Anyone here lucky enough to get into the Destiny Alpha thing over the weekend? I spent a good few hours with it over the weekend and it’s a spectacular looking video game. So spectacular in fact that one of my favourite things to do with the game is take photographs. HNNNNG.
That lighting… those skyboxes. Destiny just looks gorgeous and over the weekend photos of the game in action started peppering all over my social network feeds. I thought I’d share a few. If you have some of your own, please feel free to post them in the comments below. I’ll add the best ones to the post.
September can’t come soon enough.
BuckE
Cas Britton
Kate Moore
(And here’s a few I took…)
So yeah, it certainly is a pretty video game.
Comments
29 responses to “The Best Thing About Destiny Is All The Photographs”
Went in to the Alpha skeptical but left pleasantly surprised. Definitely earned a purchase from me when I didn’t have a lot of interest before.
Had a run through on the weekend, nothing out of the norm gameplay wise but very solid, tight controls nice visuals and seemed to be diversity in gear and weaponry. I”ll be picking it up :D. Will jump on again tonight, I hear they’re giving us one more mission
how long is this alpha live for? I haven’t been home since Thursday. Was hoping to muck around with it tonight.
I’m not sure sorry, but I don’t think it’s going for much longer.
Alpha is supposed to be over, but tonight at 6pm they are giving out a group mission. Everyone supposed to gather in The Tower.
After tonight, the alpha is over, and Beta will open in july.
Can someone clarify for me if there is a single player campaign in Destiny, or is it ‘must be connected to the server to play’ kind of deal?
My internets are shite, and I was hoping this would have an offline single player component, but I dont think it has?
There is a storyline and single player missions, but they are interlinked with public spaces that you’ll travel through, to that end you will need to always be connected to play
From what I can tell from playing the Alpha…
Each area has a mix of individual missions and also free roaming options with beacons setting objectives if you want. Random events will also literally drop in. Then there is the RAID mission which you must have online / ps+ to participate in.
So what would you miss as a single player?
Raids and having randoms jumping around the maps from time to time. It also means that community events (giant robots and alien attacks teams dropping from the sky in drop ships and behemoth space craft) will be a lonely affair.
I think. I could be wrong, but it looks like there is a ton to do on your own. With mates is solid though.
If the alpha is anything to go by you will need internet connection to play.
it is an always on line game, its a small scale MMO
I’m sold @markserells!
The low level cap of the alpha annoyed me endlessly, but overall I found my early judgement of this title being an uninspired borderlands rip off was very harsh. It isn’t original, but it definitely has heart and a fair amount of swag to go with it.
But does it feel 500 million dollars good? From the gameplay I have seen it looks a bit average.
It’s a bit hard to tell if the Alpha represents what it’s going to be like but I would say no at this stage having played it for a few hours.
Does it represent 500 million dollars? Lets be real here, you are going to spend $100 at best, their budget does not effect you in the slightest. It is a good game, of which I feel the only problem being that some of the adventuring was not rewarded, but that might just be the alpha content restrictions.
I gave it a few hours over the weekend also and although it was pretty, I was overall disappointed. I’m hoping it was just the alpha, but I found the enemies to be quite dull to fight and were pretty dumb as well, they were getting stuck behind things and sometimes didn’t react to me. Also, the sidequest area was very dull. The missions that came up were quite boring, basically just go here, scan this, go here, kill that sort of stuff and nothing more intricate then that. Overall, I expected more then this from a $500 million dollar game. I’ll be trying the Beta when it becomes available but so far i’m not sold on this.
I found the same thing with stupid AI. Overall, the alpha was disappointing. It was more like a technical demo with a couple objectives thrown in, not alpha status at all. But, then, game devs don’t actually know what the product lifecycle looks like, obviously.
The alpha was only made to test the server capabilities, you shouldn’t expect full game capabilities from an Alpha, wait until the beta is released to pass proper judgements.
The alpha was already better then a lot of games I’ve played.
No game breaking bugs, the servers handled pretty well, and its helluva fun!
Also with the screenshots, I wish they add an option to turn off the HUD.
To be honest Mark, I was pretty disappointed for several reasons…
1. The graphics. Yeah it looks very pleasant.. when it is standing still. but in motion? jaggies, jaggies, jaggies… TBH i would have personally prefered they toned down the lighting effects a little, especially on the effects, and instead run an AA (anti-aliasing) pass over the whole thing.
maybe thats just me, personally jaggies annoy the hell out of me even more than lower polygon counts.
2. Weapon recoil. This was my biggest issue. Weapon recoil and balancing… Especially the recoil… its already hard enough to aim, but once you hit that trigger the last half of your clip ends up miles away from where you were aiming… This would be understandable if this was an overpowered weapon, but considering its an early starter weapon, and incredibly weak, this should not be the case.
my remaining reasons are not worth mentioning or considering because we only have a small piece of the cake. essentially combat feels to simplistic… given the rpg elements however, im sure that the whole game will unravel with a much more complex skillset as you level up your character.
I wasn’t impressed with the graphics on PS4 either. Like you said, jaggies, but I also found the textures to be very blurry and the quality over distance dropped off rapidly like I was playing a game with the old bilinear filtering.
While the game is mechanically sound I found it very dull. The most fun I had was with Strike mode.
I feel like there is some potential but I’ll wait for reviews before buying this game.
Wish I could play the alpha, but no PS4. My hype went down for this game, but I like these photos. One of my favourite things about GTA V was the horizons, but that was best when you were flying around in the military jet, not plodding along on the ground.
Not sure if left out of alpha, but the shadows suck. It made me slightly angry. Hope that the full 40GB+ release includes proper shadows on PS4.
I have to admit this is shaping up to be an incredibly pretty game.
The Alpha is what really sold me on Destiny. Prior to playing it, I really wasn’t that excited for the game. I was never a huge fan of Halo, and this kind of seemed like “Halo the MMO”. But I definitely came away pleasantly surprised. I think I’ll be picking it up.
I really do hope they have some more “grounded” Earth areas in addition to the Russia we’ve seen, as opposed to flashy, neon-coloured sci-fi alien planets. I know there WILL be those flashy areas, but exploring a ruined Earth just appeals to me more than going to Venus or whatever.
I had it on pre-order a while ago and now playing the alpha has made me certain to pick it up. Hopefully the beta gives a bit more to do as well. Also, i didn’t play around much in the crucible but the matches I did play were really closely matched, dunno if that’s because everyone was getting used to the game but one match the last 30 seconds the lead was literally changing every 2 seconds until the end. Makes me hopeful for the full release that I won’t be continuously having my ass handed to me but I guess the level cap in the alpha also helped with that.
Running around in (I’m assuming) single player mode though I was pleasantly surprised to see other players in the map in the same area and suddenly giant robot interrupted my running round looking for missions and everyone working together to take it down. Kinda like a MMORPG dungeon but out in the open in a fps
Sky Simulator 2014. So much cloud porn.
Master Race has had this stuff for eons. 😛 Just Cause 2? If you played with an Nvidia 400 series or higher you could enable Bokeh filter and all kinds of fancy shit on the sky. Clouds etc looked amazing.
Went into the alpha curious, but not overly enthused. Came out with an impression that it was the bastard child of Halo, Mass Effect, and Elder Scrolls Online… Overworld multiplayer seems similar to Journey – the only game whose multiplayer that I actually liked. Having only two or three other people in the same area is nice – it makes the area feel worthy of exploration, makes it feel like a frontier.
The missions were fairly unimaginative – kill these guys for drops, find and kill this target – but also had some interesting ideas – scouting and investigation missions were a nice change of pace. Can’t really say I enjoyed the public events, as every time one popped up, there was only one other person around to help, so we failed miserably.
The story mission presented showed promise, but made me worry about the voice acting… Lance Reddick does an amazing job, as always, but Peter Dinklage sounds so… phony at times (“Oh no, it’s… THE HIVE (cue dramatic chord)“, “That wizard was from… THE MOON”, etc). But otherwise, the story missions seemed pretty interesting.
And the strike mission was awesome. Mostly because of the matchmaking (we’ll see how it ends up after launch, tho), and the respawning mechanic (a few seconds of waiting for a revive, or 30 seconds of stress, hoping the last guy can survive until we can respawn). No organising a group, no holy trinity, no “I’ll get yelled at if I’m not doing [role-specific task]”. Just jump in, deal damage, revive who you can when you can, and try not to die. Hopefully it’ll stay that way…
I’m also a fan of the levelling – took me about three hours to get to level 8, but you can keep levelling your abilities, weapons and gear separately. Spent all of Sunday just wandering around, doing exploration missions, upgrading my gear.
I’m a bit curious how they do their overworld multiplayer – seems like it’s mostly peer to peer, considering I saw warping in some areas with certain players and not others. It’d also make sense given the lack of sub-fee…
It certainly achieved its marketing purpose – I pre-ordered it this afternoon. Giving every PS4 owner a chance for a taste a
few daysmonth before the public beta opens… Well played, Bungie. Well played.EDIT: Note to self: “Public beta is next month, doofus. Don’t stop reading months after the second letter.”
Does anyone know whether there will be space combat in the game? There seem to be many opporutunities where the player can hop in their ship and fly to a distance planet, but i’m really interested in knowing if you can engage in dogfights. I feel the game would be rather simplistic if it was purely an FPS.