I think it’s a safe assessment that Destiny is a completely different take on FPS gaming in the eyes of long-time fans of the genre. But what is Bungie doing to help ease that transition with its epic release?
For starters, Destiny itself is a pretty good tutorial. If you’ve played the official release or even the public beta, you know the game slowly introduces you to these alien elements and tries to break things down in a way new players can easily understand. In addition, the folks at the Xbox Wire have compiled a handy-dandy quick-start guide for your reference.
Take a look below for more info:
Character Creation
- The first thing you’ll need to do when booting up Destiny is create your character. You pick a race (Human, the ethereal Awoken, or the robotic Exo) and a gender, then customize your character’s appearance as much – or as little – as you desire…
Experience Points and Leveling
- Shortly after you begin your enemy-slaying career, you’ll notice another RPG-like development: You’ve gone up a level! But hold up there, champ; don’t worry that you’re going to have to allocate points to your charisma trait or anything. Leveling in Destiny generally just means that you’re now more of a badass. Your core abilities are better, meaning you can take on tougher enemies…
Custom Equipment
- In that vein, you also get way more flexibility when it comes to your gear than in your standard shooter. Not only do you get to choose from a staggering array of base weapons; you can also customize and upgrade them to suit your particular playing style. You also have your choice of armor, which not only offers protection, but can also boost other abilities…The process of procuring new gear and upgrading it is one of the central draws in RPGs, and it’s just as powerful here. And how do you go about procuring such things? You can find some new gear (and gear upgrades) in the game maps, which encourages exploration…
Quests
- And as for those missions: Sure, they can be considered “quests,” and you even occasionally get them from non-player characters in the game world. But when it comes right down to it, these missions are simply tweaks on familiar shooter formulas. Consider Strike missions, which are often described as “dungeons.” These are really just co-op missions where you team up with friends to clear out specific areas. Then we have Raids, six-player missions which appear late in the game and require serious planning and strategy…
Socializing
- Destiny is an always-connected multiplayer experience. To that end, you’re given a small suite of actions to help you communicate with other players. These are called “emotes” in MMORPG-land, and here they allow your character to point, wave, sit… or, uh, dance…
This is just the abridged version, so be sure to check out the full read via the Xbox Wire.