Alright so after spending the better half of today with the Beta figured I'd share my thoughts on it. Spent about 500 hours on D1 between a titan and a hunter as a PVE player almost exclusively. I played PvP when i exhausted my leveling options and dabbled a bit in Trials which I felt was the best aspect of PvP in D1 but never got into it competitively or seriously just because I felt that in general the PvP was never balanced and kind of a cluster fuck (a fun cluster fuck at that but not something I could have seen really playing a lot).
I started with a titan (because best class duh) and was immediately turned off with the silent protagonist approach. Having your ghost speak to you 4 times and to just have your character turn their head towards him and then back to the front of the ship was jarring and immersion breaking for me. Really hoping this isn't representative of the full game because its so damn awkward in a game like destiny to not have a character who speaks; especially so because they spoke in the last game.
The mission itself I thought was pretty good. Graphics look good, the NPC characters interacting and performing their specials in bad ass fashion was a really nice and welcome addition to the game and really want to see more of this. It falls into the traditional destiny mission trope of go here, defend area, go there, kill enemies, rinse and repeat but in the context of the story (god that helps this mission out so much) it works well enough (I really really hope the structure of mission's have been improved in the sequel from the first). On a random side note, the rain in this mission looks bad, Like comically bad. It looks cartoonish, like someone took a white marker and just drew rain
It was weird and out of place in a level that otherwise looked pretty damn good and a step up from destiny 1.
A lot of people have commented on their disdain for the feel of the game and the weapons. On my first playthrough as a titan, I didn't notice it to be honest. Everything felt similar with maybe a bit less auto aim (and in my opinion thats a good thing). When I replayed with the warlock however I started to pick up a bit more on what people were saying. Guns feel very weak, headshots don't give that great feedback, and the warlock and titan felt heavy (but this can be changed by playing around with your stats btw). Separating the special weapons into heavy weapons feels like a really odd choice. It works for PvP (more on that later) but in PvE, its miserable to have a pee shooting autorifle switch to a pee shooting scout rifle where a shotgun or sniper would just help vary encounters up so much more and give you more capability of killing quickly (and as they said this is an old build so I guess we'll see how it goes).
Really I don't have a huge issue with the way the game feels but I also wouldn't argue with those who found it to be different either. I also want to comment on some of the weapon types. SMG's are trash. Straight up useless. I tried using them in both PvP and PvE and there really isn't any reason to pick the SMG class over auto rifles. Theyre just waaaaay too weak with a small clip so I'm not really sure what the utility is there. For PvP, I guess they didn't want to get into a situation like the shotgun where everyone was running in with a close quarters weapon and mowing people down in .5 seconds but this class needs some tuning (or maybe it already got some tuning since, old build). Exotics are also laughably inferior to what they were in D1, or at least the ones we got to use in the beta were. The Titan gatling gun looked cool and is useful enough but really feels like an auto rifle with a bigger clip that gets a faster firing rate rather than something that has a very unique function. The warlock SMG exotic, in the trash you go. This again likely comes down to them trying to fine tune balancing but I'm really hoping this isn't what all exotics are going to be like. In D1 they felt incredibly unique and going into end game content your build was essentially dictated around what exotic weapon you chose to use. Here they seem to be easily swapped in and out of place with legendaries with no real issue. Also is it me or do the rocket launcher, grenade launcher weapons in the beta feel pretty damn weak? The one rocket launcher I got Morrigan-D, was awful. Small blast radius (even with tuning the blast radius to be higher), ultra slow fire (I killed myself the first time because I jumped in the air to launch a shot and it didn't launch until about half a second after I pressed the button, at which time I had slowly fell in front of a rock and blew myself up). I'm wondering if power weapons of these types will be neutered to accommodate the fact that they occupy a slot with shotguns, snipers, and fusions. Really that would be the most Bungie "if something needs balancing nerf it" solution ever.
One decision that I think is fucking fantastic, is the class ability such as the cover wall for titans and the healing/weapons of light aura for warlocks. I totally wanted to see more varied play styles between the classes and while a lot of that has been homogenized in terms of subclasses these abilities work really well to distinguish the classes and give variety to encounters. I was so pleasently surprised when I crouched behind my titan wall and realized that when holding down left trigger it auto pulls you over the cover and simply letting go puts you back. PLUS it reloads your current weapon (So cool). THe warlock ability on the other hand is also fantastic. Healing or weapon buffs are fantastic support abilities that I always wanted to see make their way into Destiny. GG Bungie on that end, I really hope they give us more in the expansions.
Supers are also pretty amazing, especially the new sentinel ability. Like god damn do I love the fact you can alter between a bubble or cap shield within the same subclass, with sentinel being so bad ass to pull out. Shielding yourself to protect from fire and jumping out to one hit kill feels so good. It took me a bit to figure out shield throw, like even now I know its right bumper but for whatever reason it felt like it wouldn't come out all the time when I first started using it. But anyway, how bad ass is this:
http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/ThnkUdiane/video/34300280
It even blocked the titan shoulder charge! The warlock super is just a glorified Titanhammer mode which is fine but I would have liked to see something a bit more newish like sentinel (and while I haven't played the class yet, same goes for Hunters). Outside of functionality, the means to get supers as has been discussed is, tedious. Ive played games in Control where Ive gotten a perfection and failed to get a super even once. I'll discuss the implications for this when I get to PvP but for PvE, this and your abilities such as grenades and melee need to be a bit more frequent in the game; especially so given the weapon loadout system. Especially, especially so for hunters who as of now ostensibly got the shaft when it comes to abilities and supers.
The strike was a destiny strike through and through. Ive seen people calling it a mini raid both in terms of mission structure and in terms of boss encounter. Maybe if youve never played through an entire raid in this game sure. I also saw some people say this was a long strike. I beat it with 2 people in about 17 minutes which is about on par for most strikes on the first run. Now thats not to say its bad, not at all. But lets pump the breaks onf trying to make this out to be anything more than what it is. The addition of environmental obstacles is so welcome, both here and in the first mission. I lovedd the drills circling around the tunnels while youre ducking in and out of crevices while fighting cabal. Just a really cool idea and offered something that D1 was sorely missing. The boss encounter was a non raid boss encounter in destiny, which is to say, disappointing, The dropping to each subsequent level was nice and the fact that the boss changed weapons and used the floor to attack you (Seriously I was so lost the first time the floor became lava as to what could be hurting me considering I was in a titan bubble yet was still taking damage) was cool. But again hes a giant sized version of a regular enemy who has way too much health, made worse by the fact that the weapon slot system forces you to chip at him with primary weapons that do too little damage. I'd rank it with the better of strikes in D1 but I wouldn't say it radically altered the structure of them to the point of ranking it higher. Maybe if the boss design was actually interesting. Actually, I know I'd go crazy for this had the boss been pretty much anything other than "giant sized bullet sponge". I am desperately hoping this trend is not consistent through the sequel, especially so because we KNOW they can design fun boss encounters if the raid is anything to go off of. It doesn't have to be the extreme of raid puzzle boss or brainless bullet sponge-meet somewhere in the middle.
I think those are most of my thoughts on the PvE portion of the beta? Maybe I'll add more later but for now thats where that is.
PvP on the other hand: I love it. As I mentioned, I was never really a PvP guy in D1 and had no intention of being so for the sequel but I really like the 4v4 control mode. I like that the chaotic randomness is toned down and we now have more emphasis on teamwork and making your shots while not overly relying on grenades and supers to get that done. Now I know a lot of people are disappointed with this and I will say that I really hope they add a traditional 6v6 mode for PvP vets who aren't taking to this change, In fact, this seems like it should have been the logical thing to do really- emphasize the new 4v4 as the game's standard mode while also releasing with a traditional 6v6 mode as well. Its a win win in my eyes but its clear that that scenario is unlikely to happen given the map sizes and emphasis on 4v4.
Either way for something that I never intended to get into I'm finding myself playing non stop and really enjoying the changes here. It should be 60fps and it should have dedicated servers, especially so since this newfound emphasis is clearly the catalyst to the current game design which overhauled so much for the sake of PvP. The other mode (seek and destroy) is alright. I might love it but its very teammate dependent and good god with no match making (another area that I'm not sure if the game will ship with, does someone know this?) my teams have been straight up useless. I'll come back to this when I manage to get my raid team to try PvP out and see how it works when were cooperating.
All in all, as someone who is forever going to be the destiny cynic despite how much I enjoy the franchise, the beta got me pretty excited to jump back in. I don't really think the criticism being levied at this game is unfair; in fact I find most people's complaints are totally valid in terms of the game lacking innovation or uniqueness, tweaked gameplay and guns, poor design decisions such keeping PvE and PvP balanced together, etc. I myself would have liked to see a number of new additions and areas of focus be taken up rather than emphasis on story and pvp (My two biggest hopes were for mission structure changes and boss encounters to be interesting). But despite all of that I actually am loving my time with the beta and its totally won me over even knowing that at the end of the day were getting more of a refined destiny experience rather than a gargantuan sequel.
