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Alpha Preview: Destiny

Recently, Stevivor had a chance to play the Destiny first-look alpha (compared to Steve’s 20 minutes at E3) and experience a (bigger) small glimpse of what Bungie has lined up for gamers later this year.

For this particular alpha the game offered a campaign story mission, a few side quests, a co-op only mission and a multiplayer mode for players to tackle. Destiny at its core is a first person shooter that also borrows characteristics from the MMORPG genre. Players are able to choose from a few different types of Guardians, each of whom have their own special abilities. As you progress through the mission content of the game you’ll gain experience that will allow you to level up your character to become stronger. Guardians can also be customised with specific gear to suit your play style — Halo mixed with Borderlands was a comparison that was thrown around quite a lot when the game was first unveiled, but after having some time with Destiny the loot system for the weapons doesn’t seem as deep as what they do in Borderlands.

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The online aspect of Destiny is a little bit different to your traditional MMO. For instance, you don’t see everyone that is playing within the world, but people will randomly pop into the world as you are wandering around and you can decided if you want to join in with them or just continue adventuring on your own. If you have friends playing at the same time it is quite simple to join them by navigating the menu and connecting to their game, which then starts a ‘fireteam’. A fireteam also allows you to get into the co-op only ‘strike missions’ with up to two other people, which are basically like dungeons in MMOs. Over towards the social hub of Destiny is the Tower, where you’ll find merchants to purchase gear, new missions from the bounty board or a place to interact and meet other players also in the game. Then there is the competitive multiplayer, where you can drag your character into an arena and see how they match up against other players. The mode on offer for this alpha was ‘Control’, a team based game where you had to capture points of interest and hold them for as long as possible.

As someone who doesn’t care much for the Halo series I’ve been cautious about Destiny. It’s hard to judge such a massive game like this with only a few scattered missions, overall I had an absolute blast with Destiny but nevertheless there are a few things I’m wary about from what I’ve played in the alpha. The voice acting from Peter Dinklage, who plays an AI robotic companion, is quite strange; it’s a bland and boring performance. If that is how that character is throughout the game then it feels like a bit of a waste of talent.

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The other thing that really stood out as a bit of a miss was the structure of the side missions during the exploration; I found them to be very disjointed and random. I also experienced a few technical problems – for example at one stage our voice coms stopped working during a strike mission so we could no longer talk to each other within the team. Adding to this during the same mission our fireteam ended up getting spawn camped by the enemy in a corridor, the moment we were put back into the game we would die straight away because there were a dozen opponents right in our face.

But again these issues could just be a factor because we’ve only experienced a few hours with an Alpha, and other than those small annoyances, what I’ve played over the Alpha weekend though has definitely gotten me excited for its release. Destiny looks to be one of the biggest games of this year, and with so many other titles pulling out of the 2014 schedule and moving to next year, Destiny will surely be gunning for those Game of the Year accolades.


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About the author

Luke Lawrie

Writing and producing content about video games for over a decade. Host of Australia's longest running video game podcast The GAP found at TheGAPodcast.com. Find me on Twitter at @lukelawrie