WHAT TO WEAR AND SHOOT WITH?Building your legend in Destiny isn't subtle. It's about what you wear, what you carry. Even if there's no loading screens outside the initial drop into the location at mission's start, you will be spending some time on your character customisation screen. The controller Options button will default to this screen, with the fireteam party system and general settings on other tabs with a quick shoulder button press.
Your character avatar is bracketed by two boxed columns. Left is Class Focus and weapons, right your gear, with that side giving you a box each for helmets, body armour, leg armour etc. Everything offers perks, a lot include unlockable upgrades.
XP increases, gaining gear and earning upgrades are divided across a few systems. By killing enemies you earn XP. But the game's main drive isn't hitting the level cap; you'll reach that in a few days of solid playing. Instead, Bungie want you focused on weapon upgrades and pimping your character - the "horizontal growth" according to Investment Lead Tyson Green.
"The point were [the levelling] stops, [players have] already moved on to gear function and collection...," he explains during a roundtable Q&A on the subject during a post-play break. "It works similar to Diablo, in the sense that it really is about going on to the horizontal growth, trying new abilities and new builds, new weapons. With that same element that ‘I'm growing more powerful as a character, so I can do the harder activities'."
THE GHOST & SPARROW: Two key traversal aspects for your Guardian are mapped to the left and right of the PS4
Touch Pad. Tap left to call up your Ghost in the palm of your hand. This fist-sized machine will ping out a beacon that'll
mark your fireteam and objective locations, as well as hacking machines found around the world. You'll also pick up
deactivated Ghosts hidden in locations (the purpose of which is a secret for now). Right Touch Pad calls up your anti-grav
bike The Sparrow (below), materialising in and out of the world Tron-style, which is a much-needed help when you need
to get across Destiny's huge areas.So, it's weapons and gear buffs, alongside gameplay skill, that'll decide your survival percentage against the more fearsome creatures populating the galaxy. Exploring the world you'll come across chests which contain Glimmer - the in-game currency - which can be spent on new weapons, purchased from the public marketplace in The Tower.
This is the launching point for every mission, sitting in the shadow of the Traveller's corpse, the moon-like entity that for two hundred years exponentially advanced humanity's growth and gave the race's Guardians their powers. The Tower is the Guardians' central base and the social hub for the game. Glimmer buys weapons, and it sounds like the developer is ranging as far as it can from the notion of micro-transactions.
"We're focusing on the core sixty dollar experience," Green replies when asked directly. "Trying to keep the game away from needing a subscription or anything like that. It's not something we're really focusing on at all."
Unlike Halo, you can't steal weapons off dead bodies on the battlefield. Downed enemies will drop ammo, colour-coded to represent bullets for your primary, secondary, or heavy weapon. That third tier is a new inclusion, and one the team spent a long time scratching its head to work out its correct placement in the weapon wheel, according to Bungie's Community Head Eric Osborne.
"We wanted to break out and add this Heavy category, where you bring out this thing with huge high-weapon damage and it feels awesome. For a while they played with the standard weapon swop, and it was alarming how confusing it got between three because we'd been trained with two for so long. Once they changed it to the hold [of the weapon switch button], it worked perfectly."
So, you trade between primary (Scout and Focus rifles, magnum-like Hand Cannon) and secondary (Sniper Rifle, Shotgun) with a tap, or hold to pull your heavy (Rocket Launcher, Chain Gun).
The Secondaries and Heavies have that similar punchy audio texture of Halo, but to our ears the Primaries sound underwhelming. There are multiple variants of each weapon type with their own stats, and while only some will be upgradable, every weapon has its own unique name. It's a huge breach of the small but perfectly-balanced Halo roster, but keeps with the MMO structure of the game. "They've all a defined role, they have a reason to exist," says Osborne of the expanded weapon list.
‘Sound Good Advice', ‘Thunder Lord', ‘Truth' are just a few, the comedic naming clashing with the setting of this otherwise poe-faced sci-fi world. (It's the same with the physical emoticons tied to the D-Pad, letting you wave, sit or dance during your missions). Currently Bungie won't say what the weapon limit is, and are only talking these UNSC-analogue types, but we doubt the final game's arsenal will be limited to human-made weapons.
But enemies do occasionally drop loot, and loot can also be found hidden around locations or in chests. Loot's colour-coded as well; green's common, blue rare and gold for exotics. Not all will be specific to your Class, nor be available to use until you've XPed to a certain level. Some will come as encrypted data that needs unlocking back at The Tower.
You can zoom in on new gear when your Guardian tries it on. Even in the demo there was a lot of variety in looks and
texture to individual pieces...
.... as you can see above. Your character's individuality isn't limited to different emblems and colours in Destiny. Bungie
wants you to take pride in what you're wearing into battle.While you're locked to a three-weapon loadout on the field, you carry multiple guns and gear with you at all times - each customisation category box opens up to a larger grid to offer more choices.
The exact limit of this is yet to be decided, but each player will have a personalised Vault back at The Tower to store excess equipment. The idea is to allow you to change up your load-out to match the situation. However, there's no shortcut to have customised load-outs available at a button press, and switching weapons means your new choice materialises with no ammo. "The idea is that you don't switch between them endlessly," explains Lead Designer Lars Bakken of the decision. "It doesn't mean you won't have ammo for them. Within the next kill [downed enemies] drop ammo for that weapon."
The push to spend time in this screen, according to Bungie, is to generate pride in your look, your growing legend. Motivation beyond seeing the endgame or level cap will be spotting fellow Guardians equipped with cooler gear and weapons than you currently have, pushing you to explore and loot to better yourself on the battlefield. That's partly why Bungie won't tie XP level to public space meet-ups; they want you to be amazed at how quickly higher-powered Guardians can take down even the biggest threats.
BULLET BATTLES...But what that also means is that you'll need to find a quiet spot on the battlefield to roll out new weapons. It's less fiddly than you think, though during our Strike mission demo we've only a few same-level weapons to worry about. The Hand Cannon becomes our default Primary, a two-shot headshot magnum that's a beast against most enemies, and the shotgun for when we're exploring corridors and refinery interiors.
We also mainly stick with the Chain Gun as our Heavy, an ammo-chewing monster that drops both single higher-class Fallen and charging groups quickly. Good to note is that Bungie are continuing to embrace the same three-way combat from before, as we stumble on a Hive Vs Fallen battle in the bowels of the refinery and mop up the remainders with our trusty boomstick.
The mission is pegged around the thirty minute mark to complete - if we take the straight path mapped out by our Ghost AI (see The Ghost & Sparrow box out for Destiny's replacement for Cortana).
At one point in our third play of the Strike, Peter directs us to the end of one corridor after our Horde-like encounter with waves of multiple nasties. There's a massive hole burrowed through the earth, which he leads us down into. He points out the network stretches on for kilometres, and if followed, would take us through high-level enemies and loot, and eventually spill us out into the massive valley which was demoed at that morning's presentation. We only have to stick to our path if we want a quick Strike; there's good reason to range further.
Come the mission's big open area, reminiscent of the small sandbox environments Bungie like to flood their games with, we step into a bowl littered with destroyed buildings, plenty of Fallen and a bloody big tank at the other end. We switch to sniper rifle, but have to wade in for a spell to down enough enemies to restock the weapon's ammo. Then it's back to the bowl's edges, headshotting from afar and dodging when the tank's cannon occasionally trains on us. A slide manoeuvre, instigated by pressing crouch while sprinting, gives you an extra degree of mobility. "Because it's fun," lead designer Lars Bakken states simply when we ask about its inclusion.
CROSS-FORMAT: While cross-platform competitive and cooperative is out of the question "due to the platform holders"
says Investment Lead Tyson Green, it looks like you will be able to carry your character across two generations of the
same machine. "We don't want you buying a PS4 at Christmas and not being able to bring your character from PS3,"
he explains.The tank's legs have to be taken out to disable it for a short time, at which point we switch to our rocket launcher... but we've no ammo. Cue another round of dodges and close-range combat, resurrecting downed comrades when we can, leaving them to their thirty-second respawn at other times. If all the team die, we get a ‘Wipe', putting us someway back in the Strike.
Combat is fast, fun. At times, difficult. We'd put the intensity a couple of notches above Halo Normal, a little below Heroic - we die mainly because we're cocky, not crap. The tank's not even the Strike's end-boss; that comes later when we're given a sneak glimpse of a massive sphere collecting souls (the full battle will be at E3 apparently). We run through this Strike three times, and only in the last do we start using our Supers - the big differentiation between Bungie's old firefights and its new ones.
source:gamereactor
