Hi all. You may be asking: How did this chump get his hands on Destiny early? The answer is this chump is from Australia and Bungie decided to throw us a bone and release the game on our September 9th, which is about 11-12 hours ahead of North America. I started playing the game last night and have sunk about 6 hours into it.

Here are some early impressions:

The game plays beautifully. If you played the alpha/beta then you know what to expect. The first area of the game is exactly the same as the content we played two months ago, although you get access to the Moon fairly quickly. I was totally fine with seeing that stuff again because of how right the gunplay feels. The level design in the missions is also stellar and allows the kind of tactical movement and positioning that made me fall in love with Halo. It's not nearly as intuitive or as rewarding as Halo though, as the visual language of the combat has been garbled by the fact that enemies don't move and react as they do in Hale because all you're doing is lowering health bars. I still have trouble distinguishing particular enemy types by sight, which was never a problem in any of Bungie's previous games. The feedback on the guns and your hits is great but it's missing that sense that I always had with the Halo games of being able to read the battlefield like a book. Still, doesn't stop it being good fun.

I'm playing a Hunter and she's pretty cool. I have a dope throwing knife and a grenade that sends out homing energy blasts, so that's nice. I'm interested in how many subclasses I will end up having access to, because frankly the abilities on the horizon for my Gunslinger subclass seem a tad pedestrian. I do like how long it takes for you to level up and how much of a difference that makes. A 1-2 level deficit compared to your enemies is almost untenable without help, so when you level up it feels impactful. Games trivialise leveling up these days so I really appreciate how significant an extra level feels.

I think the way they handle loot and leveling is really interesting. The fact that you can level up your uncommon drops with enough use and pick different perks to suit how you play is sensational. However, everything I've seen has been much better than my current gear. There are no real trade-offs to speak of and trade-offs are what make a loot game like Diablo work. Everything is uniformly better than what you've got, with the possible exception of your uncommon gear which you may have leveled to the point where it outclasses the higher-level stuff you're finding

But man, do I not care about ANYTHING that is going on in this game! It's perfectly okay to be mysterious and obtuse with your narrative but you have to give me something to grab hold of. Interesting characters? Nope. A unique plot hook? Nada. It's all cryptic mystical nonsense. You can practically hear characters verbally capitalising every noun Bungie has appropriated into their fiction. I don't even know what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. I met my Ghost, went to the Traveller and spoke to the Speaker and now I'm looking for The Sword. I think? Enough good science fiction has been written in the medium to make this seem painfully dull, even by video game standards. Half the vendors in the main hub seem like more interesting characters than anyone with any degree of agency in the story.

For a game about Earth's last struggle against some mysterious malevolent force, it lacks any kind of sense of impending doom. I guess part of that is how jerky the pacing is. When every mission is structured to involve multiple people and eventually concludes with a fat mission-end countdown to you being warped back to your ship, there's no feeling of consequence or importance to anything you're doing. It feels like an MMO, but not enough of the awesome emergent shit that results from having lots of people on the same server in a single area happens to justify the busywork for me. The loot is cool but there's not enough of it to pull you through in spite of the stale mission design.

The best stuff I've seen so far has been the strikes, my first of which I completed this morning. The strikes throw the book at you in a way that really forces you to work together and take advantage of your various class abilities. Bungie also layers on the bombastic tunes to make it feel slightly more important that the flat tone that manifests itself in most of the other missions. The strikes are also custom, something that isn't true of the other missions. You'll often find yourself going back to old areas, which brings me to the patrol missions.

If you want to get sweet rewards from the various factions and vendors, you need to level up your reputation with each. You do that by doing these randomly generated miscellaneous quest style patrol missions out in the world. My issue with this is that to level up my reputation with the Vanguards to Level 1, I need to grind out 1500 vanguard points. The patrol missions give me 10. I haven't figured out if there's another way to get them yet, so if that's the only way to get the higher-tier equipment and armour sets, I'm out. Also there's the sense that the mission areas are less interesting as a result of Bungie wanting to make areas that you could spend hours in doing trivial nonsense. I like the overall look of the game but the structures and buildings you explore are kind of dull.

I don't know anything about the crafting system beyond the fact that I think there is one. They haven't explained it yet. I don't know. Spinmetal.

Anyway, I'm going to keep playing. I've barely scratched the surface of the Moon at 7 hours in and at the glacial pace the story is progressing there seems like there's a lot of game here. I also love shooting stuff in this game and may even dip into the competitive multiplayer, even though that's not usually my thing. There's just enough gameplay hooks to keep me engaged so I'm hoping either the story or the mission design picks up later on. It's a pretty game that plays superbly right now, I'm hoping it evolves into something more interesting.

And boy, Peter Dinklage does not care.

EDIT: Destiny may be the Dune movie of video games.

Spinmetal is gotten from random plants around maps that glow silver. You can also get them from a certain exploration mission (I think assassination?).

You get extra reputation with a specific faction/vendor by using their gear when participating in the Crucible and I think doing bounties.

All this info is a bit hazy though since it's from the beta.

I would be curious about the PS3 frame rate if anyone gets their hands on it.

I imagine the beta was representative of that. It was pretty good, not amazing and it definitely did dip to 20~ when shit went down.

It would be super great if they explained that more explicitly. I've been avoiding doing patrols at all costs because I think they're incredibly boring, so maybe I would have picked that up if I was doing more of them.

Bounties and Patrols are basically the equivalent to Diablo 3's Adventure Mode. It's an easier way of levelling new characters and is how you prepare for the end game.

Kinda bummed to hear bad things about the story, but I was expecting it after the few cutscenes/narrative expositions from the beta. I don't know if I like the (slightly repetitive) gameplay enough to want to slog through a really boring story.

Someone needs to write to Bungie and tell them to take a closer look at Adventure Mode then.

How does it play solo? I'm not much for joining guilds/clans etc. Will I be able to get entertainment out of it playing it on my own? I picked it up already today and am waiting to get home from work. I joined the Lincoln Force ANZAC group and don't mind the idea of online gaming, it's just hard to fit in and organise at this stage of my life.

It's definitely geared towards getting you to match up with players, whether they be friends, clanmates or random people, but you can do the entire story solo if you want to and it still plays great.

Playing solo is totally doable, at least it has been for me. Honestly I think some of the missions are better solo as it forces you to flank and fall-back more. A full posse rolling into a mission on the normal difficulty will smoke everything in their path, whereas it's a nicely balanced challenge solo.

They give you the option to play against enemies that are a couple of levels up from you at the mission select screen and I think that's the way to play if you have people tagging along. I actually appreciate how quiet and serene the game can be when you're lone wolfing it.

Uh it is specifically called "Explore" Mode (unless they changed that for some reason) and all the missions you do give you vanguard rep unless you are wearing a faction class item then they give you rep with that faction. The only ones that give you spinmetal and big rep/exp are the assassination missions. All other mission types do not give resources and give less exp and faction rep.

Coincidentally Spinmetal is just the Old Russia material. The Moon material is called Helium Coils.

I've been playing all day no problem (I still haven't really gotten past anything that I didn't already play in the beta) but I've tried to do this mission for times now and the servers keep booting me and it's a bummer

Though luckily I have kept all of the experience I earned and my bounties haven't reset or anything, so that's kinda cool I guess

It's called "Patrol" in the final game. When you get down there Peter Dinklage gets out of bed at 4am to say "Now we can go anywhere." It would have been better if they explicitly said: "yo this is filler content" rather than having it look like any other mission on the map.

Great preview. I was on the edge of buying Destiny, but hearing that the story and narrative is just a bunch of Bungie mumbo-jumbo is very disappointing.

@athadam said:

I used to really rag on the Halo fiction but looking back it was much more grounded and had enough likable characters that you cared somewhat about what was happening to them. Destiny is really distancing. It has this mystical, serene atmosphere that's entirely pleasant but is devoid of anything remotely engaging. The reason classic science fiction like Dune works is because the obtuse mysticism is backed up by engaging characters and enough basic information that you can grasp the context.

@adam1808: Dude it isn't filler at all. It is one of the fastest ways to level and grind out resources if you need them. It is also your primary means of grinding vanguard rep.

Repeatable quests equate to filler for me. You're talking to a person who never did a single miscellaneous quest in Skyrim if he could help it. Doing dull "go here, shoot these guys, scan this" quests just because it's the only way to get stuff isn't a good justification for me. When games do that I feel that they aren't respecting my time.

Look at the rebalanced Diablo 3. You can virtually get to the level-cap by playing a new character through all five acts. Blizzard respects my time enough to know that I want to see almost all of the stuff in their game in a single playthrough. If I really like it, I can come back for more but at least I don't have to play through the campaign four times to unlock all of my character's abilities.

I just played about 3 hours. Its about what I expected, maybe worse. Dear god the story is awful. They just fucking drop you in the middle of fucking nowheresville plot. It took a couple of story missions to even get a legit cut scene on the main plot or what your char even is. Even then is was bullshit nothing.

What really fucking irked me is after the opening mission you are brought to the main town or hub and given NOOOO meaningful direction or story other then run to these 3 way points and pick a item from 3 vendors. Really?! No story, no set up for any characters to give them life or the town some atmosphere? The background atmosphere noise for the town sucked ass as well. It could not feel much more bland. It just felt like, here is the bare bones minimum of a MMO town hub.

Otherwise its a shooter, its decently fun and functional. So far loot whoring is pretty marginal. Only level 5 though. Also they start you in the same zone start point for the Earth missions. So you have to walk through the same open world areas, to get to a new location, and or walk through a area you just did to get to a new location behind the first one. Bullshit!

Game is about a 7 tops from the 3 hours I spent with it so far.

I said this elsewhere, but...are people really buying Destiny for the story? Really? That just seems silly to me.

I always bought Halo for the story, so I don't think it's that crazy

No, but that if the underlying mechanics, and enjoy-ability dont make up for a shitty story, its a big fucking problem. Then the shitty story is just glaring as hell. It forces the game to be better to pick up the slack. Not to mention some PR asshat thought it was a good idea to say Destiny s story is on par with works such as LoTR, They have set themselves up to be held to a higher standard. IMO it was a lie to build hype.

Yeah, have to agree with this. When I launched up the game I was kinda expecting to get this lore heavy backstory, but NOPE. Just a short intro movie that dosn't really explain things to much. Then ghost finds you in Old Russia, and tells you that you have been dead for a good while (okay?) and that I probably have tons of questions (Yes I do!) And after 2-hours of playing I still don't know whats going on. I know there is a thing called the Traveler, and the darkness that follows it and wants to kill it or something.

id say keep playing folks, based off the 14 hour gamespot livestream, initially all those guys seemed very meh on the game, but at the end of the stream, they said it grew on them.

will say though, its a bummer to hear the story is basically told super slowly,

*Super poorly/It is not good.

i kinda feel bad for bungie if a gigantic production like this ends up flopping. then again, i wonder what activision was even expecting with this. i'm still tempted to pick it up; i'm kind of a fan of dry, spare plots anyway.

About 7 hours in, playing with friends, and we're all having an awesome time. Loving the game so far.

ill may very well join you in saying that, but ill wait till i get my copy and play through it.

@adam1808: Loving it so far. I am a little bit past the beta. The story is kind of meh so far but I didn't expect anything good coming from Bungie when it comes to story. I'm sorry but I always thought the story and the characters in the Halo games were kind of bad. But game play wise I am really enjoying it. If you are playing on PS4 shoot me a friend request ShawneeBGoode.

@deshawn2ks: basically how I feel about the game so far.

@deshawn2ks That's interesting since Bungie is regarding as telling a good story with the Halo games, especially with the FPS genre which many developers fail to do.

I think Jeff summed it up pretty much at the end of his launch stream when he gave his thoughts on the game so far which I also experienced during the beta. He stated that the missions he played so far was mainly protecting his robot or doing generic missions that are being given by the robot. This is probably the main area which knocked the wind out of my sails when playing the beta since I can see myself getting bored doing the same style of missions over-and-over again.

It's a pity since I think the environments, gameplay and graphics look great and shows the detail which Bungie has implemented.

I'm having fun playing the game. It's polished, plays perfect, sounds perfect, combat's engaging, I even tried the multiplayer for once and that was fun (until I got a K/D ratio of 0.13...)

It does have some flaws though.

For me it seems like a game I'll be playing in little chunks since shooting dudes gets kinda boring for me after a while. It would have been great if there were like a story or any kind of character to interact with to freshen things up every now and then but sadly, so far (I've just finished the first couple missions on the moon), there's next to nothing like that. I just wish there was some sort of personality to the game!

There's not even any great loot to be had either which is a major bummer. There's only a few chests spread out on each map and so far any kind of drops for me have been very few and very far between. I was hoping that every time you kill a boss like character or something then some sort of loot would magically appear but it never happens...

I also thought they wanted us to explore the map? But if the only thing I'm getting is XP then what's the point?

I'm curious if people playing on XB1 have noticed any issues with their copy. I remember the announcement that the XB1 would match graphical fidelity with the PS4 came sorta of late which makes me wonder if the framerate and whatnot hold up.

From what I've heard it does.

I didn't think this would be a hard decision to make but I'm really debating whether I should get an XB1 or a PS4. I just keep seeing Microsoft pumping out software updates that keep adding new features and fixing other things with their console (just today they added a bunch of new options for snapping) and I keep thinking that maybe.. maybe this will help them pull ahead in the future. The one bad thing is that I've recently finally had a chance to hold the XB1 pad in my hands and all that talk about the LB/RB buttons seems to be true - they did feel sorta awkward. The triggers felt great though and the pad itself seemed.. bigger.

The Gamespot summary after 12 hours was basically that the combat encounters and enemies are not as good as Halo, leveling is a grind and incredibly restricting as to what you can fight, and it's mainly fun when you play with people and manage the big encounters. As someone who enjoyed playing through the Halo games alone and relied on the story/characters/world to get me invested, I'm very glad I didn't plunk down for the PS4 bundle.

@deathpooky said:

I think this will be the general consensus with Destiny. I don't think it will be a complete failure as there are some great things about the game but I don't think will live up to the hype. The positive thing with Destiny is that they have expansions so they could pull a Diablo 3 and improve on it making it a better game in the long run.

Terrible story, poor characters, lackluster enemy and environment variety. The gameplay is solid enough to be fun with a group, though.

I ended up buying the PS4 bundle thing today, I wanted to check out Destiny but it was mainly for other games coming in future. Two birds with one stone kind of deal.

In the lead up to it releasing I really wasn't excited at all. All the videos seemed boring where nothing was really going on, but since the "Alpha" and "Beta" impressions were so warm I figured fuck it, why not. But hey, I am really pleasantly surprised. The gameplay is solid and I am having a bunch of fun. Probably put 8 hours or so into it so far and looking forward to playing more. I have no fucking idea what the story is supposed to be about (outside of the basic premise) but some of the plots for each mission seem pretty random. I don't know if I would call anyone you "talk" to characters either. Glorified vendors maybe, but it has a multiplayer focus so whatever. Too bad nobody I know has the game or a PS4, might make the friend only raids a bit uh, hard. Overall I am pleasantly surprised and really enjoying it, but the hype surrounding it is a bit puzzling. Solid game worth giving a go for people who like console shooters, but nothing mindblowingly amazing in scope or however the fuck they marketed it.

I'm just so desperate for something to play on my PS4. I was hesitant that the loot wouldn't be nearly as interesting as, say, Borderlands, and that the game would be just a bunch of killing stuff to grind levels with no purpose. At least in WoW there's somewhere/something new to explore as you reach certain milestone levels and I can turn a TV show on in the background while I play. This seems like after 5-6 hours it might get tedious, but yet doesn't have the competitive multiplayer legs like COD has. If I was a more patient person, I'd wait until Disney Infinity 2.0 is out in a few weeks and buy that, but I need something to play besides Madden.

So Destiny, here we go.

Everything I've heard so far points to Destiny being a repetitive yawnfest. The metacritic user scores aren't looking good either.

Aleast you guys are able to play it, I'm left with nothing.

When do the metacritic user scores ever look good? They're a mess!

My early impression is that it is weird that the splash screen said "Pre-release Beta" when I put in my newly opened plastic sealed blu-ray disc of this retail game that is now released.

I've got both, it's pretty much as you say. DS4 is a bit better than the XB1 pad but it still feels great for the most part. XB1 UI is miles ahead of where it was on launch, nearly monthly updates adding all sorts of options and functionality. Seems like they're really listening to consumers. On the other hand, PS4 UI is largely where it was on launch, sleek and minimal, but lacking features. PS4 still has the power/graphics edge though that isn't really a factor right now. Maybe it will pull ahead of the XB1 in the future, maybe not. I'd say look at the short term exclusives and go from there.

And yeah, I'm one of those "if the story sucks then I'm out" people. The gameplay doesn't seem remotely interesting enough to make up for it, either.

I've just gone full PC with a DS4 for games that need it.

Fair point, but there aren't many other indications as yet. I'll be interested to hear Jeff's take on it after he finishes the game.

@ethanielrain said:

It is amazing that they didn't even make the Questgivers NPCs all you get is generic radio chatter. There is not a single other person of interest in the world of Destiny :(

@corruptedevil: I want to move away from PC gaming and get back to consoles so it's really a choice between the two. I have a pretty strong PC already but I really hate troubleshooting game issues.