Zero Punctuation: Destiny - Always-On Grind

XDSkyFreak

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... wow. The game was so boring you could actualy feel the apathy in yahtzee's voice.

I will say there is one thing about destiny that surpised me: People complaining about the repetitive horde mode misions and saying bungee can do better because Halo ... guys ... let me sum up Halo: Fight horde, move up corridor, fight horde, move up corridor. Halo was one fucking long sequence of horde modes broken up sometimes by bosses (hello destiny gameplay, how are you?). The only difference is that somehow in Halo it's ok but it isn't here because reasons (ok to be fair, it is funnier in Halo than in destiny, but then again the bar is so low it doesn't mean much). Bungee aren't some grand FPS prophets and they never did more than what destiny is. The only difference was that Halo was packaged better and didn't have stupid MMO crap tacked on. IMO, this game is a perfect showcase of how "skilled" at making an FPS this dev team is, now that all the glitter and skin of Halo has been stripped down.
 

Darth_Payn

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It looks to me that Bungie put too much work in making Destiny look pretty that they forgot to write a passable story for it, let alone give the characters and factions anything but the most bland and generic names. I pity Peter Dinklage being underused in something (second time this year! He was Bolivar Trask in X-Men: Days of Future Past, but wasn't shown all that much.), but work is work.
Evonisia said:
OT: A backhanded compliment for Halo? I'll take it.

Weirdly enough I was expecting yet another Bungie Yahtzee review which would have been really tiresome. This video was a lot more entertaining than the previous Bungie ZPs anyway.
Imp Emissary said:
I never got to play Oni myself, but the gameplay footage I've seen looks pretty fun.

Oh right, Destiny. Um....Yeah it's kind of boring to play alone. I don't care much for PvP, and even the co-op missions get boring when you can't talk to anyone and the bosses are just bullet sponges.

So yeah, until my friends get the game, I'm probably going to wait to play past level 16.

P.S. Also the loot system is shit. ;p
Color me surprised he said anything nice about Bungie, even while trashing their latest game. Did he use weeaboo as a compliment when he mentioned Oni? He at least tolerates Halo because it's not Call of Duty or Battlefield.
 

RiseUp

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XDSkyFreak said:
... wow. The game was so boring you could actualy feel the apathy in yahtzee's voice.

I will say there is one thing about destiny that surpised me: People complaining about the repetitive horde mode misions and saying bungee can do better because Halo ... guys ... let me sum up Halo: Fight horde, move up corridor, fight horde, move up corridor. Halo was one fucking long sequence of horde modes broken up sometimes by bosses (hello destiny gameplay, how are you?). The only difference is that somehow in Halo it's ok but it isn't here because reasons (ok to be fair, it is funnier in Halo than in destiny, but then again the bar is so low it doesn't mean much). Bungee aren't some grand FPS prophets and they never did more than what destiny is. The only difference was that Halo was packaged better and didn't have stupid MMO crap tacked on. IMO, this game is a perfect showcase of how "skilled" at making an FPS this dev team is, now that all the glitter and skin of Halo has been stripped down.
The trick with Halo is that it largely avoided "kill rooms", where you're locked in and have to defeat waves of enemies. In Halo, enemies are often not the objective, but an obstacle in between objectives, which really frees up what you can do with level design. It also had decent enemy AI and variety in enemy classes, both things that Destiny is sorely lacking. It's not just that Halo's gameplay is "more fun" than Destiny's, it's that it can provide a lot more variance in design than Destiny can, and thus feel less repetitive.
 

Roofstone

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Eh, never was interested in this. I shall continue to be so.

aegix drakan said:
They made Yatzee WANT to play the multiplayer for once, and then they blocked him from doing it.
They should put at least part of that on the box.
 

Steve2911

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Roofstone said:
Eh, never was interested in this. I shall continue to be so.

aegix drakan said:
They made Yatzee WANT to play the multiplayer for once, and then they blocked him from doing it.
They should put at least part of that on the box.
They do. Of course they do...
 

SerBrittanicus

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It's games like this that make me thankful they didn't release at the same time on pc. I wouldn't have brought it immediately even if they had of course, but at least we are getting plenty of warnings about the boring, grindy, repetitive nature of this game in case it does make the jump to pc.
 

gadjo

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I wasn't going to buy Destiny because I took one look at it and thought "is that pseudo Borderlands? Because it looks like pseudo Borderlands.". I just have no interest anymore in another "murder teh alienz" fest staring jumpy mcassultrifle.
 

Metadigital

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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. What is implied in all of these complains is that the reviewer thinks games should have massive beautiful environments that they can approach in way they want to and only see once before moving on to the next thing. Perhaps I'm the exception, but I think there is value in sometimes presenting material linearly. It's sometimes nice to give players a familiar space to get to master. It's fine for the game to point to its own strengths. The massive beautiful environment that I can approach once from any angle is fine, in theory (to some degree Skyrim does this), but it doesn't need to be every game and not doing this allows so much more fine tuning and unique assets to be used on each area. When reviewing a game, one shouldn't fail to consider the development process that goes into it.

Edit: That being said, the rest of the review is pretty spot on, though I think the game is probably a little better than he thinks because I didn't have to deal with connection issues.
 

Luciella

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I was very excited for Destiny since it was announced....AND tried that beta Destiny/demo some days b4 lauch like many ppls. Yet...when i finished it i was like......uhhh whats this? They made me go through the same map 5-7 times for almost the same missions and everytime go back to base. With long as hell loading times, regardless of the horsepower of my PS4.
The only change of scenary was the capture the flag mode. Thats it....
I though it was beacuse a beta/demo had limitations, but nope, people is telling me its the same ALL THE TIME.

And no story, what i played was all the story i was going to get.

So yeah, this game is a huge NOPE for me...till it goes for free in PS+ for PS4.
 

Luciella

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Metadigital said:
C) The game makes you revisit the same place over and over again and it's boring.
But IT IS boring.
Weren't you bored that in Dargon Age 2, there were like 3 mazes in the entire game and to "add variety" they just made you enter it from -previously closed doors- and just add the same mobs but slightly stronger?

It's like lazy level design...or no budget for more different places.
 

RiseUp

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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. What is implied in all of these complains is that the reviewer thinks games should have massive beautiful environments that they can approach in way they want to and only see once before moving on to the next thing. Perhaps I'm the exception, but I think there is value in sometimes presenting material linearly. It's sometimes nice to give players a familiar space to get to master. It's fine for the game to point to its own strengths. The massive beautiful environment that I can approach once from any angle is fine, in theory (to some degree Skyrim does this), but it doesn't need to be every game and not doing this allows so much more fine tuning and unique assets to be used on each area. When reviewing a game, one shouldn't fail to consider the development process that goes into it.

Edit: That being said, the rest of the review is pretty spot on, though I think the game is probably a little better than he thinks because I didn't have to deal with connection issues.
I agree with all this except that I still take issue with Destiny's environmental design. It all looks really pretty, and it sets up the promise of a vast world to explore, but you soon lose any drive to explore because there's nothing to discover other than marginally better loot. Add to this the fact that a planet's mission set will take you to almost every corner of the explorable area. Enemies in overworld sections always spawn in the same areas, and you can't undertake one mission after completing another, you have to select it from a hub. All these factors combine to make Destiny's environments, beautiful as they are, feel completely lifeless.

captcha: "Do you love me?"
If I did, you wouldn't have to ask.
 

European Uppercut

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I've played this game and played it hard since release and now I'm selling. And here's why.

I went into this knowing what to expect. A lot of people didn't and enjoyed the game right up until level 20 and the grinding for levels past that - but I knew I was in for something along those lines when I bought. I gave the game some time to show me something else, my friends were perfectly fine with sitting somewhere and grinding for 6 hours on end but I wasn't so I started to look at other options. More strikes that I've done a million times with strangers who are a mixed bag at best and unpredictable rewards at the end.

Not for me.

I looked at the Crucible, but it's a horribly unbalanced place that doesn't play the way that you'd expect, it's all meta based off your abilities now and besides, once again it's unpredictable. There is no reason to do better than the random guys on my team who literally spend rounds just killing each other... because they can get better gear than me due to the way that gear is distributed (I mean, come on - I went on a crazy good (for me) 25-4 run and one guy just killed himself over and over.. I got nothing and he got some damn nice gear). Nevermind the fact that I drop out of this mode a lot.

Not for me.

So that leaves just doing random missions over again... which mostly consist of Dinklebot guiding you somewhere, hacking something while you defeat waves and moving on to do that somewhere else. And that's just not for anyone after a while. So then there's stuff like the raids. And honestly? While it was fun, it was intolerable due to the random dropouts that we can't control. Once we finally got through it all, the more zealous of guys in our group wanted to do it again.. and I just don't have the time to dedicate to that. Besides, we did all of that and got basically nothing out of it. No rewards other than a shader that we couldn't have gotten MORE of from doing other things. Just simple crafting materials.

Not for me.

I don't begrudge Bungie for trying something different, and in a world where they could have figured out the formula to make anything ANYTHING other than farming the same spot for enemies for hours on end something worth doing.. I would be pretty content right now. But I've looked at the release schedule and realized that it's probably best to get out now while there is some demand, because even if I hold on to it - I'll never have the time to play it through October/November.
 

Thanatos2k

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The most expensive game of all time and it's the most generic boring sterile safe production ever made. AAA at its finest.

And a Hellraiser joke!
 

Atmos Duality

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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.
 

JenSeven

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Oct 19, 2010
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And I'm really surprised Yahtzee didn't bring this one up:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/9-Tabula-Rasa

Since it seems appropriate.
 

somonels

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Did people actually know it was "always on?" I never got that bit of info from the unavoidable sources. I figured it worked by drop-in MP and the occasional random sessions when connected.
 

DirgeNovak

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Jul 23, 2008
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Pretty much that. I'm enjoying it well enough, but it's so uninspired and generic. I'll most likely trade it in whenever something interesting comes out and I can't buy it straight away.

I'm surprised Yahtzee didn't mention those FUCKING unskippable cutscenes that play again whenever you replay a story mission for grinding. God those are insufferable. They were shit the first ttime around, why do I have to watch that tripe again?
Kenjitsuka said:
CAPTCHA: What do you associate with anaheim, ca...
I'm not bloody American, you asshole. Is it Disneyland?
It is! A winner is you!
 

Not G. Ivingname

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KDR_11k said:
I feel that this video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yXs0R370LU&list=PLswVJ_e2AEzlrULSPhdAcGm7hoNYFdCeN] may help with understanding the plot.
EVERYTHING IS EXXXXXPPPPLLAAAINED! D:

OT: So, not only does this game have the problem of "Your the chosen one who will save the world, so please form a neat line for all the other chosen ones," but tells you absolute shit WHY your the one whose Destiny it is to save everyone.