Destiny: Weapons, Armor, and Loot

I like the separate loot per player system, will make it so much nicer instead of fighting over drops like you do in the MMO environment. I already know I'll be sniping almost exclusively (when I can). I'm all about the stay back and pick my targets off routine.

http://www.vg247.com/2014/06/09/destiny-ps4-xbox-one-gameplay-footage-alpha-leak-bungie-explains/

Ooohhh. I'm glad I'll be taking a vacation when this comes out so I can actually be on when others are instead of my normal gaming patterns. I like that there are more than one type of co-op activity.

Bungie drops Kinect: http://www.vg247.com/2014/06/09/destiny-xbox-xbone-resolution-will-increase/

Interesting. Bungie has stated they are using the PS4's unique features like the touchpad.... I'm not sure how they were using the kinect, but I think it will end up being better for Xbox players. Thats just the traditional player in me thinking. Its odd that kinect was a resource hog in the first place.

The ps4 controller touch pad uses basically no additional resources that I'm aware of. But that kinect's software was tied into Skype and it needed those reserve resources so ppl can video chat or something. But this makes me wonder... will ppl be able to stream themselves in their Xbox one destiny game play. If not then the ps4 camera as a stand alone product might give ps4 users another feature that would be missing on the Xbox one.

Official Destiny E3 Trailer -- New Beginnings

Wow. I am impressed.

Too... Much... Epic! *dies*

Sign up for the Destiny Alpha for this weekend!

http://playstation.greatnessawaits.com/destiny.html

You might have to put in your name a couple times so it loads a confirmation in the browser, you'll get the following message:
 

Thank you for registering! If you’re selected, you will receive a notification on your PlayStation®4 system and an e-mail will be sent to the e-mail address associated with the PSN ID before 12:01am PDT, Friday, June 13th.

Earth, Moon, Mars, and Venus have already been revealed to us as locations... but this trailer says "Mercury became a garden world" and you faintly see Jupiter on the map. Hopefully these become more locations. 

Damn near wet myself when this started off the Sony Press Conference. God I really can't wait for September and I really can't wait for Beta to start up. I signed up for the Alpha but since I have to work I won't get much time on it if they select me.

Everyone who signed up for the alpha will get in the alpha this weekend. this will be the first true test for bungie's servers!

http://www.psu.com/a023688/E3-2014--Destiny-PS4-Alpha-NOW-open-to-everyone-who-applied

Also, it is apparently in the psn store now for downloading. 6.7 gb.

I got my Alpha code in an email a little while ago. It's downloading now. I'll be streaming for a couple hours once its installed.

http://www.twitch.tv/sledgstone

As I'm sure you noticed I was on for a bit. Damn work taking me away from it (have a few hours before I go but got crap to do). What little I played was fun but don't go wandering off to much, I ran into an area with ?? mobs. Ran as fast as I could away

I'll be on this tomorrow and all weekend before work for a few hours, we should try to get a Fireteam going and go own some shit. Would really like to see what this has to offer before it goes down.

Sounds good to me. I played for a little over an hour, but I stopped because my PS4 did that damn disc spit out issue again.. wtf. I messed with the little rubber piece on the bottom of the PS4 that touches the eject button, i jammed it a little with a small micro screw driver so it won't touch the bottom of the button and everything seems fine now.. but if it does it again I'll be sending my PS4 into Sony while the warranty is still good.

Anyway, yeah.. I saw you on there but I didn't see how to invite anyone into my game, until I got to that city. BTW, did you have to take out that hive wizard by yourself? That damn thing was a bitch to take down solo.

The game is very interesting so far.. I had to change my controls to puppeteer style so I can crouch with R3. I thought there was going to be a third person mode in combat areas, but if there is I didn't see how to make that happen. I'm really getting a Guild Wars 1 / 2 feel from this game. Out in a combat area, its all FPS and exploring in a PVE environment, but as soon as I got into a town, you get the third person view and it feels like Guild Wars and other MMOs. When I get back on tomorrow I'll buy a new gun and see what else I can do.

Have you tried your land speeder yet? Hit that touchpad, and summon it in that menu, that thing will cover ground fast.

Of course I work late shifts every night til its over, and my code went into the spam mail folder so I'm downloading it right now.

UPDATED:

After playing for the short time I had, I instantly came away with a lot.

-This is an Alpha?! This game is beautiful in Alpha. The lighting is amazing...

-The controls are responsive and crisp. I changed my button layout to Puppeteer as well. This game doesn't play like Halo. The gravity physics are the only comparison you could make. Otherwise you have Battlefield unlimited sprint with COD4's weapon control. Reloads are fast, trigger pull is spot on, and weapon swap speed is above average. The single jump is a bit short, but its nothing that's worth complaining about.

-Kudo's Bungie... thanks for whipping my ass with the first mission of the game. It was intense. I started out picking the Fallen off and taking cover. My starting weapons seemed to be getting the job done until I entered the dark warehouse and the hive poured in... I failed miserably twice. A well taught lesson. My weapons were not up to par... that's when I discovered grenades and melee. The melee is pretty strong for Warlock. It will instakill one enemy and push anyone else close, away with a short knock down time. I had to strategically use all three to take down the aggressive horde... the AI is no joke. They aren't human players, but the "grunts" relentlessly chase you down until you kill them all or you die. There is no running away and picking them off... they don't let up. The higher level enemies take cover pretty well, but as you'd expect they do pop back out. This is no surprise, but the former impressed the hell out of me and had me stressed out during fire fights. When I reached the mission "boss" I found myself being too cautious and I ran out of ammo... I also learned you need to treat kills like you're playing COD's "Kill Confirmed" because they drop ammo a lot... I was just killing everything I saw and moving along without inspecting corpses... it cost me eventually. Bungie wasn't lying when they said you WILL fail, and you will fail a lot. This mission would have been a lot easier on a fire team no doubt.

-The social structure of this game is Guild Wars 2 with a small splash of SWTOR. This is a very good thing. When I was on my starting mission a nearby event popped up ala GW2... I quickly sidetracked over to the position and defended the objective with the players that were there. I performed a revive, and completed the event. The event was already in progress upon my arrival, there was no indication of a tiered reward like in GW2 when you join at the last second, and get a "bronze" which offers lesser bounty. From there I followed a few players into the starting mission area, we cleared out the entrance and they promptly vanished upon entering the mission area like SWTOR... I was put into my own instance when I crossed the invisible barrier.

-Upon completing the starter mission, I went to the tower and collected my rewards. I also selected a burst fire pulse rifle which better suited my style. It reminds me of the M16 in COD4, but with a bit more kick. Once I had better armor and a gun that I liked. I started wrecking face in free explore. I did a few gathering missions and called it a night. I started to run-n-gun hip fire across the terrain... I'll live with it, but Bungie did my biggest pet peeve in not being able to reload while sprinting. However, I'm liking the super charged aspect.

My early impression is very good. The Kotaku writer that called this game boring is clearly not a FPS fan as her previous work has shown. It has great FPS controls with classic MMO side missions. I looked at the bounty board as well and I think that has a ton of potential. Bungie is on to something good. I found myself grinning when running around burst firing the hell out of some Fallen. I know that will not always work, but its fun when it does.

I had the same issue with that hive fight. I almost had the damn thing beat, but I was so low on ammo I had to run out to get some loot drops and they took me out easily. The grenades are very powerful in this game. After that wizard killed me a couple times, I got a solid hit with a grenade and it took half it's health in one explosion. I missed that side mission you were talking about, but I did see a few dead players with the revive icons over them, but by the time I got to them the event was over and I only had enough time with these random people to exchange a few emoticons of waving. lol. I think we were supposed to do that side mission to get enough points to level up and get the first power move unlocked.. I didn't get my move unlocked until after I took out the hive, I'm sure it would have made things a lot easier. Same with actually doing the mission with a fireteam.. but it might not have been easier with a fire team.. many MMO style games like this would scale the enemies to be more difficult when more players are involved. While playing Borderlands 2 with my older bro, the enemies definitely get scaled up to a point that if you were playing solo, it'd be too challenging.

After the mission was done, the results screen reminded me of Defiance. It'll list all players involved in the mission and rank them for their total kills, point accumulation, etc. The enemy loot drops are just like Defiance and Borderlands IMO, so as soon as I was running out of ammo, I knew I had to go and run over some enemy bodies for loot to replenish my ammo reserves. I was so used to doing that from Defiance, that it was like instinct for me. The always summonable vehicle is also like Defiance, which means when the full game is open the map area must be huge to require travel at the speeds those land speeders can accomplish. I wonder if it'll have fast map travel or if those land speeders are that fast because there won't be fast map travel.

Do all the classes have double jumping? I love that double jumping is a standard for my guy.

I was expecting the Alpha to be like this and I'm quite pleased. After experiencing Defiance and BF4 on PS3 as my most recent betas from last year, the way Destiny already plays as an Alpha is leaps and bounds beyond all beta's I have ever played. My predictions for the Destiny beta.. I'm thinking the game will look even more polished, fully rendered backgrounds for the shop vendor screens and a much larger map.

For an Alpha I was really impressed with the way this looked myself. I was telling my friend at work last night that this looked more like a beta then an alpha.

I honestly had no trouble with the Hive fight. Wizard was a bitch to kill but I just found cover when I was low on health and unloaded my entire shotgun and most of my rifle ammo into his ass. Killed him with 99 shots left, was freaking intense. I never got the event out in the world, hell I only met two people down there before I entered the story area. Thought it was kinda dead for the amount of people I figured would be playing. Of course that changed as soon as I set foot in the Tower.

I rolled a Hunter for this first time out. Like the feel of it and I picked the semi-auto rifle they had to choose since it'll fit more with the sniping aspect of the class. The knife melee for hunters in one shot kill as well (and pretty damn cool when you stick it into the head of an enemy).

The sparrow is freaking awesome, that thing can get some good speed on a straight-away.  It's nice to know we'll have them that early in the game because running everywhere would suck if you didn't.

I'm pretty sure the difficulty it's scaled up with a fire team, but at least you have someone to revive you. that's why I think it would have been easier.

I tagged along with some dude that had a sniper rifle. He was just picking people off left and right with deadly precision.

I was playing as a hunter also. Hmm.. maybe it scaled the difficulty up for me in that fight because there were 3 other players with me literally moments before I opened that door. I must have entered my own instance Because they all disappeared and I realized I could have used their help. Either that or I was sucking with my shotgun. Lol. I definitely need a sniper rifle.

I didn't like the shotgun too much, I really want to replace that ASAP. Btw I think everyone has double jump... Mine is more like a glide though. It's like I have boosters on my back and I can float around for a short period. This is useful when using my super charged attack.

Yea it seems everyone has double jump. The one for Sledge and I is just a rocket boosted jump (which apparently neither of us is very good at using ).

Sledge and I were tearing shit up tonight, running around doing missions and getting our asses handed to us in 2 events where we were the only two around to do anything. BTW that tank event is a bitch, Sledge and I spent most of our time dead or finding a hole to hide in. Was extremely fun but I don't think anymore story is in the game or that I could see besides the starting mission. There was a bunch of side quests to do but over all I didn't see any story quests (unless you pick them up at the Tower at a higher level, just hit 7 playing with Sledge and I haven't gone back to the Tower yet). Loving the new Sniper Rifle I picked up tonight too, damn thing is like a freaking cannon.

We should really try to put together a fire team of six tomorrow Sledge and go try The Devil's Lair. I'm really interested to see how that plays out and what kind of loot we'll get from it.

I had some fun tonight Strider, it was great playing on your fire team. All the side quests seemed pretty similar so far.. "kill these enemies and get the item they drop", "Kill all enemies in this area", "Walk thru a massive area for 5-10 minutes to hit the square button on an objective." lol. It looks like the only part of the game left to really explore is The Devil's Lair.. the map does say it is a story mission.. but did we need 6 people or was it that we needed to be level 6 to access it? We might be able to do it on our own. The first mission looks like its limited to up to 3 players per fire team. I'll have to check it again tomorrow. I definitely want to try that area before the alpha ends.

I saved the stream of our gameplay from tonight.

http://www.twitch.tv/sledgstone/b/538218091

I got a heavy weapon tonight! I think I picked up the engram after we killed one of the numerous level 9 Hive Knights that were a bastard to kill. Those engrams get turned into weapons at the cryptarch guy. Check the video at 1:26 to see what it looks like. Now I can tap triangle to switch between my two guns and hold triangle to switch to my heavy.

Go to the 40 minute mark to see us get destroyed by that tank. We didn't stand a chance in that event..

Go to the 1:40 minute mark to see the crucible / multiplayer. Its basically 6 vs 6 domination with 3 flags. Its not entirely fair tho, considering everyone was a higher level than me and some people had shields.. how the f*ck did they get shields!?

I wonder if Destiny is sucking up all the processing power of the PS4.. because my stream quality on twitch looks horrible compared to what the game looks like.. then again, maybe its something on twitch's end.

For Devil's Lair I think you need to be level 6, and if you are playing solo, you'll be match made with 2 other players for a fire team.

I got to play a little more tonight, but by the looks of it Strider has had about as much time as me to play. I reached level 7. I continued to explore Old Russia and found some level 9s to pick on. That would have been impossible at level 5 if it wasn't for the fact that I acquired a slick sniper rifle to replace my shotgun. Its average damage isn't that great, but head popping crits makes it ultra deadly. I can't wait for the complete game full of players... I ran into 2 events which I had to solo because there was no one near by to help out. The first was clearing 3 drilling sites in which I only could clear one before time ran out. The other was a damn Devil Walker! Its like trying to do a group event solo on Guild Wars 2 . I was able to get him a fifth of the way down before time ran out.

I also found some encrypted stuff that I had to bring back to a cryptologist? He identified the items for me and I ended up with some good boots and an awesome burst fire rifle with 83 damage, along a better optic to boot. It was required level 7 so I probably would have went to bed at level 6 otherwise.

Here is a short video of me doing a bit of everything, including being a little reckless. My new rifle is not included in this clip.

I'm going to try to get off a little early tomorrow, hopefully you guys will be on when I get home. I want to do devil's lair with people I know. LOL

I think I got the a similar burst rifle to the one you're talking about DX, I had to stop for the night before I got to the required level to equip it. Both of you have amazing sniper rifles.. I'm envious.

I forgot to mention in my previous posts about 2 things.. First.. I love that it is so easy to play with a friend on this game. Go to the menu, click invite friend and you get about 4 or 5 options including invite to fire team and join fire team. I saw strider was playing so I joined his fire team and within a minute the game loaded me right to were he was in the middle of a fight.

Second.. green status weapons and armor. The fact that we can get gear like this that we can upgrade and improve is awesome.. and the green stuff isn't even legendary gear. Our

Send me a text when you get on dx if you don't see me on the game, I should be getting on sometime this afternoon. Hopefully we'll all be on at the same time ssometime today.

Heh, I got both a rocket launcher and a machine gun out of two of those engrams I picked up yesterday. Also got a new helm, a new primary (a pistol), and new foot armor. Can't use any of the armor or pistol till level 8 (almost there, I fooled around a bit here a few minutes ago to pad my level. Also picked up an engram for a sweet rifle and a hunter's cloak (that I can't wear till 10)).

Devil's Lair is a level 6 strike and supports up to 3 people so if we can all get on at the same time we can do it (otherwise it'll match us up with other players). I should be on around the same time as last night (around 4:30 pm my time so 6:30 yours, would be awesome to get together and own some shit).

Heh, I love my rifle. Now if only I could get a green version of it so it's even better.

Oh shit.. a rocket launcher!? Nice. I'll be on around that time.