Several friends at work are into Destiny, a first-person shooter sci-fi themed MMO-ish game. Bungie does not refer to Destiny as any kind of MMO; instead it is a “shared-world shooter”. Whatever, haha.
I have a PS3 that I turn on once in a while but wasn’t thrilled about buying a copy just to check it out. However, one friend upgraded to the PS4 and had a PS3 version of Destiny he loaned to me.
It took me a few days to get around to trying it, and after inserting the disk I faced an 8.5 GB download. It progressed very slowly, timing out twice (and restarting from scratch), and took me a weekend of trying here and there to let it finish. Geez!
I guess the 8.5 GB download is the same sort of thing somebody trying a game on the PC would face, if they started with an install off a DVD. I’m so used to downloadable installers these days, where I haven’t seen a delta patch from original media in a long time. On the other hand, I remember ESO having a ginormous patch even after installing the base game via Steam, so who knows; some patchers are more efficient that others.
It took a lot longer than I’m used to, and after seeing the initial welcome screen and hitting play… it started another download/patch! What the hell?! Fortunately this secondary patch went a lot faster, “only” taking 30 mins or so.
After that I was in the game, creating my character (an Exo Warlock) and not spending a whole lot of time doing it, and then off to the intro.
I wasn’t able to take any screenshots – some PS3 games will let you press PS/start at the same time for a screenshot, but the game needs to allow that and Destiny (on the PS3 at least) does not.
Anyway, the game starts with some floating robot guide that leads you into a ruined building, and explains things on the way. You get a gun, crouch to avoid lasers, have initial combat, stuff like that.
The point of the intro is to fight your way through a few large areas to a ship, which brings you out of the tutorial and into the real game, where other players are.
I had a brutal time. I’m lousy at first-person shooters in general, even on the PC with mouse/keyboard controls. So multiply that by being even crappier with joystick controllers. Over time I would improve, but for the intro I constantly over corrected, sweeping past various mobs all intent on killing me. Add a super long reload time to whatever rifle I had, 2 or 3 large rooms with multiple enemies, and I got killed a lot. As in, 19 times according to the stat screen you can view afterwards, just in the intro area trying to get to the ship.
It was a gruesome outing and I wasn’t having much fun. None if this is Destiny’s fault – the game looked fine, played fine, seemed interesting… it is just that I am really horrible at FPS games and would not be any kind of asset to a group at all. I’d probably die so often in the actual content I would drag my friends down and I hate to be that guy nobody wants to group with, forcing my friends to group with me out of sympathy. 😉
So, this experiment was very short lived indeed. The only positive outcome is that it saved me the money of buying a PS4. Well, at least for a few months – my favorite console franchise (Ratchet & Clank) is releasing a PS4 game in a few months so I will probably break down and get one then.
MMO Juggler 