DoomyMcDoom said:
Indeed,also for those of us who want boss fights, and some semblance of story progression in an mmofps, there's also warframe.
I disagree.
I would hesitate to call the 2-3 minutes of twink-rush combat a "boss fight" by any stretch of the imagination.
Lephantis (the Orokin Derelict boss thing formerly known as the G3 Golem) was the closest thing to a real boss Warframe had before I quit four months back, and I could still solo it pretty easily in under 6 minutes.
And story? "Lotus tells you to do things. You do them." isn't much of a story.
There's lore and fluff, but none of it means anything because the creators are just making it up as they go along.
After that, it's all grind-grind-grind-grind-grind-grind.....grind for BPs, grind for Mats, grind for Credits, build, then use your new thing to grind some mastery.
Metadigital said:
Okay, so most of the review is fair, but there was one criticism that bugged me - and it's a criticism that bugs me in general.
It's when the reviewer complains about the environment in one of several ways:
A) The game brings too much attention to its environments by forcing you to pay attention to their detail.
B) The game brings you on a linear path and it makes the environments feel like a theme park.
C) The game makes you revisit the same place over and over again and it's boring.
Seriously, reviewers, stop this. These are all petty complaints. You are literally complaining because the environments are too good. It makes no sense. Obviously, if a huge amount of development goes into the environments, they will tend to be 1) important for gameplay, 2) critical to include, and 3) expensive and time consuming to produce.
1) Isn't guaranteed. A great deal of effort spent on something superficial is just a lot of effort wasted.
Destiny's environments are mainly window dressing. They look great, admittedly.
2) Is ambiguous. Why is it critical?
3) Is just circular logic.
"They put a huge amount of development into the environment...therefore it's expensive and time consuming!"
-> "It's expensive because it's expensive! They aren't going to waste it!"
Basically, if the environment serves little function beyond being pretty to look at (and that is the case with most of Destiny's zones), critics are entirely in the right to address it.
Now, there is such a thing as giving an environment its own "identity", but to do that, the environment must be important to gameplay, and not just to look at. Even small interactive details can work wonders (Deus Ex is a brilliant example of that).
Good games not only make the environment interactive, but interactive in ways that aren't strictly linear. Poorly designed games reuse environments bluntly to pad game length.
Though it's not as though the critics are entirely without fault for this trend; for years, it was their overemphasis on the time-wasting kind of backtracking that lead to the decline of non-linear level design. Producers went so far overboard in ensuring the player didn't bored or lost that nuanced level design is an extreme rarity (at least from AAA) outside of maybe sandbox games, which are non-linear by their nature.
Ironically, they now complain about games being too linear...
If there's any point where I'd needle the critics for when they bring up the bugbear of level/environment design, it's that.
