Thousands of gamers are absolutely loving Bungie’s latest shooter, beavering away in public events to get those precious Ascendant Shards/Energy, spending hours on Raids dying over and over again in the hope that they’ll get their just rewards, and waiting patiently—five days at a time—to descend on Xur in the Tower in the hope that he’ll be stocking a weapon of their wildest dreams. Yes, Destiny can be a grind, but it’s a bloody good grind.
However, it’s not perfect. There’s more than a handful of tweaks, features and whopping great changes that could make it even better. After speaking with our fellow clan members, these are the five changes that we would most like to see incorporated into Destiny at some point. We can live in hope…
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1. Stop making us press the OPTIONS button and spend precious seconds in the menu
It’s such a clunky method right now to select alternative equipment. Whether it’s a mission, a Strike or a Crucible match, different scenarios require different weapon-sets. When enemies all of a sudden surround you and you’re equipped with a sniper rifle and want to quickly whack out your powerful shotgun, it’s immensely frustrating having to: Press OPTIONS, hover over to the required item, Press ‘X’ and then Press ‘O’ to head back to the action. Why? Let us be able to switch on the fly and hot-swap between them.
Even better, why not let us create Loadouts and save them to the d-pad? We’d happily trade in dancing with some random dude for a press of the d-pad which allows us to access up to four pre-saved Loadouts. The same goes for using Consumables. There’s precious seconds wasted in the heat of the moment selecting your Heavy or Special Ammo Synthesis, which can result in instant death, when they could be mapped to the controller. Just give us some way to quickly access the stuff we need in battle without taking us out of the battle. Even an inventory wheel for quick access would be far better than the current set-up.
2. Stop making it so painful to get Ascendant and Radiant Shards
Bungie has made the grind a little more bearable in recent weeks with the ability to now buy items from the Crucible Vanguard, but there’s still a way to go before we’re totally satisfied. Now, we know grinding is part of the fun, but farming Ascendant and Radiant Shards is nothing short of tedious, yet we’re expected to own six at a time to upgrade one defense slot on a piece of armor. That’s six public events, which are no longer challenging (and that we’ve played a thousand times), or gambling with the likes of the Daily Heroic Story mission in the hope that we’ll get an Ascendant Shard out of it, only to be disappointed nine times out ten with Ascendant Energy which we don’t need. Here’s how to fix it: either make Ascendant Shard drops more frequent and rewarded for a wider range of activities, or make the amount of Shards you need for items less than they currently are. Simple.
If you’re at a higher level and hoping to upgrade raid armour and raid guns, it’s even tougher. You need 21 pieces of Radiant materials to upgrade each item, and these can only be gained from Raids, if you’re lucky. The most amount of Radiant materials we’ve gained from a Raid thus far is 10. Do the math and you’ll notice that you’ll need to play a hell of a lot of Raids to upgrade all your items. There’s no need for this level of grind, and sheer luck.
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3. Let us skip cut scenes
Why are we still sitting through four-five minutes of cut scenes over and over again? We’ve seen them. We’ve seen them a dozen times. We’re bored to tears with them. We have to replay missions and Strikes over and over again to get the materials we need to level up, but WHY do we have to watch these cinematics repeatedly, impressive though they are. Surely it wouldn’t take much to add this small feature. Just let us press ‘X’ to get the hell out of there and on with the action.
4. Ability to create playlists
We love The Crucible; it’s fast, furious and a lot of fun, but imagine just how much more entertaining and diverse it would be if there was the option to create our own playlists. We know Bungie has the skills to do this; Halo’s mass of customisation options are brilliant. We all have our favourite maps yet we don’t always get to play the ones we want – map rotation is random. We’d love to be able to setup a playlist, choosing the map we want and setting parameters, such as restrictions on weapon types and even classes. Destiny’s multiplayer would be elevated to a different league with such options.
5. Send items as presents, or give us a clan item share option
We’re not talking about a fully-fledged trading system here, or Auction House. We’ve seen that fail in many games and witnessed unscrupulous players take advantage of such an economy, but how about either giving us an item that can be gained from a set of quests (such as the Exotic Bounty quests) that allows us to gift a piece of equipment, set of materials, or ‘X’ amount of glimmer to a friend of our choice.
Even better would be a decent clan system set-up so that team members can share resources. Many players are in a clan and many play with teammates who work together to complete missions and Raids. If we had this option, clans would be helping each other out by sharing items with players that just aren’t getting the drops they need to purchase them.
Which features would you like to see in Destiny? Let us know in the comments below.