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Destiny Alpha Gameplay Leaks [Update: Luke from Bungie comments, read post 1557]

Gattsu25

Banned
Halo: CE wasn't popular until it was released. The first trailer they showed at expos for the Xbox was actually met with disinterest (it actually has a lot in common with how the Destiny trailers are presented, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijMxWftXvPg). .
Halo was not popular pre-release? What type of revisionist history is this?

People were hotly anticipating this game back when it was a PC exclusive..did none of that happen according to you?
 
no, he's wrong. From a technical point of view, producing a dynamic camera change in context with the animation is much, much more difficult, especially since you have to design the camera around the environment and make sure the character looks fine in adjustment.

Look at skyrim, the first person view is miles better than third person, why? because all you need to animate is the camera position and hands, the third person view require the character model, the camera, the action itself ect.
A great example of this is the third-person mod for Dead Island, which shows you why animating from 1st to 3rd perspective isn't easy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXmZX8iz2SE
 

Acccent

Member
no, he's wrong. From a technical point of view, producing a dynamic camera change in context with the animation is much, much more difficult, especially since you have to design the camera around the environment and make sure the character looks fine in adjustment.

Look at skyrim, the first person view is miles better than third person, why? because all you need to animate is the camera position and hands, the third person view require the character model, the camera, the action itself ect.

Yeah, except in a multiplayer game the character model and animations are necessary even if you're in 1st person, and the 'only' thing you do is to make sure the camera transition from 1st to 3rd person is okay – which is miles better than making an animation look good in both POVs.

edit: ah, that Dead Island video is a great example, yeah – it really shows that good 1st pers animations absolutely don't always translate to good 3rd pers ones, and making animations for complex movements that look good and convey the right information in both perspectives is very hard. (Note, it's also obviously possible to render different models and animations for your own character and other players', but still, you'd have to make something for 1st person that at least gives the impression of doing the same thing as other players, and that in itself is hard)
 

op_ivy

Fallen Xbot (cannot continue gaining levels in this class)
Halo was not popular pre-release? What type of revisionist history is this?

People were hotly anticipating this game back when it was a PC exclusive..did none of that happen according to you?

he is right in that prelaunch e3 xbox impressions werent indicative of how big, great, and important the game would end up being. i remember some footage with the warthog gunner in first person.
 

Booshka

Member
I can't know the actual reasoning behind going to 3rd person for some moves, but Dictator's right when he says animating 1st person is way harder as soon as complex movements are involved. Dishonored and Bioshock do it well (though Bioshock doesn't do anything too complicated) but the key difference is that they're single player games, and you only need look at Mirror's Edge animations in 3rd person to see that what makes sense in 1st person sometimes reeeeeally doesn't when you see the whole body. In 1st person you need to have onscreen feedback for what you're doing, so for instance pulling a fist back before a punch is super hard to do because you can only convey it with the other hand and the camera movement; and if on top of that you need to do it in a way that still makes sense when viewe from another player's perspective, it's quite the challenge.

(also did you really use shadowrun as an example for good animations)

Shadowrun doesn't have amazing animations overall, but the hand movement for powers and reloading is good. The utilization is good as well, visually the player understands exactly what is happening when they use a spell or ability.

Ladder animations aside, I think the game animates perfectly fine, and the lack of ladder animations was a conscious decision. They didn't want the player to lose any player control while going up a ladder, so fuck it, you just float up and down the things so you can shoot and use powers while on them.

I think going into Smoke in and out of Smoke is animated well in Shadowrun, so is the perspective change when you pick up Artifact or switch to Katana.
 
its not official, its a leak. and yeah, the guy isnt the best at showing off thee combat. lots of hiding behind cover, unloading a clip, hiding and reloading. rinse and repeat.

Fuck the influence that CoD has had on players.

Brad at Giantbomb played Wolfenstein The New Order on the Quick Look and even said "this is pretty Call of Duty", not that I blame anyone but that most shooter developers have gone for that model.
 

tasch

Banned
Yeah, except in a multiplayer game the character model and animations are necessary even if you're in 1st person, and the 'only' thing you do is to make sure the camera transition from 1st to 3rd person is okay – which is miles better than making an animation look good in both POVs.

what are you spouting off about? if the animations look good in third person, they'll look fine in first person, the animations look fine in first person, they wont necessarily look good in third person.
 

KingJ2002

Member
Once i saw the opening cut on the trailer... i stopped watching. I have a feeling this is probably part of Sony's Destiny Presentation at e3 and i don't want to spoil the surprise announcements for myself.

I can imagine Bungie / Activision scrambling to put something together now.... sucks for their marketing teams who work to put that stuff together.
 

Bsigg12

Member
Once i saw the opening cut on the trailer... i stopped watching. I have a feeling this is probably part of Sony's Destiny Presentation at e3 and i don't want to spoil the surprise announcements for myself.

I can imagine Bungie / Activision scrambling to put something together now.... sucks for their marketing teams who work to put that stuff together.

I hope this isn't a part of their E3 conference because that would mean we haven't seen a single new area of the game in all their showings of the game. This is probably what we'll be playing in the beta in July though.
 

RSB

Banned
I hope Bungie will give us the option to turn off the enemy health bars and damage numbers. I don't mind it on bosses, but every single enemy having a health bar is too much IMO.

Oh, and now that Marty is gone, do you think they will let us play without music? It would be really nice to finally have that option.
 

Acccent

Member
Shadowrun doesn't have amazing animations overall, but the hand movement for powers and reloading is good. The utilization is good as well, visually the player understands exactly what is happening when they use a spell or ability.

Ladder animations aside, I think the game animates perfectly fine, and the lack of ladder animations was a conscious decision. They didn't want the player to lose any player control while going up a ladder, so fuck it, you just float up and down the things so you can shoot and use powers while on them.

I think going into Smoke in and out of Smoke is animated well in Shadowrun, so is the perspective change when you pick up Artifact or switch to Katana.
All good points, but the powers animation isn't nearly as complex as what the Destiny guys want to make, and for good reason: in Shadowrun it stays in 1st person so making it more complex would have been super hard :p the priority just isn't the same.

what are you spouting off about? if the animations look good in third person, they'll look fine in first person, the animations look fine in first person, they wont necessarily look good in third person.
whatever, get aggressive by yourself
 

Sothpaw

Member
I hope Bungie will give us the option to turn off the enemy health bars and damage numbers. I don't mind it on bosses, but every single enemy having a health bar is too much IMO.

Oh, and now that Marty is gone, do you think they will let us play without music? It would be really nice to finally have that option.

In an RPG it is good to have as much information as possible. It might be too much of a handicap in high level content to warrant on "off" option.
 

rgnine

Member
Looks like i'm late to the party. People shouldn't ride off a game until they've had a chance to play it. Trust me, these videos are but a small sampling of what the game actually is. You'll see more come Tuesday at noon PST.
 

tasch

Banned
All good points, but the powers animation isn't nearly as complex as what the Destiny guys want to make, and for good reason: in Shadowrun it stays in 1st person so making it more complex would have been super hard :p the priority just isn't the same.


whatever, get aggressive by yourself

dont instigate then attempt to back pedal, you're pulling things out of the air.
you have double the camera system work, double the animation work, you've got a lot more clipping issues to resolve. You're talking from a theoretical background of "it's harder" but you say nothing and offer nothing to prove your point.

Not to mention the use of third person adds situational aweareness for effects, so while some abilities may work in first person, the bladedancer focus requires third person so that you can see where enemies are beyond your FOV. The golden gun also gives you situational awearness which helps alleviate the stress of the super.
 

BigTnaples

Todd Howard's Secret GAF Account
Game looks like halo. So Meh I've played that game already.


Lol. Really?

I get the borderlands comparisons, but it's really nothing like halo aside from being first person and having similar art.


Even if it was super similar, you didn't see people saying,

"Game looks like Marathon. So meh,I've played that game already." About Halo.



Before Borderlands released everyone was saying it just looked like a cel shaded Fallout 3. But that couldn't have been further from the truth.
 

Acccent

Member
Here's an example of quick transition from 3rd to 1st person using powers that looks smooth and clean to me.

Holding Artifact to Teleport to Gust and Shooting

Wait, I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing, because that video doesn't seem to contradict anything I meant (sorry if I miscommunicated that!)

What I meant, and what I think Dictator93 did as well, is that in Destiny the priority is "characters doing cool stuff" like that jump + smash you see in the leak at 1:41
  1. animating this in 3rd person in that game is necessary, since it's multiplayer
  2. making the animations in 1st person good enough to convey what's happening and be coherent with what's seen by other players would be super hard (and even more if the same models are used for 1st and 3rd person)
  3. so the camera just switches to 3rd person for a time which requires way less work
In Shadowrun, you do have the same multiplayer constraint, but the priority was to 'make animations that work in 1st person for the powers', which is why they end up being relatively simple (ie. just the left hand doing some stuff). The camera switching from 1st to 3rd when picking up the artifact does work (because that's not hard to do... and even then it's not particularly well-executed, but it does work); it happens not because of the character's movements, but because it's impossible to provide feedback of the character holding something on their back in 1st person (without any UI work of course).
 

HanselBot

Banned
Well coming from someone who never really played Halo, but loved Borderlands, this looks fantastic to me. I think I'll be wasting a lot of my life on this one ;)
 

quickwhips

Member
Lol. Really?

I get the borderlands comparisons, but it's really nothing like halo aside from being first person and having similar art.


Even if it was super similar, you didn't see people saying,

"Game looks like Marathon. So meh,I've played that game already." About Halo.



Before Borderlands released everyone was saying it just looked like a cel shaded Fallout 3. But that couldn't have been further from the truth.

I'm still waiting for Bungie to show me something cool. Right now its Meh. But I feel that way about some Halo Levels but then some are amazing. No one has played it yet. Its their job to get me excited. Its not my job to be excited by default.

It really doesn't look like Halo at all.


Well, other than the fact that it's a Sci Fi FPS.


It screams Halo to me.
 

op_ivy

Fallen Xbot (cannot continue gaining levels in this class)
oh come on, it definitely shares a lot with halo. cut the guy some slack
 
Surprised is not the word but just annoyed. Every game ends up like this and then some people complain about why we can't have nice things. It's like people literally suck the hype out of themselves or in other words, disinterest themselves from a game that otherwise is good. It happened with Watch Dogs and it ended up being a good game that people trashed to death. Playing the game makes a huge difference than just looks.



This is not a Win/Win to me. Maybe I'm optimistic all the time but I feel like people want to enjoy things more than they lead themselves to believe. Either way, it just sucks the wind out of what's to come for the game. There's still so much we don't know and we are already calling it quits? It makes no sense.

It is a Win/Win for plenty of us. That is the context in which I made the statement. For us, i.e. those that already like what they see. You are writing this under the assumption that it matters to me if other people like the game. As long as enough people are on board that the title gets great support then to me and possibly others the disliking by some is immaterial. It's funny that suddenly Bungie is a company with no track record of great games. In addition since we have seen next to nothing of the game it is somewhat laughable to watch people attempt to pull apart a few snippets of Alpha gameplay. But enough game footage for me to love it and others to hate it. To each is own. Chalk up a sale for me.

Honestly if I didn't know better, and perhaps I do not, I would think there are some sour grapes over Destiny being multiplatform and even more, the PS4 being the edition to own.

This all may sound like I am being a jerk but think about it. I am simply being honest and not spending paragraphs trying to convince you why you are wrong, why the game is great, and why you should be dancing for joy. People very often can only be told things they already know or already believe. I just choose not to care about counter opinions on something over which I am thrilled. I am sure there are games over which you are excited and for me it generates nothing.

As I said in a previous post a great many people will likely purchase anyway. Some of it due to natural hype and some because opiniopns will alter once more of the game is seen.
 

-PXG-

Member
This is Halo x Borderlands. That's not a bad thing. It looks and sounds cool. It just isn't new. It looks fun, just a bit slow.
 
I really want this game to be good. Like really really badly. I'm just not excited about it.

Normally, I start out skepticle and move toward a purchase but this is completely opposite. I would have bought it sight unseen but now I'm waiting for reviews. I think it will be good but I'm really hoping for a new Halo expirence. Something that blows me away completely.
 

op_ivy

Fallen Xbot (cannot continue gaining levels in this class)
Was this a PR leak to try and quell doubts?

lol, no.

watching shitty player run around in circles, utterly lost, stumbling into the same respawning enemies over and over again, before finally advancing the game only to devolve into peek and shoot gameplay?
 

jem0208

Member
It screams Halo to me.


The only "Halo" thing about it is Sci Fi.


As FPSs go, it's pretty damn different. ADS being a major thing, default sprint (although I admit that was in 4 but that's a different discussion entirely), enemy AI, basic weapon handling etc.

I really can't see many comparisons you could draw to Halo.


What it screams to me is Borderlands. This game really does seem like an MMO take on Borderlands. Coop focus, very similar looking combat, very similar RPG style mechanics, a focus on loot, medium sized areas interconnected areas to explore.

Make the game cel-shaded and I would believe that this is a Borderlands spin off.
 

Koobion

Member
This game has looked boring since I first saw it, and this really doesn't look any better at all. But pretty much any first person shooter does these days. I hope Bungie will try something new eventually.
 
Switching from 1st to 3rd person is extremely lazy design IMO. Also, it is disorienting. Those powers should be done in first person.

could you please explain how it is 'lazy' design? Like, what is the amount of effort being subverted by the developer by pulling the camera back and showing the action in third person view?

imo its just a design decision, and one that i like. I like seeing my character in full gear in all his/her glory pulling off those special moves. I like to see, for that once in a while time during a mostly first person view, my character's full body animation (with cape, cloth, etc) and having that perspective makes things less monotone.
 
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