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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Destiny Review by Gergroy

 

What rating would you give Destiny?

90-100 4 7.27%
 
80-89 25 45.45%
 
70-79 11 20.00%
 
60-69 7 12.73%
 
less than 60 8 14.55%
 
Total:55

So, originally I just had some thoughts I wanted to share about Destiny, but then it turned into a full on review, so here you go.  

WARNING there may be very very very very minor spoilers in this review.  If you don't want to learn anything about the game, move along.  That being said, this would be a hard story to even spoil...

 

Like others have said many times before, Destiny tries to be a lot of different things, none of which are all that new.  Now, not doing something new is not a bad thing, and in many aspects it has turned out great for Destiny.  However, the try to do everything approach has led to some deficient areas.  

The Graphics:

Destiny is a beautful game.  The worlds have obviously been crafted with a huge attention to detail that make exploration one of the funnest things about this game.  It isn't the best looking next gen game, but the art style more than makes up for that.  Not really much else to say about graphics.  

The Story:

This is the biggest dissapoint of Destiny.  There is so much potential here for some great exposition that is just completely wasted.  There is this amazing history of events that is never really explained, merely hinted at.  There are four different enemy races that are part of some "darkness" that are never really explained.  Everything about this story screams for depth and gives the developers every chance to deliver a great storyline and yet they left it as a shallow husk.  Devoid of any coherent elements that give the player a reason to keep plodding through the story missions.  Most of the story missions are just fetch quests or go here kill that type of quests.  While that can be said with most games, these missions felt much worse as the player often only had a vague idea of what the story behind the mission was.  

Then there are the NPC characters, of which there are exactly five, for the whole game.  Not counting the shop vendors in the tower of course, as they aren't really part of the story.   For the story, there is your ghost, the speaker, the two awoken, and the stranger.  Only the ghost has a somewhat prominent role, and even that role isn't more than just vaguely explaining what is going on.  Honestly, when you meet the awoken I felt like the story elements might actually start coming together, but then it just turned into a fetch quest.  Seriously?  

Overall, there was so much potential for the story of this game.  You see hints of it all the time, but it always ends up being a shallow experience.  I understand that this was possibly a concious decision, as these kinds of quest based games can often be hard to deliver a meaningful story experience.  Still, there are fairly obvious ways that the story could have been improved in this game. Obviously the biggest failure of this game.  

The Gameplay:

I'm going to break up the gameplay section into the different areas of gameplay in the game.

General Description:

Bungie is an FPS/MMO hybrid game that focuses on loot and leveling.  There are three different classes that each have two subclasses that can be leveled and developed.  These subclasses each have special abilities that can be used to alter the gameplay in a variety of ways.  For example, in one subclass the titan can do a smash attack that does area damage, while in the other subclass they produce a bubble shield that will stop projectiles from traveling through it.  

The loot system is probably the biggest draw for the game.  Each player can equip various types of class specific armor and various weapons.  The loot has different classes of its own, common, uncommon, rare, legendary, and exotic.  Each weapon or piece of armor that is uncommon or higher can then also be leveled up as the player gains experience.  

The loot and leveling experience has been very addicting and enjoyable in my experience.  Easily one of the best loot systems I have played around with in a console game of this fashion.  

Story Missions:

While the story behind these missions are shallow and often meaningless, they were still fun.  Bungie obviously knows how to make a first person shooter game.  The mechanics behind the gunplay are sound.  The variety of enemy types is great!  

The story missions usually had goals of killing a specific enemy or artifact.  Along the way to these goals Bungie throws all sorts of well orchestrated firefights at the player.  The path to the goal was usually a delight, even if after achieving the goal you felt like the mission was kind of worthless...

Strikes:

The strikes are both awesome and annoying.  This is actually where I have been spending most of my time in this game.  I love how well orchestrated this mode is.  It is like a focused story mission with an uber boss at the end.  Strikes are a high reward experience, as you get some really good loot from completing these strikes.  

However, for some reason Bungie only lets three players play a strike at once... I don't know about you, but I generally have about 6-8 friends online at a time, and having to split off to do a strike is no fun.  Why didn't Bungie include some strikes that could have a higher player counts?  

Raids:

Well, to answer my previous question, I guess it was because they have raids.  Which is another awesome yet flawed experience.  So, raids are like strikes, but higher level, higher risk, higher reward kind of experience.  You can actually have up to six players in a raid... but they have to be people you know as there is no matchmaking for raids.  That doesn't really bother me too much personally, as I have plenty of friends to play with, but I can see how that can be troubling for some people.  It also requires a bit more cordination on my part to make sure I have at least five friends online to play with.  

Now, I have played the raid quite a bit at this point, and have yet to actually beat it.  This sucker is hard!! Ridiculously hard!!!  It requires a lot of cordination and teamwork which is the reasoning why bungie didn't include matchmaking for it.  I can understand that mentality.  So far, the raid has been fun, but I think me and my friends need to grind out a few more levels before we will be able to beat it.  

There is plenty of reason to keep trying with the raids though, even if it is difficult as the best loot in the game is aquired through raids.  Like I said earlier, loot is the primary draw of this game, so raids are imperitave to the longevity of the title. 

Competitive Multiplayer:

Ok, here, again, bungie does some things well and other not so well.  The multiplayer is reasonalbly well organized and mostly balanced.  Although, I do have some complaints over the different class abilities here and how some are obviously more effective than others.  However, the fact that I think the weapons are armor that players have equiped seem to mostly balance out is impressive.  The maps are all excellently designed, Bungie definitely brought their A game on that.  There are some different modes available like control where you battle to control key points in map with opposing teams, as well as classic deathmatch and such.  

One big gripe for the multiplayer though is there is no private game matches.  If I have more than six friends online and we want to play multiplayer, we have to break up.  If we could host our own private match it would make things a lot funner for us.  I'm sure I am not the only one that would want the ability to have private matches either.  The exclusion of this feature doesn't make much sense for Bungie.  

 

Conclusion:

Destiny is one of the hardest games that I have ever encountered to come up with a score for.  It is a game that has some very obvious and glaring faults that can deride the experience for a lot of people.  However, it also has some of the most addictive and enjoyable gameplay experiences that I have ever had the pleasure to play.  I will be spending a lot of time with this game, despite its faults because at the end of the day, games are about enjoyment, and I enjoy playing this game even if it has some frustrating faults.  As such, my score is mostly a representation of my experience and enjoyment of the game and not a sum of all of its parts.  

80/100



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But...is it unbiased?



The One and Only

VizionEck.com

Good review and a fair evaluation. It sounds like Bungie has a lot of work to do on this game to bring some segments up to the standards they set with other segments. I'm willing to bet that they'll address a lot of these faults, though, to be honest, as this doesn't sound like a game they're going to walk away from anytime soon.

Your review really illustrates how meaningless a numerical score can be, as well. Some games are a straight line in terms of the experience they provide, while others are a set and peaks and valleys, with personal enjoyment depending heavily one which aspects an individual enjoys the most.

Personally, as someone who has spent a great deal of time on grind/loot type games, like Borderlands, Torchlight, WoW, Ragnarok Online, and The Old Republic MMO, and on exploration games like Fallout 3/NV and Skyrim, Destiny sounds like something I'd like.



Erp derp, super biased, ur only a PS fanboy trololol.

But seriously, it's nice to get reviews from fellow consumers instead of 'proffesional' reviewers.



Destiny review by who?



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Good breakdown concur with all except I would give it a 9 because while the story sucks others are.so good it is a non factor in my enjoyment



End of 2009 Predictions (Set, January 1st 2009)

Wii- 72 million   3rd Year Peak, better slate of releases

360- 37 million   Should trend down slightly after 3rd year peak

PS3- 29 million  Sales should pick up next year, 3rd year peak and price cut

bigjon said:
Good breakdown concur with all except I would give it a 9 because while the story sucks others are.so good it is a non factor in my enjoyment

Honestly if some of the game modes didn't have minor annoyances like only three to a strike or no private lobby for multiplayer, I would probably give it a 9 as well.  Story isn't that big of a deal in these types of games, even if Destiny's was egrigious in its failings, it wasn't a deal breaker.  

Still, other game modes had their failings so I felt like I really couldn't give it more than an 8.  Even though I do really like the game and have been playing the hell out of it, just too many faults in the final product...



Ninsect said:
But...is it unbiased?

no such thing as an unbiased review...



gergroy said:
Ninsect said:
But...is it unbiased?

no such thing as an unbiased review...


This!

And I wish the people (no idea who they are) on this site would stop naming them as such.



super_etecoon said:
gergroy said:
Ninsect said:
But...is it unbiased?

no such thing as an unbiased review...


This!

And I wish the people (no idea who they are) on this site would stop naming them as such.


Well, some people can be more blatant with their bias than others.  Selnor was particularly bad with his reviews.  I think the idea behind the unbiased reviews is to try and be as objective as possible.  So I cant really fault them the idea, even if removal of bias from a review is impossible since a review is just someones opinion...