I’ve been thinking about how to write this post for quite a while after I got Destiny for the PS4 on launch-day and the reviews started to hit the net. The problem is, that expectations for that game were sky-high. And rightly so given the creators of Halo being behind this.
Sadly, they couldn’t really deliver. The game has very little content compared to any game in the Halo series and the level-grinding stops to be fun once you hit level 20. There are far too many currencies and affiliation ranks you have to collect/climb up to get the better gear.
For these ranks you normally have to collect so-called “bounties”, like finishing a certain amount of fetch-quests on one planet, which give you more points towards these ranks than just doing normal missions. The problem is: you can only have 5 bounties at any given time. And if you try to collect one of the “exotic weapons” on top of that, your progress on that front does also count to that limit. Luckily, Bungie wrote in their recent patch notes, that this limit might be lifted in the future and it looks like the first DLC will really set the new bounty-limit to 10.
It’s also disappointing that for being able to play most of the “new” (old but on higher difficulty and, I guess, with different rewards) content after level 20, you have to have friends that want to play with you. No match-making there.
Another rather gripe I have is with the way the game starts. The menu structure indicates that you are supposed to have multiple characters, but whenever you start a new character, you have to sit through the tutorial and intro-video, which are both only even remotely interesting the very first time you start the game. And all that for a story that is completely negligible at this point, without any actual characters. Oh, and don’t make the same mistake I did and start with anything but the Warlock class if you want to play in the Crucible. Compared to the i-win-button the Blade-Dancers seem to have, this class is extremely under-powered.
But why do I still like it? The controls are great, the universe, while tiny, is interesting, and it’s just the most beautiful game I’ve seen to date. I’ve never played any MMOG before so I was also new to the concept of raids. While match-making is not available for the one raid (!) that is in the game right now, it is for the smaller strike-missions, which I enjoy quite a lot :-)
Some also criticised the competitive multiplayer modes. Yes, as with everything else here there is too little content and variety, but I personally really enjoy Control and Skirmish and still play at least one match every day :-)
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