Thoughts on the PC Beta?

[Sychotix]

To crack open the new section...

What does everyone think about the PC Beta? Notice anything broken that could potentially be exploited?

Apparently, tricking the game into thinking you are playing with a controller (even though you are using mouse/keyboard) will enable aim-assist. This is a pretty huge flaw to me, one which I'm not sure they can easily fix without removing it altogether. Supposedly Overwatch had similar issues in the beta and they removed it entirely.

EDIT: More info. Its using XIM4. Destiny 2 streamer is testing aim assist with mouse and keyboard (Updated) | PC Gamer

I would assume that this "aim assist" could be enabled by flipping a flag (or NOPing a jump) somewhere in the games memory instead of having to buy an expensive piece of hardware, but this method would of course be easier to detect. Potentially writing software to grab mouse/keyboard inputs and map them to XInput or something?

[Kenneth]

I think the beta was very lackluster. I bought a PS4 for Destiny 1 and put at least 1000 hours into that game and sadly this beta just does not do the game justice. A lot of my friends were very put off by it but I had to keep explaining to them that this is such a bare bones beta. There is a whole world yet to be explored and raids to beat.

An analogy I tried using was lets pretend WoW had a beta in 2017 and once you logged in you picked a class and from the character screen, instead of hitting enter world, you had three options. BG on the same map, Arena on the same map, and One Dungeon. No World, no capital city, no anything. Just one BG, one Arena, one Dungeon. Now would that kind of beta do what WoW really is any justice? Most people would say absolutely not. And that is kinda how I feel about this beta.

For newer people on the cusp of buying or not, this beta probably didn't win them over. Which sucks because it played smooth and was insanely well optimized. I am playing on an 8 year old CPU and because it had render scale I was able to run it flawlessly.

So as a huge white knight for the game, I would say this beta was definitely below average. I wish they would have added some sort of progression, even if it was to be reset at launch, just to give people something to do rather than queue for the same 3 things over and over.

[Dante]

The singleplayer gameplay was "ok" at best, and the multiplayer was very boring and doesnt stand out at all compared to other fps games. This game could potentionally be a fun game to play with friends, but playing solo not so much.

[vpdaughtreyz]

The Beta it self was not much compared to the beta we received for Destiny 1. We received 1 strike, 1 story mission, and 2 PvP game modes with 2 different maps, while in Destiny 1, we received the entirety of Earths story, Earths Patrol area, Earths strike, and a mission on the Moon, as well as some PvP.

The story mission that we got to play was already a huge improvement from the type of story content we got through Destiny 1's campaign, so you can tell off the bat that Bungie appears to be trying to do good by the players that complained about the story when the first game was still in its early days. Whether that is going to reflect in the other story missions is unknown, but should they follow suite with the mission we played in the beta, story will be fun.

The strike was fun, alright length, the boss didn't feel like a total bullet sponge like most bosses in the original destiny did (I fucking HATED The Nexus) and had some variety to it with different phases. However, regardless of phases not that much changed between the phases. First phase, boss teleported around the room, and spawn adds, once you hit second phase, floor would vanish and you'd fall to the second stage where the boss would routinely heat up the floor so you would have to get on high ground to avoid dying, while also dealing with adds routinely spawning in. Star of third phase, you'd fall to the final stage, and the boss would stop burning the floor, adds would still spawn, and a bit through the fight he takes some damage and hits this berserk phase where he just runs at someone and starts spamming bullets at them, and again, spawns adds. I may of missed a mechanic or two, but that was basically the boss.

The design of the strike it self was pretty cool, everything looked nice, nothing felt all that tedious, and according to Bungie, the Inverted Spire was the weakest of the strikes they have lined up in the actual game, so assuming they aren't lying through their teeth, the strikes look promising.

Now, the PvP is where there is a problem (for PC anyway) while it plays like it did on the console, basically halo 3 with abilities (its fun, just like Halo was) there is an issue with aim assist and controllers. Now, it being on the controllers it self isn't bad, mouse and keyboard players will still walk away with an advantage as Mouse and Keyboard has the higher skill ceiling, however, there is some worry that players will be spoofing their mouse and keyboard setup to get picked up by their PC as a controller so they get the aim assist as well, which could pose a pretty serious problem, with potential to make games unfun. The community is pretty split down the middle about it being a bad thing or not, but I personally have played on a remote and switched around a bit, and I don't notice all that much of a difference.

The lack of dedicated servers is also laughable. While it didn't happen to often, still ran into the occasional player that would eat a full clip, and not take damage as they we're logging in from the 1990's, they would still die after the game caught up with them and those bullets YOU fired do register at some point, however, it looks really weird, and isn't something that should be in a triple A title.


All in all, the beta, while not offering much, was fun the first day, boring every other day due to limited amount of content. Some of the game play footage of the EDZ looks really really fun, and I wish we got that as a beta instead, but the game may be worth $60. Good thing i'm a PC player, I get an extra month and a half to judge if I want the game enough based on what goes down on the consoles