After-Action Report: Destiny 2 "Beta"

When you've got at least one Destiny streamer following your Twitter feed, it can be surmised that they like (or at least find mildly amusing) your thoughts on a game which they devote a considerable amount of time to playing.  So it is with some trepidation that I wanted to talk about my experiences with the Destiny 2 beta that came out earlier this week for PS4 players.  And lemme tell you, folks, it's not going to be mountains of joy slathered in buckets of praise gravy.

While playing this week, I found myself very badly torn on this thing.  There are some elements which are highly laudable.  There are others which seem very troublesome.  When the beta ends, I'm not going to be terribly reluctant when I delete it, but my enthusiasm for the full game has been somewhat damaged.

The Good 

Let's go over the good stuff first.  The new weapons available to players are interesting, and from a handling perspective feel good.  Submachineguns seem to offer a degree of flexibility that marries the raw firepower of auto rifles with the snappy responsiveness of sidearms.  In tight corridors or places where enemies pop out from behind corners, SMGs could prove to be very useful.  In some respects, they fill the role that shotguns currently occupy in Destiny, now that shotguns have been moved over to the "power" weapon category.  Speaking of auto rifles, they've never been my favorite weapons previously, but here they seem to be better than in the first game.  I might not use them as much when Destiny 2 releases, but I'm not going to be trying to avoid them like the plague.  By far, my favorite power weapon has to be the new grenade launcher.  For me, it's got a versatility that isn't found in rocket launchers or machine guns.  You can launch directly at a big target (polished off the boss in the Strike by completely depleting my power ammo during one run), or you can lob them over obstacles to hit smaller targets that are being particularly troublesome.  For lack of a better term, it's a precision weapon, something which requires thinking around corners in ways that rocket launchers can't quite pull off.

I was pleasantly surprised by the presence of shaders on the different ships, and even more so by the fact that they were randomized for each player.  I would presume that there will be different ones available in the final game and that they can be swapped out at will.  I liked that each class was granted a different ship, but I'm hoping that Bungie is not locking players in with only three ship models and a bunch of shaders to cover it.  We'll have to see on that score.

The Strike mission was, I think, a distinct improvement from Destiny.  It felt more like a "mini-raid" than an extended story mission.  While I can't be sure all Strikes in Destiny 2 will be like this, I'd say that it's an excellent effort, that we're in an environment and executing a mission instead of just making the circuit in the Patrol area and going behind specifically locked doors.

As far as the adjusted character classes, I like some of the things that have been done.  Warlocks have been granted a level in badass with the Dawnstriker set.  Before, the Sunsinger Warlocks were grenade spamming beacons that were asking to be shot in the face.  Now, they've got a much needed degree of heft.  I wasn't overly impressed with the Sentinel Titan, but it's never been my main class, so I suspect I'll need to devote some more time to really getting comfortable with it.  Arcstrider Hunters certainly seem to have gotten buffed a little from their Bladedancer origins, but much like the Titan, I'm going to need more time to get comfy with the subtleties.

The Bad

I'm going to come right out and say this first: this was not a beta.  Or, at the very least, it was not a beta that was what I would consider to be particularly useful.  While it might have served as a load test for the servers, even that data is likely to be questionable since things were so staggered.  Come release day, Bungie's servers are going to get hammered.  It won't be a nice, controlled influx of players.  It'll be everybody getting on at once across three different networks.  I almost hate to think what will happen with Blizzard's other games when the PC crowds start hitting Battle.net for Destiny 2.

Compounding this is the lack of control that players had over anything substantive.  While it's possible that Destiny 2 will start players out at level 20 and 200 Light, only to strip it away and reset everybody to level 1 when Ghaul kicks us over the side of his ship, I would have liked to get a feeling for XP progression.  I wanted to get a look at the new Patrol areas and do some exploring, even if it was only in the European Dead Zone.  I wanted to get a chance to play around with the character creator, see if I couldn't find new options that would look good on my toons.  Instead, we're stuck with two Crucible maps, one non-repeatable story mission (unless you keep deleting and creating toons), and one Strike.

For the life of me, I can't think of why Bungie would revert back to having only two class sub-types, neither in terms of story nor in terms of design.  There's not any compelling reason to limit things to two sub-types when each class had a third sub-type that worked perfectly well.  To some extent, problems like damage against energy-specific shields will be able to be mitigated with the presence of energy-specific weapons.  But it just seems so willfully stupid.  "Oh hey, you know those methods of Light manipulation that you rediscovered and mastered?  Ha-ha!  You've got plot amnesia now."

For all the good work on weapons handling that was present, the weapons themselves felt kind of underpowered for some reason.  Admittedly, Cabal troops have always been tough targets, but even enemies like Fallen Dregs and Vandals or Vex Goblins and Hobgoblins, had a feeling of "bullet sponge" to them.  Critical hits just didn't seem to have critical effects.  For somebody who regularly punches out enemies with one shot in Destiny via hand cannon and scout rifle, this is not a welcome development.

Crucible matchmaking was, as usual, an absolute horror show.  Unless you've got three buddies with you, you're lumped in either with the killer elite or morons who can't shoot straight and who can't play the objective.  I find it a little disturbing that there's no method for checking the quality of another player's connection, though since this was based off an older build, that functionality might yet be present in the final release.  While Countdown seemed interesting, being partnered up with randos who didn't really seem to get the idea of the game was beyond frustrating.  And the whole "advantage" thing that kept getting mentioned in the Control map was very poorly explained.

The most generous description I can apply to this is "demo."  Demos are not a bad thing.  But an actual beta has a particular connotation in game development.  It assumes certain levels of readiness, a degree of polish that is higher than an alpha release, but not quite what will be in the final game.  And while certain areas might be locked off because of build parameters, the meat of the game (or at least a generous cut) should be there.  Call it what it is, not what you want.

The Call

So, what do we make of this?  What kind of game has Bungie wrought?  The honest answer: I genuinely don't know.  There is so little to work with here that any impression is going to be incomplete, and that in turn is going to be looked at more dimly because it doesn't cross the threshold of "leaving them wanting more."  For me, the lack of content in the demo (no, I will not dignify this with the term "beta") has engendered a feeling of expectant disappointment.  All their talk of how much more there's going to be only serves to accentuate how little there is in this demo.  I would dearly love to be proven wrong, and we'll have an opportunity to see in about a month or so, but it's not giving me a great deal of hope.