Destiny 2 Beta Thoughts!

Because your admin happens to be a gamer and he likes to jabber on about games he's played.

Feel free to post your own gaming chronicles here, or any gaming-related discussions that don't pertain to message board-based role-playing. This will allow us to keep things a little cleaner.
Post Reply
User avatar
IamLEAM1983
Site Admin
 

Posts: 3707
Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2013 4:54 am
Location: Quebec, Canada

Destiny 2 Beta Thoughts!

Post by IamLEAM1983 »

Destiny the first in name reminds me a lot of the first Assassin's Creed, or even of the first Borderlands. All three games couldn't be any more different from one another, but they all acted as a kind of staging grounds for what seemed to be each involved developer's desired vision. Assassin's Creed 2 figured out that if you're going to drop a mook in a plot-rich environment, said mook better have a compelling personality. Borderlands figured out that ending the first game with a half-assed boss fight and a literal shower of loot also wasn't compelling. A good game needs a plot hook, decent world-building, and enough of a sense of Self to motivate returns or repeated playthroughs. Destiny's only different from the bunch in that it applied those principles during the first game's penultimate DLC run. The Taken King felt like an injection of character, diegesis and tonal information that went far beyond what the vanilla game and the House of Wolves expansion delivered. Unfortunately, it makes the initial crawl up to the Black Garden feel like a prolonged tutorial for the real meat and potatoes of the complete package. As for Rise of Iron, it more or less served as Bungie growing complacent again after Oryx proved to be the antagonist the game had sorely needed from Day One.

At the same time, serious missteps were taken. Most key plot points were delivered not in the multiplayer Strikes, but in the closed-off Raids, which couldn't be accessed from the game's drop-in, drop-out multiplayer offering. If you weren't willing to seriously go looking for a pickup group using third-party software or sites, you'd never so much as see Crota's fall, Atheon's demise or the lethal traps of the Vault of Glass. This left the single-player experience feeling like weak connective tissue holding the cooperative content together. You did have a few notable Strikes involving talked-about participants in the universe's lore, but these were usually adjutants to the greater threat at hand, or opportunist forces briefly forcing you to sideline your trek across Earth, Mars and Venus to handle the Fallen House of Wolves, and its leader's ambitions of godhood.

The short of it is that Destiny the first in name was never particularly good at giving you a clear sense of your motivations, or that of your enemies and allies. What was there was poorly articulated, and what wasn't needed a companion app and a phone or tablet to be accessed. If you did, you were treated to a Dark Souls-esque smattering of lore snippets couched in heavy metaphors or disjointed recollections. Like From Software's series of titles, Destiny warranted the creation of the position of "Lore Explainer" for several YouTube content creators to tap into. Listening to polished renditions of these jumbled chunks of mythological data to silent gameplay footage might've been interesting, it still served as an extra hurdle between the players and the game's lore. It also made certain shifts in tone difficult to explain or tolerate. Graven solemnity turns to tongue-in-cheek camaraderie by the time you boot up TTK, with no ramping-up of Cayde-6's signature Nathan Fillion glibness. It's jarring, to say the least.

Of course, there were other holes to plug. Some are systemic, others harken back to the lore and tone-setting - and then there's the fact that a lot of fans had the impression that Destiny Prime was a ten-year package, guaranteed. The less naive knew that Bungie's commitment to the franchise would mean more games, and not just a single "game-as-a-service" sales pitch, endlessly updated like any other MMO. Sony, after all, thrives on sales both physical and digital. If you expected Warframe by way of Halo, you'd better prepare for a massive disappointment.

The Beta for the second game's been released, however, much to the delight and chagrin of the former title's remaining players - which only shows how things like Steam's Early Access program have blurred the average consumer's conception of what a Beta implies. When I snagged my copy, I knew I'd get unstable connections, overpowered or underpowered weapons, exploits galore and a general dearth of content to peruse. Infinite Super attacks and a submachine gun that chews through bosses like toffee has become part of my overall experience with the title, along with the notion that Multiplayer matches are naturally hilariously unbalanced. Rival teams can barely close the distance to one another; their opponents' über-potent ordnance kills them in an instant, and vice versa. I knew I'd be set with Bungie more or less asking me if the game was complete shit, whereas a lot of people figured they'd get a full zone with several play areas to goof around in.

A friendly note to the average fan: a Beta is not a finished product. It's not stable, it's not refined - by all rights, it isn't even content you should be able to access. There's one hour's worth of content in there, tops - three or four if you redo the whole thing with each of the three classes, or six to eight if you obsessively redo it all with each class' subclass. That's it. 

At the very least, Homecoming makes for a decent first mission. You've kicked SIVA in the teeth and have resurrected the Iron Lords, you've killed Crota and Oryx and shut the Black Garden away from our universe. You've done a lot of good, all things told. Unfortunately, you've pissed off the Cabal while on Mars, and have managed to incense Dominus Ghaul, the leader of the militaristic Red Legion. For whatever reason, Ghaul deems you unworthy of the Traveler's Light, and deploys what I'd have to call a "Space Magic Dampener" to cut the Last City off from its sustaining techno-deity. You lose your Ghost - still voiced by Nolan North - lose your Super and Grenade skills, and presumably have to crawl back up to Level 40, which motivates both the grind and a few plot points and additions. The AI-based Failsafe replaces your Ghost for a bit - based on what I can gather - and I can only assume the initial set of single-player tasks and quests revolves around powering yourself up again and reclaiming your Smol Floaty Nerd Friend. The Beta's offered Strike seems to take place well after your Ghost's recovery, as he remains around to serve as the same expository device and Horde Mode initiator he did in the previous game. TTK's scanning mechanic doesn't seem to make a return, but any and all recovered Codex pieces are now accessible in-game.

We at least get to see more of the City than the Guardians' Tower, this time around, and it has the franchise's overall standard Post-Post Apocalyptic tone, wherein futuristic bits and bobs coexist with earthy tones and glittering bits of jeweled glass, the whole of it splayed across the rusted corpse of the former Golden Age of Humanity. I can only hope they'll manage to tickle the part of me that still wants to see a moody Dungeons and Dragons crawl with high-powered firearms and Space Magic Grenades. There was some moodiness and atmosphere in parts of the first game, but it all evaporated rather quickly.

So there's a plot, there's more of a tone, there's new weapon and Super types, and Bungie's extending a helping hand to those like me who never felt compelled to using LFGDestiny or Where's Xur? to try and chart the storyline's more portentous - and endlessly repeatable - events.

I musta killed the Imminent Mind about thirty times on Venus. Looks like I'll be shaping to do it all over again with the Coherent Mind, on Not-Venus, of which I've forgotten the name. I'll admit I also laughed when I heard Ikora Rey lament the Speaker's death. I bet Bill Nighy thought his lines as the Speaker in the first game could've put people asleep... 
Post Reply