Alpha Impressions

Thought I'd give some of my brief impressions after playing through the Destiny alpha over the weekend. Overall I think the underlying concept is really solid, and most of my complaints are things that can be easily fixed. I thought the Alpha served its purpose admirably; it made me want to see more of the game.

Special thanks to @christaran who provided the code I used to get into the Alpha.

What I Liked

+ The game looks good on the PS4. The skyboxes are really nice to look at and I didn't suffer any slowdown. It definitely managed to capture the "je ne sais quios" of apocalyptic-but-hopeful mythology that permeates a lot of Bungie games.

+ The music is really good and works with the graphics to create a particular tone.

+ I like the simplicity of the underlying game-design. The problem with many MMOs is that there are so many class differences and statistics that gameplay ultimately gets overwhelmed by mathy stat-obsession.

Destiny on the other hand has only three classes and they differ mostly in jump-style, grenade function, melee ability and special. There are also only three stats, each of which ties directly to a single ability or cooldown. This paired down focus means I'm not having to spend a ton of time in the menus looking at what stat is giving me more of another derived stat that affects one or two of my abilities.

+ The strike mission was really fun. The grouping was easy and fast and the action was generally pretty fun. As someone who usually shys away from group content due to the difficulty of finding groups, the fact that I played through it several times says something.

+ For an Alpha, the thing was pretty damn stable. I only lost a server connection twice, and each time the game failed elegantly by telling me what had happened and either sending me back to orbit or the title screen. I did not lose progress either time. Given some of the fiascos with launch-related issues in gaming lately, I thought it was pretty impressive.

What I Didn't Like

- Some of the sound design needs work. I thought some of the mission-beacon dialogue was really hard to understand without subtitles. It felt like the voice-actors were blowing into the microphone while speaking or something. Some of the guns also sound a little tinny and could do with more substantial sound effects.

- The bosses in the strike mission tended to fall into the bullet sponge category without being particularly difficult. Since the available strike looks like fairly early content, I hope the final release has some more involved boss fights.

- Graphically, some of the tells can be too hard to see. I lost some of the objective markers in the sky box due to their subtle color and I had a hard time determining when shielded enemies actually had a shield up and how much they had remaining. In strike missions, there also needs to be a better call out when a teammate goes down, as it often wasn't immediately apparent that someone might need to be revived.

- The PvP felt really uninspired compared to the PvE content. Another capture mode? Oh joy.

What I Still Don't Get/Am Ambivalent About

+/- The "grimore" system. This seems to function like a proto-achievement system where you are awarded with "cards" that give backstory on the world and gameplay when you perform certain tasks like "killing x number of enemies." Right now, the only way to access these cards is to go to the Bungie website.

I get what they're trying to do; they want it to be a centralized hub for everyone's character management and social interactions between players, which in other MMOs gets spread out in various guild/clan-specific websites. However, the website crashed two different browsers, and I'd really rather have the backstory in an in-game codex.

+/- The level cap appears to be 20. Given the amount of content promised, it seems Bungie is focusing on lateral progression through items and gear as opposed to straight up levels. Unfortunately, given the level cap in the Alpha was only 8, I didn't get a good feel for how the gear progression was going to work. Most of the items I found only had a damage increase and one or two scopes available for unlocking, which I don't think is enough. I would have liked to get a better idea of what the higher level items let you do.

+/- At the low level cap, I didn't get a good feel for whether the classes actually felt different enough to sustain long-term gameplay. I played all three classes up to the cap, and I must say that after a while, they all kind of blended together. I hope in the final release, there are more pronounced differences between them at later levels.

+/- The mission-lore seemed a bit light. I'm a sucker for a good story, but most of the missions didn't provide a lot of background. Most of them said something along the lines of "coded message to follow," but then never actually gave me a coded message, which was disappointing.

Bungie clearly wanted to speed up the mission-acquisition process beyond "go back to town and talk to people with a yellow ! over their heads." I say "yes" to that, but this might swing too far into generic territory. Given that you were limited to having one mission at a time, I'd like more lore to go along with that mission.

Pretty spot on impressions. I feel the same way about most of your points. Only thing I'd like to see them add is facial hair so my space wizard can have a beard.

I was able to play some of the alpha today. Probably not for me. Maybe I'll pick it up if it goes on sale, but I have a feeling its gonna be one of those games that takes forever to get a price cut.

I was really busy in the Alpha ;p. Here is a pick of an actual blue Fusion rifle I pulled out of Devil's Lair. It was level 12 as I recall, couldn't use it but I did screen cap the "details" screen so you could see it had a lot more going on than the greens. The third from the left was the generic "damage up" upgrade but the one to it's right effected reload speed I think and the one further right there gave it different bullet types. Some bullets would increase damage but lower stability, think another did extra shield damage, etc etc. The last upgrade required weapon parts and such and gave yet another damage bonus/buffed everything slightly, catch 22, it also locked all the upgrades so you could no longer change the scope or bullet type. Basically if you unlocked it the gun was as good as it could be but you could no longer alter it.

Hope this gives you an idea of the depth the weapons can have.

Some new footage from a newer build than the alpha, maybe?

@fattony12000: Nah that's all the same build. Possibly earlier since you notice no actual damage numbers and at some points it even just says "critical". Your Gif is literally just some moon based pvp, and you could find those Pikes (the speeder things with the guns) every so often on the forgotten shore too. You would have to fight the fallen for them most of the time though. I think most of this footage has also been shown in other videos just it would have had dialog over it. I know for a fact I have seen those clips of the warlock throwing three orbs and the hunter using arc blade before.