Final Thoughts: Destiny

So it’s time for my final thoughts on Destiny.  Having spent a good 22+ hours in the game, I’ve had a chance to tinker with just about everything.  You can take a look at my account here.  Overall, I really enjoy the game.  I’ve been looking for a good co-op FPS game that isn’t just focused on the PvP.  That being said, I do have a few gripes.

Repetitive Mechanics / Gameplay: In story mode, ALL of the missions end up being you protecting your Ghost while it unlocks a door or hacks a computer.  Then to mix it up, most of the bosses just have HUGE pools of health and it ends up just being a race to kill adds before the next wave of adds gets there.  If this was a  traditional MMO, this would NEVER fly.  I found myself frequently falling asleep when I was playing at night because of the sheer repetitive nature of the game.

Nothing is explained: I found myself looking a lot on google for things I needed clarification on.  One of the biggest things is the lack of explanation regarding the grimoire cards.  Apparently you get some bonuses if you collect a certain amount of grimoire cards and level them up but nowhere in the campaign or otherwise was it explicitly explained.  In fact, nothing is really explained, you are apparently just supposed to inherently know what’s going on.  The MMO players might pick up on some things because of their background but FPS players most likely won’t know what’s going on in the background.

Lack of Communication Support: The game doesn’t support voice chat with people not in your direct PlayStation Party.  Which makes it extremely frustrating when your teammate is off looking at a wall while there’s a boss fight going on.  However, Bungie is going to remedy the situation so this won’t be a huge thing in the near future.

On the positive side of things:

Being able to tweak your character during load screens:  This is absolutely genius!  Destiny has really long load times but you can actually go to the character menu and tweak your character, change items, disassemble items, etc…  It helps to lower the annoying load time waiting and I am surprised it took this long for a game to really adopt that.

Good mix of FPS and MMO: I think Borderlands first did this really well but Destiny masters it.  The game is still definitely skill based, if you can’t aim your weapon, you aren’t going to do very well.  However, there is the character progression that you’d expect to see in an MMO.  Unlike other MMO games that struggle with balancing gear between PvP and PvE, Destiny simply makes all weapons do the same amount of damage in PvP whether it be a level one weapon or a level 20 weapon.  Your health and armor are not affected by gear either in PvP.  It helps to keep PvP purely skill based and helps to keep the PvE content balanced.  The one thing that can cause some consternation is that your class skills work as is, so a level 1 player wouldnt have access to the same skills a level 25 player with 40+ hours of game-time would have.

Mixing the two can also cause some distress for hardcore MMO players and hardcore FPS players because the addition of the other side can be difficult to get used to.

Like I said before, overall, Destiny is very well done and worth a look at.  The game is made 100x better if you have a group of friends to play with.  It’s a lot of fun to get together and roll through some bosses together!

Final Thought: Excellent MMOFPS.  At times is repetitive but the great co-op experience makes up for this.