Comments on: Thoughts: Destiny

By: Thoughts: Destiny 2 | The Scientific Gamer

Thoughts: Destiny 2 | The Scientific Gamer — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 11:01:01 +0000

[…] Destiny 2 at launch. It struck me as a perfectly decent game — not quite the same thing as the original Destiny, but that was fine because I didn’t like Destiny all that much. It took much more of its general […]

By: Thoughts: Anthem | The Scientific Gamer

Thoughts: Anthem | The Scientific Gamer — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 11:00:50 +0000

[…] — that Anthem should be an always-online cooperative loot-driven shooter in the vein of Destiny or The Division– but I do not know what it is about. There’s a lot of Capitalised Nouns […]

By: Thoughts: The Division » The Scientific Gamer The Scientific Gamer

Thoughts: The Division » The Scientific Gamer The Scientific Gamer — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 11:01:21 +0000

[…] I have a somewhat lower opinion of Destiny than the author of that article, which I suspect is why from my point of view Destiny and The Division sit side by side so comfortably. Given how long these games take to make (both of them were in development for half a decade or so) it’d be unfair to accuse The Division of ripping off Destiny entirely, but I’m sure Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment were very much paying attention to the success of Destiny’s MMO-lite metagame trappings that kept players coming back month after month. It may be bolted to a different genre – the third-person shooter, which very much plays to Ubisoft’s strengths since it seems like every damn game they release is a third-person game — but The Division’s metagame is driven almost solely by that drive to do missions and kill bosses to acquire better, shinier loot that’s been the hallmark of the MMO since time immemorial. In terms of implementation it’s a perfectly adequate system, if a little more unpolished and limited than Destiny’s thanks to The Division being a year and a half behind on the development curve. Where The Division falls down, however, is that this system of shooting hordes of generic mooks to get bigger guns makes absolutely no goddamn sense when you transplant the setting from Magic Future-Earth to modern-day NYC — and worse, actually gets more than a little uncomfortable if you stop to think about it for more than a couple of seconds. […]

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Mon, 19 Oct 2015 10:20:47 +0000

One major problem with the jumping from planet to planet is that you spend a non-trivial amount of time in loading screens. Aside from the point you mention where the mechanic prevents the story missions having any kind of coherence.

I think I’m OK with this being a game I fire up for an hour occasionally and then put away. Pointing at people who don’t look like you and clicking on them is fun enough, but yeah, by making it an MMO they’ve lost the impact that a shorter, tighter experience would have had.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 21:18:17 +0000

I’ve fallen out of it now after thirty hours. It was fun enough – Bungie are still arguably the best in the business at console shooters — but I must admit bafflement at my flatmate, who has over six hundred hours invested in the thing. What are you doing it for? Move on, please; there are bigger and better games out there.

I’m kind of sad I missed Dinklage. That being said I understand his dialogue has been immortalised on Youtube, so I know where to go if ever I find myself in need of a laugh.

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sun, 18 Oct 2015 21:15:16 +0000

I think I’m experiencing the best of the game coming into it with the Legendary Edition – had I been playing it for a year, I suspect I’d be far more negative about it than I am here.

In answer to your questions:

One: If someone were to hypothetically scoop out a bunch of material from Saturn’s rings then it would eventually fill itself in; however, this would take some time. I don’t want to put a concrete number on it since my solar system physics is a little rusty at this point, but we’re talking at least years for it to start and decades (or even centuries) to completely undo the damage. A bigger problem for me was that just after the hole gets made, there is a cutscene where Oryx shows up on his space-balcony, surveys the damage, and then *flaps away on his space wings*.

Two: Yes. Tomorrow, in fact.

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 15 Oct 2015 16:35:26 +0000

Very surprised to see you cover this. I like the game because of the shooting and trying to dress my Guardian up in nice outfits. I agree about the Raid issues, but if you play with a decent group and have even one person who has done it before, you can dramatically drop the time required, and checkpoints mean you can do a single three-hour raid in three one-hour sessions. I recently joined a few PSN communities that do a reasonable job of filtering out both assholes and idiots (and the dreadful hybrid, the idiotic asshole) to make the more elaborate activities actually fun and manageable.

My big complaint is that the game has been out for about a year and already huge swathes of content are obsolete (as in the rewards you get are pure garbage now) and, according to Bungie, won’t be updated. So going through the effort for the first two raids or the Prison of Elders gets you nothing you can actually use (save shaders and ships), though these activities can definitely be fun to do.

So, two things. One: as a scientist, is the depiction of Saturn’s rings at all accurate? It doesn’t seem like that hole would just stay there.

Two: are you going to look into Beyond Earth: Rising Tide? I assume you’ll give it a thrashing, but I’m quite liking it and haven’t seen a lot of press for it.

By: Ninja Foodstuff

Ninja Foodstuff — Wed, 14 Oct 2015 08:15:02 +0000

I got this (the pre-DLC edition) on PS3 last year after the marketing hype had died down but people were still saying how great it was. On paper it seemed like it might be fun, but then I got put off by the classes being limited to 3, none of them particularly interesting. I played for around 3 hours or so, and in that time I had one of the most exhilarating gaming moments in recent memory, and one of the most tedious (a boss battle that was a standoff and took 30 minutes). I might have persisted if it weren’t for my inability to aim with a controller, but what really put me off was I had a voice in the back of my head asking myself what the hell I was doing this for, surely there were better things to do with my time, rather than just clock up hours until it became worthwhile.

Also I could not believe just how bored Peter Dinklage sounded. I thought it was supposed to be some sort of joke, like he was a suicidally depressed robot or something, but apparently not. That’s just the way he read his lines.