5 reasons why you shouldn’t play Destiny at launch

Ah Destiny, the one game poised to be this year’s poster child for console gamers everywhere. From a surprisingly polished alpha last month to a beta this month, there’s a lot going for Bungie’s upcoming MMO-shooter hybrid.

Or so I thought.

While the alpha gave me more than a sliver of hope with its slick graphics, tight gameplay, and a possibly interesting take on a tried and tested premise, the beta left me hoping that the final product isn’t going to end up being the damp squib that showed up for download on my Playstation 4 last weekend. Here’s why:

 1. The missions are repetitive

The basic mission structure has you traveling from one point of the map to the next, shooting up waves of aliens and doing little else. If this is what the final game is going to be like, we’re in for a complete snoozefest. Reason being, the beta had you doing the same thing for every single mission. There’s no variety in the story missions that have you uncovering the great threat that is the Fallen, nor is the solitary strike mission present any different. Even the free-roam missions are equally repetitive. There’s only so many times you can find yourself slaughtering specific enemy types and harvesting their organs. And in Destiny’s case that happened way too often over the course of a single weekend.

2. Extreme backtracking

While I’m all for making the best possible use of amazing environments, and ensuring missions feature them well, I’m dead against game design that forces me to backtrack to the same structure across the breadth and width of Old Russia three times in as many missions. We get it, some areas are more important than others. But if after-effect is knowing every single nook and cranny blindfolded in just two days of gaming, then there’s a definite problem. Either that or the picturesque environs of Old Russia are a lot more sparse than Bungie would like us to believe.

3. The return of error 37

Diablo III fans know what I’m referring to. For the uninitiated, error 37 was the message that showed up every time the Blizzard faithful tried to login to Diablo III on launch day and in some cases, launch week. Bungie’s beta wasn’t trouble-free either. The Playstation Network was down for a couple of hours for most. And for some of us, it took the better part of four hours post beta launch to even access the store page, let alone download the game. If this is indicative of what to expect when the game hits, I wouldn’t recommend buying it or downloading it for a couple of weeks at least.