Destiny beta! 7/17 - 7/23

[Psychotic]

TO THE MOOOOOOOOON!

[Pant Leg Eater from the Bad World]

That first moon level is p awesome.

[Aulayna]

Aww only the first level on the Moon. Was fun, though as an FPS casual, already finding the difficulty curve a bit much. Only reason I killed that witch or whatever it was is because it got Super Charged right in the face. Took a couple of attempts.

[Iceglow]

I'm enjoying Destiny, I really am there's a lot to enjoy such as the gorgeous graphics and the superb voice acting, even characters whom I've had little cause to talk to in the beta, I've noticed has some great voice acting talent around. Of course, everyone's picked up Peter Drinklage as your Ghost companion throughout the story. But I'm 100% sure that I've heard Claudia Black in there too.

That being said, I do have some gripes with the game: The enemies feel pretty boring, Bungie made great enemies in Halo out of the Covenant; they had personalities. For example; Grunts screaming "Run Away! They're everywhere!" and other lines what have become meme's in their own right though most most have faded by now to obscurity. I've killed enough enemies in Destiny's beta to know exactly how each fire fight will go down but I can't say there are any truly iconic enemies in Destiny's Beta for me, I didn't play it and immediately thought "Dude that's my new favourite enemy!". Though I suppose this is a beta, Destiny isn't out yet and who knows by the time I've completed the full game I might actually have changed my opinion on this. This isn't a real problem if I'm honest however, as the bosses are pretty memorable, even if after about 3 - 4 attempts at the same mission you're adept enough to know exactly what to use and from where to win without much trouble.

Perhaps my biggest gripe is that I've seen a lot of people describe the multi-player modes as pure Halo even in this thread. As one of the forums biggest Halo players (I may not be Paul or Dan in skill terms but I'm still pretty damn good to have on your team) I feel like I ought to tell you now: You're so very, very, decisively wrong. Halo Multi-Player is all about how balanced it is. Allowing players to take their current inventory and character from Campaign to Multi-Player is a grand idea. However, it's also a major pain in the ass in terms of balancement.

Take for example my character: Iceglow I'm packing some pretty ace gear there, though some of it is freshly acquired and needs upgrading. Now in Multi-player I get to walk in to a Multi-Player game with that. Pit my character against someone who just unlocked the Crucible at level 5. The level 5 will deal somewhere in the range of 50% - 66% of the damage I can on average depending on how lucky they have been. This means that even if they get the drop on me, I should be able to turn around and potentially kill them if not before dying, then simultaneous to them killing me.

Likewise, I've got some pretty good stuff but someone who has been a little luckier or has spent more time playing than I have will have obtained better guns or armour. I've seen a player take a direct hit from my rocket launcher in a Multi-Player game and survive on 25% health still able to kill me before I can change back to my normal weapons or reload. That's a heavy weapon designed to kill things as quickly and messily as possible but they just took it in the face like "Hey what you got there kid? A BB gun, best be careful son!" Sure, I think it's great to reward players for their many hours of game play harvesting these items and guns, but not at the expense of the balance of the multi-player game.

I still say that the best FPS Multi-Player I've played was Halo Reach. The reason for this is that yes, it had abilities but none of them utterly broke the game play. It also had 2 classes of weaponry Covenant and UNSC which were balanced if not exactly then comparatively. Yes, you were rewarded for ranking up and playing a lot of games but the rewards whilst cool were cosmetic and had no real impact on game play. This for me is the ideal Destiny should have lived up to in Multi-Player. Sadly it hasn't.

That being said, will I be buying this game when it comes out? Hell yes I will!