Destiny First Impressions (watered down Borderlands)

[gigastar]

Wonder how many people were fooled by the artificial hype the gaming sites were building for the last month...

I guess we will find out when Activision starts trumpeting its sales figures next week.

 

[lassiie]

I know people are gonna rail against me for this, but I do think it's a Borderlands clone. With none of the soul, charm, or fun of Borderlands. The game is mechanically sound and environments look nice, but the game just feels kind of hollow. There's also a huge problem with enemies being bullet spongy to the point of ridiculousness.

Haha, it's exactly what I said in my title of this Forum Post (Watered down Borderlands).

To be fair, people said the low level of Destiny makes it worse compared to the 50+ levels of Borderlands 2, which I agree to a certain extent, however most of the skills in the 3 skill trees have one skill thats leveled up 5 times. So in reality there is only about 25 levels. However, the 3 separate skill trees with VASTLY different gameplay styles is what makes it interesting. Destiny tried to do something like that with changing your grenades or special move, but ultimately they are very minute changes. They tried to incorporate this kind of like how it was done in Borderlands, however, because of the PVP aspect of destiny it was nearly impossible to do, because they couldn't make any awesome skills in their tree that really made you excited to level up, or see combinations of skills that you could experiment with to make unique builds. So instead of ever really 'powering up' all the changes felt linear. Change how your grenades work or your ability works. In contrast with Borderlands, you got skills that drastically altered the way you played and made you feel more powerful as you leveled up, like Axton being able to summon multiple turrets or Maya being able to apply all elemental effects on a phaselocked enemy.

The other reason it gets compared to Borderlands is the way weapons work. Once again it feels like they completely missed why this worked for Borderlands. In Borderlands, you have multiple weapon types with multiple manufacturers of each weapon. Each manufacturer has distinct characteristics on how the weapon functions. Like Maliwan weapons are elemtally focused, Hyperion weapons start off inaccurate and become more accurate the longer the trigger is held down, and Tediore weapons are thrown like grenades when reloaded and explode for damage based on how much ammo was left in the clip. Not only does each weapon focus on different stats, like reload speed, magazine size or recoil, but each weapon has a really unique and fun characteristic that makes them memorable. All that is just scratching the surface on the complexity and variety of the weapons in Borderlands. Destiny has different weapons types but it just essentially becomes equip the weapon with a bigger number. Boring and lifeless and nothing memorable.

 

[stroopwafel]

i'm kinda curious as to what you find to be brilliant in the "gameplay" asides from space ship travel is there anything new in this game that hasn't been done in a halo or cod game before?

Nothing new, no, I just think the gunplay in Destiny is really satisfying. It makes the shoot-outs a lot of fun. Personal taste ofcourse but I think its the one redeeming factor of what is an otherwise fairly bland game. But like I said, this can also have to do with never having played a Halo game and being unfamiliar with Bungie's style.