Ragar would love for more shooters to have levels and gear with stats on it

If you’ve been following either the Playstation 4 or Xbox One, you’re likely familiar with Bungie’s Destiny. For many of us, that was the big “you need these new consoles” title announced. The folks behind the original Halo trilogy were back with not just another first-person shooter, but their own take on expanding the genre. While the September 9^th release date is still over a month away, Bungie has been bringing in players for alpha and beta testing of its game. Last week we had the first round of beta testing for prospective PS3/PS4 players, and this week the Xbox fans will get their chance to try it out. After some time with the alpha and quite a bit more with the beta, I’m ready to talk about my impressions of the game thus far.

Destiny Makes Me Want a Borderlands MMO

The first time I heard of Destiny was while watching the Sony press conference at E3 last year. I knew Bungie was working on something after leaving Microsoft to go independent, but I hadn’t followed them that closely. They specialized in shooters for consoles, designed to be played with a controller. I enjoyed the first couple Halo games, but I vastly prefer aiming with a mouse and keyboard. In addition, my preferences for shooters had shifted after playing games like Borderlands and Firefall. Those games satisfied both the FPS and RPG fan in me, giving me classes with abilities, equipment with stats to balance, and various fun toys to use in blowing everything up.

When a Bungie rep played the game on stage at Sony’s event, it looked like it would scratch that Borderlands itch I’d had since beating the sequel: a solo campaign in a science fiction setting that could be played in co-op with friends, open world areas with random events to participate in with other online players, and customization everywhere (class choice and talents, equipment stats, equipment traits, leveling, etc). Of course it still had that “only for consoles” issue, but I was looking for something new to play on my PS4 anyway until The Order: 1886, so I went ahead and preordered the game to get my beta access.

Let’s start with the RPG mechanics since that was the main draw I had for the game. You can choose one of three Guardian classes in Destiny: Titan, Hunter and Warlock. The Titan, my class of choice, is your heavily-armored assault trooper; he won’t win any races, but he can take a beating while dealing damage and he’s great for close quarters. Hunters are like a hybrid assassin/ranger: they specialize in stealth dagger kills, long range fighting and mobility. Finally, the Warlock would be Destiny’s equivalent of a caster class with an emphasis on using control of the Void to smite their foes. These base classes determine what armor you can wear, what talents you can choose, what subclasses you can specialize in, your grenade effects and what cooldown powers you’ll have access to.

Our fearless leader Cyliena also tried her hand at Destiny

As you level your Guardian you’ll unlock new abilities and talents. The left half of the first row of talents is for unlocks – your first grenade at level 2, movement ability at 3, special attack at 4, etc. Everything from row 2 and down is where player choice comes into play. The two talents under your grenade ability are other types of grenades with effects of their own – you can only pick one. For your movement and other active abilities, you can select one talent underneath each power to modify their effects. As a Titan, I can make my Lift movement power take me higher, I can give myself greater control over which direction I move while flying up or I can frontload a strong burst of momentum when I use it for quick escapes. My Fist of Havoc special attack is a devastating AoE by itself, but with the secondary talents I can create damage fields with it, cause shockwaves on the ground upon impact, or even go Death from Above to rain death upon my enemies after Lifting into the sky. When it comes to the right side of the talent tree, these are all “one per column” but they’re more traditional passive talents. Two columns are for bonuses to your various statistics – you can have one bonus from each, but there’s no way to be great at everything. The other two are for triggered effects – increased duration/range/benefits of grenades and powers, effects that proc on kills/sprinting/ammo pickup, etc. Finally there’s the button on the right, Illumination. Normally you can swap around your talent choices whenever you please, but by selecting Illumination, you lock in those choices. You’ll be given a fresh copy of the class in case you want to level it again (at a faster rate according to what information I can find) for a different loadout, but that first build is now permanent. Why would you do this? Locking your loadout will give a bonus to either Armor, Recovery or Agility, depending on which class you’re locking.

The classes and talents offer a significant amount of customization and choice, but what about the equipment? Your weapons are class-agnostic; if you really want to run around as a Titan with a sniper rifle and a hand cannon pistol, you are perfectly free to do so. In many cases you’ll be swapping weapon styles anyway, be it to match the content you’re working on, to mesh with some bonus you’ve unlocked, or simply because the game keeps giving you upgrades for weapons you don’t use. Your armor will have class restrictions depending on how heavily armored the piece is, but at their core you’ll see four basic stats aside from the armor value: Discipline, Intellect, Strength and Light. The first three are all tied to cooldown reduction – the more you stack, the faster you can throw grenades (Discipline), use your special (Intellect) or attack in melee (Strength). Light isa completely different matter, however. For the MMO players out there, the closest analog I can really come up with is Hit Rating – the amount of Light you have will cause you to do more/less damage to higher level enemies. While all four stats are important, Light will be your main gating factor for endgame since the mobs will continue to get tougher while you’re stuck at the level cap.

There’s even more customization beyond that though when it comes to your equipment. Many of the pieces you find will have greyed out traits listed at the bottom like “grenade kills reduce your melee cooldown” or “increased magazine size with Pulse Rifles”. These are unlockable traits – once you’ve used a piece of equipment long enough, these traits are available for purchase with the in-game currency, Glimmer. Like your talent trees, you’ll be limited to one trait per column on your equipment, so at higher levels you’ll be forced to choose how you’ll build each weapon.

The Only Reason I Have Non-Melee Kills is Because Fist of Havoc and Storm Fist Have Cooldowns

Now that I’ve talked about all of the RPG customization stuff, some of you are probably wondering about the whole “shooter” part of this roleplaying FPS. Before we start, I’ll be frank: I’m an MMO player, not an FPS expert. I’m not going to be able to tell you just how balanced the weapons are to one another, nor will I be able to give you a detailed rundown of the Crucible and how PvP here feels versus Bungie’s previous Halo games. My focus for both this beta and the game when it launches is playing through the story and the PvE content, so I’ll be talking about my time with that aspect of the game.

First off, let’s talk about the console controls. So far this is probably the cleanest console FPS I’ve played when it comes to aiming – it’s no keyboard and mouse, but I could control my aiming well enough to be effective, though I’m unlikely to be headshotting anyone while running without aim-assist being generous. The weapons themselves felt great to use and there was a wide variety even within the different categories of weapons (rate of fire, damage type, etc). Lift was useful for getting around my limited speed as a Titan, though it was unlikely to get me out of trouble should I pick too big of a fight. Flashbang Grenade and Fist of Havoc were fun abilities to use and almost always on cooldown to clear out a room or buy me time to run and heal. My favorite of all of them though was Storm Fist and really just melee attacking in general. For most FPS games I’ve played, melee was treated as a last resort. You have some games like Borderlands with melee characters, but many of those treat melee as “use this only when your special power is off cooldown or you’ll die.” In Destiny your melee attack is not only useful, but it’s even a part of each class’ talent tree. It’s entirely feasible to Flashbang a group, then one-shot a few of them with melee attacks while they’re all disoriented. Even without the grenade, I found myself often using my melee attacks to take out enemies, whether to save on ammo or simply because it feels really satisfying to kill an alien with one punch.

For the PvE players out there (and the PvP folks until they unlock the Crucible), Destiny is built around planets and moons as the hubs with individual maps scattered across each. Once you’ve completed the first map and unlocked your ship, you’ll make your way to the Tower, the Guardian-protected city and player hub with shops, vaults, bounty quests, etc. Some story dialog and quest breadcrumbs later, it’s back to your ship in orbit to pick your next map. Each planet/moon has various markers showing maps you have access to, their level and their content type. Most are story maps where you must play through them in order to unlock the later maps; the beginning is open-world, but once you get to the final area with the plot’s boss/event, respawns are restricted and you’re in an instance with only your fireteam members. Some are exploration maps, an expanded version of that open-world beginning where you have a smattering of random quests you can pick up across the map, various enemies to slay and no hard time limit. Many of these maps can even be scaled up in level to allow for replayability. So far the only one of these I’ve tested was scaling the first post-ship map from its original Easy (level 2) to Normal (level 5) and all that did was increase the number of mobs, but I’m curious to see if even higher difficulty settings might add new mechanics or behaviors to boss fights.

If group content is more your style, there’s also Strike maps, Destiny’s equivalent to repeatable dungeons. Picture your story missions and their end instances, but built around three-man teams and designed to take 15-30 minutes. Three-man dungeons not hardcore enough for you? Destiny also offers Raids, endgame six-player dungeons designed to take hours to clear. I haven’t had the opportunity to test out a Strike yet, but I’m definitely interested in doing so at launch. In particular, I’m curious how they stack up against the instanced “dungeons” in Defiance, which failed to grab my attention when I tried them during my brief stint with that game. Destiny does already have the advantage over them in one respect though, since they’re actually willing to give me equipment upgrades on a regular basis.

Conclusion

I’ve reached Destiny’s beta level cap of 8, completed all of the available story missions and put in quite a bit of time with the Exploration map, including soloing a Spider Tank I had absolutely no business fighting (spoiler: Ragar 1, Spider Tank 20+). After all that time, what are my current thoughts about Destiny? Am I still glad I preordered the game? Absolutely! While I would still rather play with a mouse and keyboard (never tested plugging them into the PS4 but I’m assuming it’s not supported), I had a blast playing through the game and I’m looking forward to running some Strikes with my friends in September. When you think about Bungie, you normally think about their multiplayer on Halo, but I’m very impressed at what Bungie has managed to accomplish for Destiny’s PvE content. If they can accomplish something to this scale with a console FPS/RPG, I’d be curious to see what they could pull off if they tried to go up against Firefall or Defiance in the MMOFPS genre.

Michael “Ragar” Branham