I played the Destiny Beta on PS4 both solo and with friends and had quite a blast. My initial thought was that while I enjoyed the game, I wasn’t excited to buy it, because the co-op missions were a little too fast paced. What I mean is that as we would clear an area, members of the team quickly moved on, so I had to follow. I would have preferred to explore at my own pace, rather than be dragged from fight to fight. I felt the same way in the Isengard 3-man instances in LOTRO – it was all just running between fights.
Then I played more games with friends and really enjoyed the interaction and the team play, so I was considering buying the game. In fact, I was convinced I would buy it and was even scoping out the GameStop version so I could get their pre-order exclusive. And I would get the $90 package instead of the $60 one, because it included the expansions that would cost $35 separately.
Then, on Saturday at 2PM, during the server load test, they opened up the first Moon mission. I flew to the Moon, excited to see how the low gravity and no atmosphere would affect gameplay. It didn’t! The gravity was the same as Earth’s, so I couldn’t jump super far. And the roars of the baddies and gunfire and all the other sounds carried perfectly through what should be a nonexistent atmosphere. So the gameplay was exactly like on Earth, but with different scenery. I was and still am floored at this kind of mailing it in. Surely Bungie knows about the physical characteristics of the Moon, but didn’t want to take that into account for the game.
Admittedly, this was a Beta test, so this could change before launch, but it certainly felt reasonably polished. If they were going to change the physics on the Moon, you’d think they’d want to have tested it to see how people compensated.
So now my interest in buying the game has waned again, mostly because of the moon, but also because I’m hearing speculation that the game will contain not too much content. I can see that the game has lots of potential, but I’m not going to make a $90 bet on that potential.