I’ve been lucky enough to get into Destiny over the weekend and more importantly allow Destiny to take over every waking moment I can spare. Here are my first impressions.
After playing for a few hours you hit the Alpha level cap of 8. Good old fashioned level ups seem to be second place to looting and levelling up individual items. Even after I reached the level cap I continued to find new weapons and gear and level them up to unlock new stuff like scopes and damage increases.
The looting is similar to borderlands although there are a few important differences. Firstly there aren’t 27 different shades of orange indicating that one rare item is slightly rarer than another. There’s white for common, green for uncommon and blue for rare. Admittedly there’s also legendary items but they’re firmly out of bounds for the Alpha. You can look but definitely not touch.
As an example most uncommon assault rifles have a choice of 3 scopes that are unlocked only by using the weapon. And I don’t mean for 30 hours but you have to get out there and kill a fair bunch of enemies. Machine guns have different round types and rocket ammo alters the ammo count in favour of attack power and visa versa. And each weapon also gets a cheeky damage boost pretty easily. This could, and I have no doubt will, really open up in the Beta and the full release.
One noticeable similarity to Borderlands (and arguably Borderlands’ key to success) is that two instances of the same weapon can be different. One may be more powerful, one may have a higher fire rate but otherwise look very similar, both visually and by name. You’ve got to pay attention but won’t be spending 30 minutes comparing two slightly different weapons and reaching for the calculator to work out DPS.
Abilities unlock nicely, nothing seems at all unattainable but there’s more than enough to keep you going. Having said that looking further down the road I’m not sure there will be all that much to do after a few long sessions. In about 4 hours I was at the alpha level cap of 8, which is supposedly out of only 20. And that seems quite low to me. I can only guess that destiny is going to rely on its loot system, which is great, and entertaining gunplay which is even better. Plus it looks very much like you can have multiple classes for each character which could be interesting.
And my God is the gunplay fantastic. Bungie know one thing, and they know it well. And their heritage clearly shines through. If you stop admiring the weapon designs long enough to actually fire one you are instantly rewarded with satisfying heavy recoil and pseudo realistic sci-fi sound effects. Everything’s so smooth and we’ll balanced I don’t think I stopped grinning during the violence. It just feels right.
If (like me I’m ashamed to admit) Destiny isn’t at the very top of your wish list put it there now. There’s a single player experience that’s just like an offline fps. Great co-op opportunities for friends or drop in/out play. A whole MMO beneath that ties everything together. And competitive multiplayer too. And you can do any or all of these on one account with one character. Or you can have several! Destiny’s one of those games that tries to do it all but actually seems to be succeeding. Its borderlands looting, with Mass Effect multiplayer in a Halo universe. The Destiny open Beta starts 17th July, and I hope to see you there! We’ll be uploading some videos of my time on Destiny shortly so stay tuned! And feel free to join me either now or in Beta or full release, my PSN is Haggis666.
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