I actually really liked it. It's been a long time since I really enjoyed a shooter like Destiny, but perhaps that is because it plays similar to Halo. It has a lot in common with Borderlands 1, less in common with Borderlands 2 as far as loot is concerned. This is probably going to be the biggest reason why I'll be buying this game on launch. Loot doesn't come as quickly as it did in either Borderlands game and I honestly prefer that. Most of the time, what drops is an upgrade to what you have already especially if you are in the habit of keeping multiple types of guns, which have their own skill trees to unlock, even on the uncommon variety. However, I do wish drops would come off of downed bosses. I feel like that was a wasted opportunity in the Strikes, Destiny's raids, it's only sometimes that something will drop at the very end and very rarely will the first boss drop something. Bit of a bummer.
The guns themselves are a bit more plain. Some people have called them boring, but I think I much prefer Destiny's guns over Borderlands 2's guns. There aren't any annoying gimmicks like guns firing six out of seven shots in their clips or anything similar. They do sometimes have an element effect on them. Borderlands 1 has the leg up on weapon "fun-ness" in my opinion, however.
I played two out of the three classes so far. Titan is very much going to be the "tank" character. Looking at their future skills, they get a spawn-able shield, a buff to allies' survivability and buffs to their melee attacks. They also have the greatest damage resistant score, but the lowest agility. Warlock is the "mage" class and they get skills that will lower cooldowns on their abilities and something else I don't quite remember. I much preferred the Titan class to my Warlock, but that was more due to my CQB fighting preference than anything else. Warlocks I think have the lowest damage resistance but one of the highest agility scores.
There are two types of PvP. Most of the matches appear to be gear and skill points balanced. Everyone has an equal chance to kill everybody else. However, there is also something called the Iron Banner. These are matches where your gear and skills matter and I personally got slaughtered in them. Loot distribution is kind of weird after the match as they are based on RNG. Something that is not too unusual in MMOs, however Bungie has said to bring your (paraphrased) "A game to these matches. It could mean the difference between getting that sweet assault rifle." I don't know if they meant going to the store to turn in what's effectively tokens for some really nice stuff, or that the loot distributed after the match was meant to go to the top players but didn't. They haven't said either way and it's causing no small amount of unrest at the Bungie forums (which are pretty toxic if that helps you imagine the rage over this small point). Either way, it sure helps to grind PvE content to get loot before going to Iron Banner where I felt like I was tissue paper compared to other players and I was playing Titan at the time. Gear is going to be a much larger aspect to the game than level I feel.
For PvE, you have story missions, an open world area and Strikes. SMs are usually about 15 minutes on average for Normal difficulty, but they all have a Hard difficulty. The AI for enemies aren't anything too revolutionary, but it's still challenging. Sometimes I could notice Fallen, enemies most similar to Elites from Halo, noticing when you are in ADS and juking to the side. Melee enemies notice when you are using a shotgun and will backpeddal away, forcing you to sprint after them. Even the Hive, who are more aggressive (similar to the Flood but a bit smarter) will try to back off when you bring a shotty out and kill a few of their friends. The open world could use a few more interesting missions. Most are "Kill X of Y and collect what they drop" but I've heard of some players getting a "Hunt this particular enemy and kill it" and said enemy will actually try to run from you. Haven't seen it myself, but I'd like to play it. There definitely needs to be a higher occurrence for dynamic events. The Alpha seemed to have them more often, but I've only come across a few so far in the Beta. Seems like it needs to go for a rate more in between the two.
Strikes are interesting. It's too early to tell how group makeup will affect how well you can do in them like in traditional MMOs. (Though I have a feeling it won't. Destiny doesn't really have a Healer class and each can succeed very well if they are playing the character well enough.) I only played with PUGs and my only complain with PUGs is that there is no easy way to set up a chat with your teammates besides manually inviting them to a fireteam, which is silly considering we are already in one to begin with. This is pretty important because the Strike has tactics. Whether it's survive mulitple waves of enemies, and it would be helpful to encourage your teammates to spread out over the area to cover more ground and cover each other, or bringing down the two bosses. There is an easy was to take down the Devil Walkers in this game and it involves attacking one of the spiderlegs as a team and doing enough damage to force it to reveal its weak point and then focus on that. Repeat and you can have him down in a few minutes. Otherwise it is a bullet sponge and it is very possible to run out of ammo when each of you are attacking a different weak point on the body. Or explaining that to beat the final Eye Boss Thing, it's a good idea to spread out and trade the aggro back and forth while shooting its weak point in the very center of the eye. Otherwise, I've had people group on me and it just kills all three of us with its powerful Eye Cannon Thing. Nothing too difficult considering that it is the first Strike in the game, but if its a sign of things to come then I welcome this sort of thing. Much more fun than zerg-rushing the enemies.
Probably the most disappointing aspect of this game are the class powers. Titans have a ground pound move that kills everyone surrounding you, Warlocks fire a powerful orb that kills enemies surrounding it, and Hunters get a golden gun with three shots that deal a huge amount of damage. I didn't read the description of future skills too closely on these, however so maybe they get more dynamic. As of now, at level 8, they are much less impressive than some of the class abilities you can get in the Borderlands games. There also seems to be a third, empty space next to the locked out sub-class we get at lvl 15. I don't know if that's something left on the UI or something Bungie didn't want to reveal in the beta, but I hope they have something more for us because it would help bring in a little more variety.
