I'll try to answer, even though I am getting more pissed off with Bungie/Activisions way of handling the press and doing the typical misleading "Hey look, $500 million sold to retailers!" crap to mislead people into thinking they made $500 million in revenue the first day. Along with not giving any of the reviewers a chance to come out with day one reviews because they had a feeling it wouldn't garner 8, 9 and 10/10's and hurt sales. It is definitely a 6/7 out of 10 sort of game. I can explain why I feel like that after the explanation of how it is definitely like ME3, but 1st person, but without the things that made the atmosphere so awesome.
1) ME3 had a good storyline and single player component. This definitely doesn't. The single player is horseshit, with horrible voice acting, with the same rinse and repeat wave of mobs missions and nothing ever changes. The reason why I feel people can definitely be upset about this is they originally sold this as a solid story experience/universe. Alpha/Beta showed limited content and you would have fan boys saying that there is going to be much more, causing confusion in the community. When it comes out, you realize there are maybe 5? different atmosphere types, which consists of large maps getting heavily reused, and limited NPC monster/alien art. So the single player experience is MAYBE, quite honestly in my opinion, about as brainless as playing against Bots in Battlefield 1942 in single player with a back drop that never gets explained. 10 year plan or whatever the hell they are saying, it isn't engaging. AT ALL. So that 10 year plan isn't going to be worth jack if they don't make some serious changes in their DLC momentum if they come out with the same content for the next two DLC's.
2) It differs from Borderlands in that it really isn't open world. You are limited in where you can go, and while there is stuff to explore, there isn't any need too unless you are a completionist. Which is fine if you are, but going back to a planet to find 5 gold chests which aren't doing anything for me anyway since nothing seems to be dropping from them regardless (Until they fix this) isn't making it any more fun for (my) tastes. Borderlands was definitely less persistent in so far as population. You picked a group of players to play with and you were locked. Here at least you can run into random players. What the majorly fucked up here on is you have really NO way to communicate with them unless you invite them to a fireteam or friend them randomly. Otherwise, about the only interaction you are going to have is spamming a wave/salute/dance emote in a corner somewhere. You will get the occasional player that you just team up with ala the game Journey(If you ever played that, you run around a world and randomly a buddy shows up and you two work together without speaking and only communicating via blips and bloops), with zero communication and just playing together without speaking. Loot rained from the sky in Borderlands. In Destiny it is sought after and you feel a sense of accomplishment when you actually * do * get something, but the entire itemization process from 1-20 is ridiculous. In leveling to 8, I haven't seen one blue drop through playing PvP matches, single player, and one fire team. All green or white. You would think you would be able to at least get a blue drop, and heaven forbid a taste of a lower level purple. Not a thing. Whether that is because I am one unlucky guy, or because the low level rare items just flat out don't exist on the loot table, I have no idea. But being that no one else has gotten anything super cool in this level range from what I have read across the forums, I would bet it just doesn't exist.
3) The missions and encounters are EXACTLY like ME3 multiplayer in COOP. Here are a wave of enemies, now you get to a destination, now you fight more waves of enemies, then you win. Seriously, how they could not have made this more engaging boggles my mind and screams lack of effort. Considering EVERY mission is like this. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Whether it is going through a story mission or a fireteam, or if you are out on patrol - with one exception being maybe you get lucky enough to see a boss and you fire on the standard "Hit the yellow weak point". None of the bosses seem to have any cool special abilities. Which is again, astounding to me. Put some effort into it for God's sake.
Now there are some good parts, but nothing that you couldn't really find in any game out there today. Want to go hunt loot? Talk trash in party chat? You can do that in pretty much any game out there today so it brought nothing new to the table other than the fact there are more people playing it for the next 2 weeks than Diablo 3 because it is a fresh coat of paint in a different genre.
The gun play is good and very responsive, and the UI is easy to navigate. It has a fun skill system, and an itemized upgrade path for items which help you reload faster, pray more bullets, do more damage, etc. But even that upgrade is locked to the piece of armor you will have so once you loot a new piece of armor, that upgrade you got while doing a story mission, you need to go back and do it again to replace the upgrade on the new piece of armor. And that's called replayability in their eyes, which is fucking ridiculous.
The PvP is pretty much a 3-4 point conquest mode. Nothing new here either, although I really didn't expect it to be.
Basically I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of people just cash this thing out after 3-4 weeks and if they didn't buy digital, trade it in for a slew of fall games. Far Cry 4, The Evil Within, DA:I, AC: Unity, Little Big Planet 3, etc. People are going to get burned out quick on the lack of engaging gameplay in missions, horrible story so no need to follow it, and standard run of the mill PvP. The game doesn't differentiate itself from anything else, and what it tries to bring to the table it does horribly due to a lack of communication options, even when you set your fireteam option to public.
So while I am still logging in just to shoot some random crap and see if there is anything better later on in the game, I keep reminding myself of when I played River Raid on the Atari 2600 and I thought "Ok if I blow up this bridge, something really cool will happen and I will see something new" only to see the same crap, over and over. And in this day in age with the budget this thing had, watching a publisher try to side swipe fake numbers as sales in the press to garner popularity among the community, and seeing other people's reactions that feel the way I do, I wouldn't be surprised when come November this game is a ghost town.
I also went to Best Buy last night to pick up a bluetooth speaker for my deck, and saw about 50 copies sitting on randomly placed box shelves. Which makes me think their "$500 million to retail" number they spin; $350 million sitting on store shelves across the nation collecting dust.
Anyway, like others, I have nothing else to play. (Although Diablo 3 will get more attention after I put the nail into the box of this game) But once that stops, I forsee the demise of Destiny.
And that, to me, sucks. Had they gotten their mindset into making something new and fresh, it wouldn't have been years of wasted potential. Chalk up another "Not going to take a risk, lets ship mediocrity" game into the nether
