First, you play Destiny. Then, you complain about Destiny. Then, you play some more.
That’s been our process over the last few weeks, anyway. Several of us here at Kotaku have been playing Destiny regularly, and every time we play, we come up with more things we wish the game did differently.
Bungie has already improved the game’s loot system and says that more fixes — like expanded chat options — are coming in the near future. So, I polled Luke, Tina and Jason on which issues we wanted Bungie to address first. We came up with 30 things. Some of them are small, some of them are big, but all of them would help make this game easier to play and more complete-feeling.
Two notes, before we begin: First, these suggestions are mainly for PvE play as opposed to The Crucible; we’ve been spending most of our time doing that, so that’s where our focus is. Second, we have no idea how technically feasible most of these additions would be, or how much of a headache it would be for Bungie to add them after the game’s launch. Doubtless some would be easy fixes, while others would require a huge amount of work and re-shuffling. But hey, we want what we want.
Ready? Let’s go.
1. Sparrow Races
The title says it all, really: sparrow races, man! How in the world someone can put super awesome speeder bikes in their game and then not organise some way to race them is beyond me, but somehow Bungie did it. It seems like only a matter of time until the game offers some organised way to race our sparrow speeder bikes against other players, and we hope it comes sooner rather than later.
2. A Comprehensive In-Game Stats Page
I have killed so, so many aliens in this game. Unfortunately, unless I want to leave the game and download the smartphone app, I can’t tell you how many. I also can’t tell you how many hours I’ve played, how many strikes I’ve completed, how many times I’ve died, or how many bullets I’ve fired. There should also be an easy in-game way to check stats like your Vanguard or Faction rep, for that matter.
3. Better High-Level Armour Customisation
At the moment, high-level armour doesn’t really allow for any cosmetic customisation. You upgrade it as far as you’re willing to take it, but the armour itself doesn’t change in appearance or allow for any customisation of abilities. We’d love to see some sort of deeper armour customisation — not just of appearance but of ability, or perhaps a “gem”-like system that lets us weld items onto our armour to gain additional buffs.
4. Better Ship Customisation
Similar to armour, it seems like at some point we should be able to customise our ships to better reflect our characters and our personality. Maybe place a cool turret somewhere, or change the colour of your thrusters, or customise your paint job… it’d be nice to feel like our rides reflected something about us other than just whether or not we’ve been lucky enough to find a rare ship while doing patrols.
5. More Landing Zones
Each planet in Destiny offers a single starting point for patrol missions. We’d love to be able to choose our landing point, rather than have to navigate all the way from the Steppes to The Divide every time we want to go take out that Fallen Walker in the public event. Speaking of patrol missions…
6. Patrol Mission Difficulty Modifiers
One of the things that makes Destiny‘s missions more replayable is the fact that we can modify the level and difficulty to keep things challenging. Unfortunately, that’s not true of patrol missions, even though they’re still a good way to earn faction rep and complete bounties. We’d love to see a second difficulty setting — maybe just a single one — that kicks the base level of the grunts on each world up by ten or so levels. It’d require segregating players into one patrol zone or the other, but it would make patrolling so much more challenging and fun for high-level players. Maybe patrol missions completed in the higher-level zones could also pay better. I know, CRAZY IDEA, but just a thought.
7. Launch To Tower, Not Just Orbit
About half the time we launch to orbit, we’re not going to head to another planet to go on another mission. Rather, we’re only passing through space on our way to the Tower to cash in bounties, decode engrams, and do whatever else. When we bring up our ghost in the field, two face buttons are still unassigned — it only makes sense that one of them could be designated a “Launch to Tower” button.
8. More To Do In The Tower
The Tower has a woeful lack of interesting things to do. “Find Xur” and “Turn on the Fan” are some of the closest things to actual activities, and it’d be nice if Tower could continue to grow and offer more and more things for players to do. Maybe some sort of goofy jumping puzzles, or a scavenger hunt, or at least some holiday-themed decorations and activities? Maybe turn on double-jump and let us do our own footraces? The soccer ball is cute, but hopefully it’s just a start.
9. New Shaders At The Store, For Pete’s Sake
It’s the strangest thing: No matter what her restock counter says, the Guardian Outfitter at the Tower never seems to get new shaders in stock. That’s fine if you like Provincial Royale and Jester Apogee, but if you dreamed of trying out one of the many other shaders out there, you’ll have to win them in the Crucible or in a random drop. We’d love it if the Guardian Outfitter would actually start getting some new stock, even if it was just once a week. It’s amazing she’s stayed in business this long, frankly.
10. Built-In Shader Previews
It’s nice that you can go to this site to preview a shader you’re considering buying, but it’d be even nicer if Bungie built in a preview feature for shaders similar to how it lets you preview other gear. Surely there’s space for a dressing room somewhere on Tower…
11. Meaningful Clans
The clan system in Destiny feels like a very thin start — it’d be nice to see clans become more meaningfully integrated into the game, similar to other MMOs. It’d be nice to be able to create and manage your clan in-game, and even to have access to a shared pool of money or bounties. It’d also be cool if every clan could be given their own space on Tower (they’d all occupy the same area, of course) that you could customise, where people in the clan could go to hang out, get clan-specific bounties, that sort of thing.
12. Custom Emblems
The expensive legendary emblems are all pretty cool, but they also feel a touch haphazard and random, since they have all been designed by Bungie. We’d love the opportunity to design our own emblems, the better to help our clans stand apart. Bungie’s offered that sort of customisation in Halo games, so hopefully it’s only a matter of time before it makes its way to Destiny.
13. Opt-In Proximity Chat
It’s great that Bungie is adding opt-in chat for crucible multiplayer and strikes, but it’d be nice to see something similar for proximity chat while out exploring in the world. If you find a high-level player while doing patrol missions and you’re thinking of going on the Nightfall Strike, wouldn’t it be nice to just ask them if they’d like to come along? Speaking of communication options in the field…
14. A Bunch More Emotes
Destiny‘s built-in emotes are woefully undercooked. Dancing is fun, and should stick around, but the other three options are basically useless. Worse, they’re inconsistent between classes, and each one occupies an entire d-pad button. This game direly needs a wheel’s worth of emotes that are actually useful, some of which relay information through the other players’ ghosts. “Help!” “I’m ready to revive.” “Come here.” “Go there.” “Shoot that.” That sort of thing. They wouldn’t have to all be practical, though — as dancing has showed us, more goofy/fun emotes would be welcome, too.
While in-game chat options are nice, there should be a built-in emote system that actually facilitates communication with players who don’t want to chat or who speak other languages.
15. The Ability To Change Your Handle
Bad enough that Sony won’t let us change our PSN names. (Seriously, get on that Sony, what the heck.) Whatever platform you’re playing Destiny on, you can’t customise your character’s in-game name. Coming up with a cool name for your MMO character is a time-honored tradition, and Destiny should allow players to create custom names for each of their characters, rather than having them all operate under their Gamertag/PSN name.
16. A Helmetless Option
We’d love to be able to show off our fabulous haircuts outside of the Tower. A helmetless option would be pretty cool — if Bungie wants to keep things “believable” they can always have players wearing rebreathers over their noses and mouths while gallivanting about on the surface of Mars or the Moon. But if they wanted to keep things “believable,” well, maybe they shouldn’t have included space magic and moon wizards, ya know?
17. Character Re-Customisation
Maybe you’ve grown tired of your funky blue hair or your white face-tats? Well, too bad. At the moment, Destiny offers no option to re-customise your character after you’ve created them. It’s a feature that should be available in every role-playing game. If we’re going to continue to develop these characters over the next ten years, we’d better be able to change our minds about how they look. For some set amount of glimmer, players should be able to completely change the look, race, and gender of their character without having to start from scratch.
18. The Option To Hide Other Players’ Handles
While we’re happy to know that we’re undertaking this public event with xX_TheDoctor1986_Xx, it’d be nice to have an option to turn off other players’ handles in-game. It’d be entirely optional — their level could still display, since that can be useful information, but it’d be nice to have more control over what shows on our HUD at a given moment. Speaking of that…
19. A HUD-Free Screenshot/Selfie Mode
It is far, far too difficult to take good videos and screenshots in Destiny. This is a beautiful game, and it’s been designed to take advantage of the social features offered by the new generation of gaming consoles. But every angle you try to get is covered in text and other junk, and the camera seems to actively work to crop your teammates out of shots. Destiny would hugely benefit from a HUD-free screenshot mode, as well as a good selfie mode. It’d be even better with the aforementioned helmet-free option, which would make every random battle look far more interesting and photo-ready.
20. More High-Level Solo Activities
At the moment, most of the best high-level activities — the nightfall strike, the raid, the weekly heroic strike — are limited to groups of three. Which is fine, but we’d love to see more solo-friendly activities outside of bounties and the daily heroic story mission. If a player just wants to play for an hour or two each night, there should be more than a couple of things for them to do.
21. New Missions With Actual Variety
It’s clear that both of the coming expansions will bring new strikes, raids, and missions. But it’d sure be nice if the missions in those expansions could add some actual variety to the game, rather than simply having us defend Ghost as he unlocks all-new doors.
Here’s hoping the new missions channel the sorts of challenges seen in the Vault of Glass raid, with enemies who buff and debuff, bosses that require careful strategy to defeat, and environmental challenges that test the limits of Destiny‘s long-distance jet-jumps. Show us what you’ve got, Bungie. We can handle it.
22. In-game Grimoire Cards
The lore-drenched “Grimoire Cards” are a funky system that feels unfinished — you unlock the cards in the game, but if you actually want to read what’s on them, you have to visit Bungie’s website or use the smartphone app. It’s an odd decision that diminishes a lot of backstory and means that most players won’t see any of it. Grimoire cards should be moved into the game somehow, either during loading screens or at a kiosk in the Tower, or somewhere in the menus. You wrote all that lore, now put it in your game, Bungie!
23. An Integrated Looking-For-Group Tool
While it’s nice that there ar e websites that let people hunt for teammates for the nightfall strike or the raid, it’d be even nicer if the game itself could feature that sort of tool. (And of course, even nicer if they could integrate matchmaking into every type of group activity in the game.) Failing that, a “beacon” system, perhaps, where you put out word that you’re looking for teammates for an activity, then are given a list of potential matches to message and try to coordinate your schedules. This would also be great for assembling teams for specific crucible challenges, and so on.
24. Vote To Skip Cutscenes And Pre-Mission Briefs
It is absurd that Destiny doesn’t allow players to skip cutscenes. Embarrassing, really. The Queen’s Wrath bounties tasked me with completing the “Restoration” mission multiple times, and each time I did, I had to sit through the interminable cutscene where the Speaker talks about how the children are frightened anyway. I didn’t really like this game’s story the first time through, Bungie. Why are you making me watch it again and again? Furthermore, I like to plan and strategize with my team as a mission loads, but it’s often hard to hear what we’re saying while Ghost blathers on and on about stuff that doesn’t really matter. Players should be able to vote to skip cutscenes, as well as Ghost’s pre-mission briefs.
25. A Way To Undo Gear Breakdowns
Everyone’s done it: Looked at that amazing exotic auto-rifle in your inventory and thought, just for a second, what if I just pressed the breakdown button? Just for a split second. Just long enough to let the bar get a quarter way across. Why not live dangerously?
In truth, it’s likely that someone or other will accidentally break down a legendary or exotic piece of armour and regret it afterward. It’d be nice if there were some sort of short-term undo option for breaking something down, like the buyback option most RPG stores offer.
26. An Inventory Wheel
It’s much too difficult to access our inventories at the moment, particularly when under heavy fire on a high-level raid. It’d be nice to have an inventory wheel that lets players quickly access different weapon loadouts, ammo packs and other consumables, and check the status on various bounties. There’s no reason we should be fiddling with in-game menus while taking damage from enemies.
27. Shared Bounties
If you wind up out patrolling with a friend and they have a (non-exotic) bounty that you don’t, they should be able to share that bounty with you and have it turn up in your bounty inventory. You shouldn’t have to return to Tower just to get on the same page. That would make it much easier to casually pop into your friends’ game without so much worry about whether your short-term goals are the same.
28. A Home For Exotic Bounties
Exotic bounties are cool and everything, but they’re also time-sinks, and they shouldn’t hog an entire spot in your bounty inventory for the multiple days it usually takes to complete one. Rather, exotic bounties should be relocated (maybe to the missions inventory spots?) so that players can still carry the usual number of bounties each day.
29. An In-Game Map
While we’ve all learned the basics of Old Russia and the Moon, it’d be nice to have an in-game map that shows our location relative to the overall world we’re exploring. The map wouldn’t have to give away secret locations or anything, but it’d be nice to be able to orient ourselves while we explore.
30. A Way To Pause The Game
Look. We know it’s an always-online game. We know that every player exists in the same space and time, meaning that no one player has the ability to pause time to go to the bathroom. All the same, there simply needs to be some pause option in Destiny. If you’re playing solo, maybe the game just puts your character in an impervious stasis. If you’re playing in a group, maybe you all “vote to pause” and something similar happens.
Regardless, Bungie: As adults with roommates, spouses, children, and pizza delivery guys occasionally asking for our attention, we cordially ask you to add some way to pause your fucking game. Thanks.
31. Let Players Trade Items… Or Maybe Don’t
Item-trading is actually the 31st thing on the list, because we’re not sure if we really want it. Sure, it’s a standard feature in most MMOs, and it’s incredibly annoying to get a legendary or exotic item for a class that you don’t play. However, giving players the option to trade items with other players would significantly change the entire dynamic of Destiny‘s economy and post-level-cap play. It seems inevitable, but we’re not sure that it would actually improve the game.
So, there you have ’em: 30 things we think Bungie should add to Destiny, and one extra big one we’re not sure about. Given how much the game has already changed over the last month, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that some if not most of these things will be added at some point over the next year. Here’s hoping it happens sooner rather than later.
I’m sure you all have your own tweaks you’d love to see in the game — and your own thoughts on whether item trading would improve or hurt things — so I hope you’ll share them below.
Comments
49 responses to “30 Changes That Would Make Destiny A Better Game”
25, wtf? who does this?
I know right. Who the hell accidentally presses square to begin with. Yet you need to hold it down for like 5 secs.
One of my friends was mass-dismantling a shit-tonne of crap in his inventory and accidentally dismantled a legendary primary out of carelessness. That was almost a month ago and he’s still sore about it. 😛 It happens when you get caught up in the boring routine of it.
While I’d still say it’s pretty careless to accidentally dismantle something you didn’t mean to, I was more referencing the actual act described in the article of “tempting fate” by half dismantling something for shits and giggles
Yeah, that example makes me think of the psych eval they give you for the military, where they ask if you’ve ever been tempted to jump off a cliff/building, or if you were piloting a plane do you think you’d ever feel the urge to plant it in the ground.
No. No. This is not a normal urge people experience, Kirk.
And fate knocks and says “Hi! Have this 2 second lag spike while you do that”, and there goes you’re exotic.
LOL after we completed the raid one of our team accidentally dismantled the chatter white shader, still not sure how you could do it but he did.
here’s a vid of us all pointing at him after he did that lol. (its at the end of our celebration dance)
The raid took us 1.5 hours.
http://xboxclips.com/video.php?uid=2533274794659845&gamertag=NEMALIVE&vid=4456a5ce-fb71-4abd-a615-d9601774abd2
Bungie need to see this list.
This list is garbage, there’s like 5 things that are actually needed, but shit like 9, 17, 18, 19, 22, 25, 30 seriously GTFO
Holy crap I can’t stop laughing. This sentence broke me.
I registered just to upvote this
21 is the most important item in that list. If you’re not playing PVP, the game is an endless Horde mode. One thing that separates the fun MMOs from Destiny is that boss fights require positioning, strategy, and in some cases, extra-cirricular activities (such as pushing buttons, or defusing bombs). Destiny’s boss fights are just a war of attrition with adds and need to be more creative in what they involve.
My favourite mission ever is the Sword of Crota. Why? You get to run around with a giant sword rather than shooting at things. If that is enough to make me excited, I think my heart would stop if I had to push a button mid-fight too.
On that note I’d love to see more interaction in the form of crowd control. Not roots and slows and all that class specific ability stuff, but enemies that react in predictable ways under fire so you can herd them around a bit more reliably. Particularly with Shanks, Harpies and Wizards. I’d kill to be able to pin Wizards to the ground, especially if it meant Ultra class Wizards wouldn’t be able to escape behind a pillar and recharge their shiled while you reload (it’s only fair and balanced when I do it).
I don’t think it’d fit PvP but in Destiny 2 I’m hoping they do limb damage on regular enemies. It’s so weird that I can’t kneecap a charging enemy. I’ve just got to go for precision head damage and hope they stagger.
Yep, guarding Dinkbot gets samey very quickly.
But then I remember that most of the Halo games were about flipping switches (not that I don’t like Halo, but I’m just sayin’).
There are some good points in there, but even if they were implemented it’s a bit too late for me I’m afraid. The only thing even remotely interesting left for me to do is some higher level strikes I’ve not undertaken with some friends. But I need ascendant material for these to be achievable and there’s just too much of the same repetitive crap to go through in hopes of getting one or two of these, let alone enough to upgrade all of your gear.
there was this thing they did on the PS1, where while a game was loading, you might get a little minigame for no specific reason (Sometimes it actually unlocked things, but not the key point) to play while you were waiting for the level to load.
Why don’t we do that now? Just a space invaders clone while you warp to locations would be wonderous. It would fit seamlessly.
32. A volume control. Especially for the music. Some of the tracks are great, but they’re not ‘I-can’t-hear-my-fireteam-during-the-boss-fight-over-the-deafening-music’ great.
I’m sure most of these will be on their way, they just didn’t make it in time for the full release and throwing $500 million at it, Activision were probably pushing for it to be released.
Trading items, no. Atm it’s relatively easy to hit the level cap, ok a bit tougher to level up after level 20, but still for a MMO (yeah I know it’s not a traditional MMO) being able to hit the level cap after a month or so of playing casually (within a few days-a week for a hardcore player) means that it shouldn’t be made even easier by allowing for trading. The cap needs to be upped/removed in future updates as I find it quite restrictive already, let alone having the feeling of not making any more progress over the next 6-12 months. I know stuff will be announced, but it’d be good to actually know what’s coming other than the DLC and leaked upcoming raids & strikes
As for a couple of the points, with skipping cut-scenes, I know the Queen’s missions aren’t available now (assuming the emmisary has now left the tower) but with the first mission in particular, once you complete the mission and get the countdown you could just return to orbit and still get the mission rewards without having to sit through the cutscene. Granted a proper option to skip would still be desirable.
An in game map I would love. Yesterday I was speedering around Mars trying to find an area, looked at the map before going in, got lost, exited, looked at the map again, got lost again, decided to drive around for ten minutes and then found the back way into where I was trying to get. It’s not exactly instinctive.
I’d definitely love to see more high-level solo missions, but I have a feeling that that’s what the DLC will bring along.
One more thing I’d add to the list, more planets/maps on the same planets.
Overall, you can definitely tell this is a vanilla game. Imagine a WoW veteran loading up the vanilla game now. They’d probably quit in frustration over how limited the game was. I can see the same happening with Destiny, the problem is that with a large amount of developed MMOs, when a new one comes along it’s inevitable that it will feel lacking after the initial buzz has worn off.
Agree with everything except the WoW comparison.
WoW launched with thousands of unique quests and individual storylines for the six starting zones of the eight races, a few for the different classes, and night-and-day in quest plots and thematic differences for the two factions. Dozens of zones, each packed with quests and NPCs that interact with you, a sprawling capital city, nine classes, three skill trees each, packed with customization and cross-spec options. It took literally months for anyone to reach level cap, and longer still to exhaust the unique content before settling in to the end-game grind.
Destiny’s two days of content before cap, then a very limited selection of end-game activities (which consist of repeating the two days of content you did from 1-20 at varying degrees of difficulty) are pretty poor by comparison.
That’s why I was reluctant to label Destiny a MMO, but that is what they’re trying to do. But yeah, I wasn’t comparing the vanilla WoW to the vanilla Destiny, rather suggesting that in a few years time we might look back on this version of Destiny and think ‘how did we play a game that’s so limited’ because (hopefully) there’ll be a LOT more content for people to do much like someone playing WoW now might think about the vanilla WoW and how many features weren’t in the game but now are.
For sure though, the actual quests/missions are severely limited in Destiny. Hopefully the DLC will be substantial and not just an extra 3-4 missions per pack and a couple of extra raids to rinse and repeat every week when they reset on Tuesdays.
Thinking about it, Destiny’s extreme popularity right now might be its downfall. Everyone’s playing the hell out of it and so reaching the level cap quickly and all missions, strikes and the raid have been done several times over. People get bored, don’t play it as much when Bungie bring out new stuff for it. Bungie need to come good with regular updates to keep people interested if they’re planning for a 10 year plan at least.
“the Queen’s missions aren’t available now” ? really? I just got 3 of them ready yesterday to do today! WTF
From memory (might be wrong) it was available to the 6th. Not sure if it’s updated yet or not or if it’s been extended (or if I got the date wrong)
Na I think your right I had a quick google, 25th Sep – 6th Oct, hopefully timezone difference to NZ gives me a few hours to get through them?
might be possible. I’m not sure what time Brisbane it updates but might be afternoon-ish?
Looking on the website, 6 hours 45 minutes til reset time so smash out them missions 😀
If you log onto Bungie.net and check under Legend-Advisors you can see the countdown until reset time
So that would be 10pm NZ time, its now 3:23pm
Hopefully, but I wouldn’t count on it. Something we discovered on launch was that the game launched at midnight on the date that it was wherever you happened to be in the world. So some nations were ahead of others. If they treat their scheduling like that (and we know Oceanic servers are separate), then the date line will not save you like it normally does with US-centric events.
I get the impression they pissed so much of that money up the wall that Activision refused to continue funding. I really don’t think they would have released a game this incomplete unless they felt like they absolutely couldn’t afford to hold off release. I mean the environments and general art assets are super detailed but the content is all still obviously unfinished.
It feels like they went back to the drawing board right before Activision gave them a hard deadline for when they had to either release or lose future funding. Normally I’d consider that a douchebag move but given Destiny’s current state and the amount of money that went into it I would have cut my losses too.
Activision are dumb but they’re not dumb enough to torpedo a franchise just to get it on the shelves for the September release period.
Best way to improve Destiny: Take the disc out of console, crack it in half and put in Halo instead.
Yeah, if you’re a little kid with anger issues.
No, if you have any taste. Destiny is just Halo minus the quality level design and story.
I agree with the trade thing but I think I needs to be equal trade. So like, you can only trade an exotic piece for another exotic, legendary for another legendary etc.
1. Sparrow Races: One of the few things that actually manages to rank almost as high as ‘sports’ on my list of ‘shit I don’t care about’.
Obviously I hate fun. Or, more likely, don’t think racing is fun. I hate that it exists as an (usually lucrative/mandatory) activity in every damn open world game ever.
6. Actually, I think there is a sort of ‘soft-difficulty’ being imposed through scaling. Go grab your trusty scout rifle and plink away with some body shots on a Fallen Vandal on Venus, make note of the damage done, then trip back to Cosmodrome and take some shots at a Vandal there, and you’ll find that you’re doing less damage.
I haven’t done any testing to figure out the equation, just enough to see that the damages are different. Your damage is reduced when you fight lower mobs, by the looks.
The fact that it’s not hugely obvious is still probably a problem for people who’d rather be getting hammered by Hallowed Knights all the time.
2-30: Yes. This is an improvement (however minor).
31: Hells no. http://www.destinygold4u.com CHEAPEST GLIMMER EXOTICS LEGENDARIES SHADERS why did my account get
phishedhacked why the fuck can’t I find anywhere in the world to get headshots on fallen thanks to bots stealing all my kills and where did all the godamn chests go?!You forgot the most important one:
1. Retcon the existing placeholder ‘story’ and put in a real narrative.
There’s definitely some caps involved with damage. I think it’s just a cap based on the level difference of the enemy and the weapon you’re using. It works pretty nicely by capping everything out at ‘very easy’ mode rather than your typical one shot anything with your weakest AoE ability mode.
As frustrating as repeating content is at least they seem to have done a good job of balancing it with the leveling/gearing process. I can run Cosmodrome, Restoration (Level 2) and it’s super easy, but I can’t completely disconnect. I swoop in with my shotgun taking everything out in one hit, but things still damage down my shields and I’m not just running to the end then using a single AoE burst to take out everything that followed me.
Yes, getting shredded by a fucktonne of enemy fire is a pleasing thing in those instances.
It kind of ties in to the other thing that a lot of people have complained about with the loot system – the equality of it all. The fact that you’ll just as easily get a legendary killing trash in Cosmodrome as you will in the Buried City.
Some people get annoyed that there’s no extra reward for the apparent extra difficulty, but I would suggest they’ve probably gone that route to ensure that the earlier zones still have some incentive to be there, so people don’t feel penalized for being anywhere other than the highest-level areas of Mars, or for hanging out with their lowbie friends and helping them out.
Maybe as #32 perhaps Bungie could just play the game for you?
This game has really long loading times. And most of the story is found outside of the game vis-a-vis grimoires. Why not have Dinklebot brief you on what’s going on with the world (i.e reading out the grimoires) while you’re waiting in your ship?
even having the grimoire cards popping up in the loading screens so you actually have a chance to read the ones you’ve got would be good. The loading screens were flashy and kinda fun to look at in the beta, but now it’s just tedious
Yeah exactly. There is a wasted opportunity there.
To be fair though, I think the grimoire system gets more crap then it deserves. I sort of disagree with the argument that the grimoire should be accessed in game rather than out. Personally, I never read a game’s codex. If I made the decision to take time away from studying or housework, I’d prefer to play the actual game as opposed to reading pages and pages of lore. Besides, I think it’s fair to say that a majority of people own smartphones now. If you’re interested enough, you can read up on the Destiny lore in bed, or when you’re waiting for the bus or train.
Mission summary screen for finishing the raid? Instead of timer goes to zero, nothing happens, leader has to go back to orbit. Glichy, unco, ugly, such a letdown after hours of effort and weeks and weeks of time to fix it.
How about the option to have a solo instance?!
Nothing annoys me more than loading up a story mission I haven’t completed yet and finding that there is another player running the same mission who has already killed every enemy on my way to the final ‘respawning restricted’ mode where I’m finally in my own instance.
I want to be able to play the whole game (minus Strikes) without other players stealing my kills or ruining the action I should be experiencing.
The pause ‘change’ is a joke… Welcome to MMOs, and multiplayer games in general.
Although yes, there isn’t a single MMO (that I can think of) that allows you to pause, there’s also not many (if any) online games/MMO’s that allow players to move each others avatar around (usually there’s no collision). I reckon they could implement an option to put your character in an non-interactive state as long as you weren’t in combat/within 50m of an enemy for say, more than 10 seconds. That way you don’t have to find the tightest spot you can find that would stop players from being dickheads and pushing you out into a group of mobs, just so you can run to the toilet for a minute, considering the game takes so damn long to load anything that you could go toilet and quickly grab/top up your drink before the game even loads you out to orbit, only to then have to wait another minute or so to get back into the game.
However if you’re in an instanced area or a strike then there should be no need to have the option to phase/pause.
my 1 point list to make destiny better is to add some actual fun.
Totally agree about the Inventory Wheel (or something similar). Can’t tell you how many times I’ve had my Fire-based fusion rifle on and come up against an Arc-shielded enemy and had to swap it. I’ve almost died so many times in Strikes because I have to bring up my character screen to change weapons. Fucking fix this Bungie!
Totally disagree about trading. The game should NOT have it. I’ve put in hours to earn my gear and a trading option would be insulting. Especially if some noob can just walk up to his mate and get a free Legendary helmet without having done anywhere near the work I did to get mine. And before you start the whole “you didn’t earn it, it’s all RNG”, tell that to the guys that have earned so many motes and strange coins to buy the shit they need. Or stacked up numerous Vanguard/Crucible marks.
Anybody here use the destinylfg.net site? I’d love to find some players to take on the weekly strikes with.
how about boss fights that actually involve strategy eg having to shoot legs or thrusters off a boss before you try and kill them. at the moment it is all about hiding behind a pillar and shooting them from behind cover. They should reduce boss damage and make it so you can survive more then 2 seconds in front of them.
Or maybe some slightly more opaque form of threat-management. I don’t mind if we play piggy-in-the-middle with the aggro ball, but it’d be nice to know for sure.
For a while I THOUGHT it was damage-based, in that I can usually land a certain number of sniper-round head-shots before the more humanoid bosses swivel to take me out (or pursue, in the case of the Archon), but this is pretty much not the case for Phogoth or Nexus boss who both give you a serve as soon as they detect you step out of cover. Whether that’s poor timing compared to other people out of cover or not, I don’t know, we’re all usually huddled behind columns in different locations to avoid AoE party wipes.
The Vault of Glass Raid pretty much got this down perfectly to be honest. So much to take into account before actually firing at the boss.
Isn’t that the strategy for the Walker Boss (Legs) and the Tank Boss (Thrusters)?
Doing that makes it easier/quicker but it’s not something that is required.
maybe something like a really tough boss woulds only weakness is exhaust vents (aka the death star) and you need to shoot a rocket or through a nade into all the vents first to break some kinda of shield. only then will it take actual damage.
Also good if you could get out from behind cover a bit more in the fights. Way to hard to take them on in the open as you get slayed by MOBs or as soon as you hit the ground after avoiding the main gun of bosses they can shoot to quickly after and just nail you.
Well, I love being able to see people’s handles.