As you may already know, Destiny has already hooked me. I almost used the word "addiction" in the title of this blog, but then I figured that's in poor taste compared to people with actual addictions, so I didn't. I do have several people related to me (cousins and whatnot) that have dealt with and continue to deal with serious addiction issues, so maybe I'm slightly more sensitive to it that most people.

That said, man, I'm as close to addicted to this game as is possible, for me, at least. And it's not even out yet. I put over fifty hours into the Beta, and if you count the Alpha, I've got to be over sixty and on my way to seventy. Granted, I don't have a job, or a life outside of the internet, but still, that is A LOT of time for me to spend playing a game like this. Especially since most of it was spent in the PvP part of the game, but I'll get to that later on. I should start from the start.

So, as you may remember from when I wrote about the Alpha, after playing that, I was left excited and hopeful for the game, mainly the campaign. I played a little bit of the PvP (The Crucible) in the Alpha, but not much. Again, hopeful is the important word, because even in the Alpha, I had suspicions about the overall quality of the campaign stuff, I just wasn't willing to go so far as to have low expectations for it. I am willing to do that now.

That's not to say the campaign stuff in the Beta is bad. Fundamentally, the shooting in Destiny, whether it's against AI or other players, is still fantastic. It is absolutely some of the best shooting mechanics I have ever played in a video game. Part of that may be the continuing "DualShock 4 factor," which is to say that it's the best controller I've ever used and just about everything feels good with it. That said, I'm sure this game plays great no matter what the controller is.

It's also a game that got more fun to play (in terms of pure mechanics) the more I played it. My increasing skill with the game is part of it, but a lot of it was the skill advancement. Unlike a game like Borderlands, where almost all the skills and upgrades are either defensively focused, or upgrades to attacks/class skills, Destiny upgrades the movement options of the characters quite a bit. Well, really it's just a skill in the skills menu, but it feels significant every time it gets upgraded. At least with the Warlock class, I didn't play a Hunter or Titan enough to get beyond the first jump upgrade (level 3, I think).

But that second glide jump upgrade for the Warlock is when the game really clicked for me. Suddenly I was zooming around, changing direction in mid-air, and just generally feeling like a totally rad space magician straight up merc-ing fools with space magic. If I was smart, I would have recorded some footage of me doing rad stuff in the game to use as an example, but I'm pretty sure all the footage I saved on my PS4 is of dancing and flipping over the hover bikes. Which, to be clear, are both fantastic features in this game, but not crucial to feeling like a totally rad space magician.

While I'm talking about core mechanics, I should mention the guns. I'm a little torn on them. On the one hand, I feel like the game covers all the typical gun roles that you would expect in a first person shooter. There's the high rate of fire guns with relatively low damage, the ones with burst fire, the single shot guns with high damage (ranging from revolvers to rifles). That covers the main weapons, then there's the secondary weapons, which include sniper rifles, shotguns, and a charge-y up rifle thing that I didn't care for. After that are the heavy weapons, which appear to just be rocket launchers and heavy machine guns. Just about anything that you would want is in there, and I enjoy using some of them quite a bit.

But they're also kinda boring, in terms of design. I mean, there's no Needler. I'm not saying this has to be an Insomniac game where every weapon is completely unique and weird, but it would be nice if there was some stranger stuff in there. Or even if it was like Borderlands, where most of the guns are normal, but then you find something truly strange and weird. And for all I know that stuff may be in the game, but given the overall tone, and what I've seen so far, I doubt it. This is a game set hundreds upon hundreds of years in the future, it'd be cool if the guns in the game felt a little more sci-fi-ish, but it's not that big of a deal. And like I said, this isn't the full game, so who knows.

Then again, some of the gun upgrades I was getting were leaning in the direction of being weird. Like the last sniper rifle I was using. Well, first I should say that if you use guns and pieces of armor enough, they can be upgraded. Mostly it's normal stuff, like more damage, and different gun sights, or holding more ammo for the armor. But this one sniper rifle got the ability to collect ammo from afar by shooting at the ammo. And it totally works. Which, really, I shouldn't be surprised that an in game features works, given the overall level of polish in the Beta, but it's still a weird thing. Especially given how limited sniper rifle ammo tends to be.

That's a definite gripe I have, how the ammo works in this game. So, instead of collecting specific ammo for specific types of guns, there are three kinds of ammo pickups. Primary, secondary, and heavy. They're clearly color coated, and one type works for all guns in that category. For example, the same green secondary ammo pickup will refill my shotgun, or my sniper rifle. But, there's a weird thing that I thought was a glitch from the Alpha, but is still in the Beta, so maybe it's not. Anyway, if I have my shotgun equipped, and I have full ammo, but switch to my sniper rifle, I won't have any sniper rifle ammo. So, naturally I'll switch back to my shotgun...which now also has zero ammo. Now, if you equip another gun of the same type, say, a shotgun with a higher damage rating, the ammo count stays the same. But equipping a different type of secondary weapon will reduce your ammo to zero, for all of your secondary weapons.

I didn't try it with primary or heavy weapons, but I just don't see why that's in the game. Maybe it is a glitch, and they just didn't have the time to take it out before the Beta. I certainly hope so, because things like that are only going to prevent me from wanting to switch between weapon types in between battles. I was already complaining about the lack of variety in the weapons, but implementing systems like that will only make me want to stick with a couple of things even more than I already was. Then again, I mostly stuck with an assault rifle with a big magazine (44 rounds) in the Beta, because it was simple and worked, so maybe I'm not one to talk about this.

I'm also kind of the same way when it comes to the class specific skills, too. Part of why I liked the Warlock so much is the feel of that upgraded glide jump, but I also like that class's special skills the most. They're basically just magic grenades in two varieties, medium and large. Seriously, the grenade is a magic grenade, and the super is a bigger magic grenade. The melee special is more than just a magic grenade, as it sucks energy from foes to recharge the other powers more quickly, increase movement speed, and probably something else if the Beta hadn't artificially stopped me from continuing to upgrade my abilities.

I think that's enough about the mechanics. Well, I suppose I should put in one sentence reminding you that despite my complaints about certain aspects of it, it's still SUPER fun, and everything goes together pretty nicely. Okay, now I'm moving one to other things. Namely, the not so good parts of what I played. Granted, this is a Beta, so perhaps the final game will address some of these issues that I am about to discuss. I highly doubt it.

Destiny has really poor mission design. Based on the Beta, missions involve starting in the same spot of the map, running and/or hover biking to a location, fighting a couple waves of enemies, and then the game forces you back to orbit. All of that within the span of ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Problem number one with this is that there's too many loading screens in this game. If there are a string of missions in a location (Old Russia, in the Beta), then I should have the option to do them one after the other without having to go through a loading screen to get to orbit, and then another loading screen to get back down to the planet. Now, if this game had a ton of meaningful story, and going to orbit and/or The Tower resulted in my seeing some well done cut-scenes with characters I cared about, I wouldn't mind. The problem is that none of the story stuff presented in the Beta seemed like it was worth caring about at all. And none of it is skippable either, which really sucks if you're creating a new character to play with a friend and don't want to see the same bad cut-scenes AGAIN.

Okay, bad is a stretch. They're just boring. There's two "characters" in the story. The faceless "Speaker" guy, and the little Dinklage Ghost robot (also faceless). And I guess the character you play as has some dialog, which technically makes him/her a character as well. But I don't have any reason to care about anything going on. We've seen so many games (and other things) with big, nebulous threats to Earth that it's gone WAY past cliché. It's not enough to make me care any more, if anything, it makes me care LESS because I know that betters stories can be written. Hell, I AM a writer, I've WRITTEN better stories (but that's a different discussion).

Anyway, the point I was trying to get at before I distracted myself is that this would be a better game if I could just go and do another mission on the planet without going through more loading screens. It makes the game feel disjointed, especially when there aren't meaningful reasons for it. The Tower really only exists to buy stuff, or have encrypted loot decrypted (a system that I hate, by the way, when I get loot, I should be able to use it instantly). Yes, you can dance and hang out with people in the Tower, but it's pointless. I can dance anywhere in the game, there's a dance button. I don't need to travel to this one stupid place just to dance with friends, I can do that in the battlefield! Why? Because dance CAN bloom in the battlefield.

I've gotten off topic again. Now, even if the game didn't force you into orbit at the end, these still wouldn't be great missions. Not terrible, but not great either. They're short, and rely heavily on "just shoot waves of enemies." They lack the bombast that you get from more heavily scripted shooters, and lack the "tactical freedom" that you get from more open ended games like Crysis, Far Cry 3, MGSV (I assume, but also kinda Ground Zeroes). Granted, those games are A LOT more stealth focused than Destiny, but you get what I mean. The missions in this Beta felt kinda lazy. Bungie can do better, and I really hope that they aren't indicative of the game as a whole. That'd be pretty disappointing.

Now, I wasn't going to say these harsh things about the Beta, because it was a Beta, but then I played the mission on the Moon that Bungie had hyped up, and only had open for a couple of hours. And it was the same exact poor design as the Earth missions, the only difference was that it was on the Moon. I know the response is going to be, "Well they're just holding back the good stuff from the Beta, they want to keep it until the final game." I dunno, I feel like they think this stuff IS the good stuff. Maybe I'm being too harsh. I dunno. But when I'm playing through a mission, and start thinking that I could design a better mission (something I usually don't when playing good games), then I think I'm using the appropriate level of harshness.

The PvP's pretty good, though. There was only one game type in the Beta. I forget the name, but it was a control points type mode. But it did have its own spin on it, where points are pointed not by simply holding the control points, but by killing enemies. Controlling the points just gives points multipliers that add more points to the team's points totals in the quest to get enough points to win. Okay, I'll stop saying points now. Basically, they injected some team death match in to make it slightly different. But, in the end, it still plays pretty much the same. You run around, kill enemies, and recapture control po...er, zones. It's fun. I played almost fifty hours of it, after all.

There were only two maps (both good) in the normal playlist, but there were a few days in which Bungie opened up "The Iron Banner" playlist, which did not scale weapons and gear to make things more balanced, unlike the normal mode. That playlist had two additional maps in it (also good), which made it the place to be when it was running. So far as the not balancing thing goes, well, the level cap was 8 in the Beta, and I was at 8 with level 8 gear, as was everyone else. It felt the same as the other mode. I'm sure that, when the full game releases and people are at the cap (20 seems to be the rumored cap) the day after release, there will be a noticeable difference.

I don't really have any gripes with the PvP. I just hope that there's a decent number of maps and modes. Specifically maps. I'm fine playing that game type forever (control zone type modes have always been my go to in these sorts of games), but the game needs a decent number of maps.

Is there anything else I wanted to mention? Probably, but I got interrupted part way into writing this (good for you if you can spot the exact spot), and may have forgotten some stuff. Either way, even with my complaints about the mission design, I'm still really excited for this game. It's easily the game I'm most excited for this year. I'm going to buy it, and spend many, many hours playing all of its game modes. I'll probably buy a bunch of DLC for it. I'll make another weird looking alien dude that looks like a lady because I like dudes that look like ladies. I'll make my character's armor look real stupid in the name of humor. I'll dance until the end of time in this game. And I'll have a ton of fun doing it.

Maybe I'm going into the realm of too much information, but I think this guy's pretty cute.

Okay, is there anything else I want to write about? Yes, but I feel like this blog is long enough. You'll have to wait until next time to read what I think about my new Wii U. I do like it, but I'll get way more specific in the future. I really hope to get back into writing my in progress book, but who knows. I have another, probably really stupid project in the works with a "Twitter friend." I can't really talk about it, other than to say this "friend" is making me "play" a Visual Novel for "research" for this project. I'm not going to say which one he's making me "play," because I'm slightly embarrassed. (Never mind that I linked to it and you know what it is now).

And there's something else cool happening soon, but I was told not to tell, so I won't say what it is. You should know shortly. I'm excited. Not like, super excited. Moderately excited, I'd say.

Oh, speaking of that, I'm almost done with my Star Trek Quest. If you didn't know, then last year I decided to watch all of the Star Trek on Netflix. All the shows and movies. Well, technically Netflix doesn't have Insurrection, so I can't watch ALL of the Star Trek, but close enough. I'm in Season 3 of Enterprise, and when I finish, I'll probably write something up about watching all of the Star Trek. I might put it here, maybe on my WordPress, maybe both, I dunno. It's still a few weeks off, though. But that's interesting.

And as usual, I didn't proofread any of this, so sorry. You can live with a few typos. Probably. Also, here's something I drew on The MiiVerse. Hashtag Year of Luigi.