My thoughts on Destiny (from the Beta)

The art, graphics, and sound (VO, sound effects, music, etc) is all stellar.  This is to be expected as the considering the pedigree and budget behind the game.  The shell of this game is incredibly enticing and production values are top notch.

The story is unoriginal and has been done to death. How many games are you considered the one, have a floating spherical robot that does things, and you're fighting off a massive universal evil by shooting aliens?

The character progression and systems are mediocre at best with major talents doing things that "proficiencies" do in other games and because there are only 3 classes, the limited talent trees don't offer anywhere near the amount of variety you'd expect from a loot dropping action RPG.

The loot dropping happens too few and far between with bosses rarely if ever dropping loot and the loot that does drop, like the talents, rarely does anything to change things as it focus's solely on the damage or armor and not the actual function of the gun or armor. This means pretty much all guns and armor in the game function the same minus small stats that increase reload speed, make grenade cooldowns shorter, increases melee damage, etc. aka basically stuff that would be done in proficiencies in other games but not things that make getting new weapons and armor feel unique and worthwhile.

The gameplay is painfully basic with not much changing outside of gun types, mostly due to the wishy washy "power" system lacking depth and the item randomization being so poor. This means, don't expect anything groundbreaking because outside of the handful of powers and doublejump/jetpacks, the gameplay is the norm. If you've played any fps's you've seen it and done it already.

The lack of any kind of economy system and trading is confusing. Hey I get you don't want other players to trade gear, which the gear is nothing of note but whatever, but even in Monster Hunter if you want to trade you can still trade other items besides gear. For a game that's being hyped as a MMO, this seems like a huge over site.

Only allowing three players on quests is also very weird and incredibly disappointing. Four players seems standard for a game like this but for whatever reason, they decided to go with 3, which is incredibly annoying when trying to play this game with friends. If anything, you'd expect games to INCREASE the number of teammates not lower it.  To take it a step further, the lack of cross platform play for a game that's supposed to be a MMO, even with systems in the same network (360 with XB1 or PS3 with PS4) seems like a pretty big over site.

That said, the game is fun with a group of friends, like any coop game, and it looks and sounds nice. However there are shortcomings which boggle the mind, especially in a game that has a $500 million budget. There are much better loot based action/rpg's out there, there are much better FPS's out there, and there are much better MMO's out there. I understand it's a blend of the 3 but it's not the first to do this nor is it the best. This is a mediocre game with a lot of polish, the type of game that focus's on graphics over gameplay and depth.

6/10