I've experienced so far a mini map or some way to view a map would be nice since I find it easy to lose team mates especially if you're in a random group.
Just FYI: Then refers to "time," "sequence," and "as a condition." Than refers to a difference in degree and should be used in comparisons.
The game just feels... undercooked. The maps are restrictive, empty, and vapid of all but enemies, the mission design is unacceptable, leveling up offers no choice, the loot is a ton of recycled weapon models, the enemies are not diverse, the storyline is barely there and is very short, and the PvP has major balancing problems.
I kind of wonder what Bungie has been doing all these years. I wasn't hyped much at all and I was still underwhelmed.