I've been enjoying Destiny Beta quite a bit. I played all three classes. Here are some comments:
- graphics are really nice, everything looks great and the draw distance is awesome. No pop-ins I could notice, which is a first I think in any game I have ever played...
- control is tight and responsive, really fun to run around, shoot and melee stuff and jump around.
- character progression is nice - the additional skills bring more cool ways to kill things and improve the power of your toon.
- the gear progression and upgrade so far is rather limited. I guess it's because of the cap and only uncommon (green) gear being usable? Blue+ needs higher levels, at least all the pieces I found
- the pacing of the game is a bit strange. It's more "stay in orbit and select your next mission" rather than a big world. Again, could be because it's beta and only limited things are available (one zone pretty much, but it has several places to visit).
- loading times (especially for the Tower) are rather annoying. When going to a mission, it's better, which is strange, since the Tower is very small and each mission is actually loading the whole area and just instance you once you get to the mission area ("darkness zone").
- the special skills are cool to use I really like Hunter's Golden Gun the most I think, though Titan's BOOM is also cool.
Anyway, this game is no Borderlands 2 (I saw someone trying to compare it to BL2). Borderlands 2 feels like a huge world that you can explore, Destiny Beta feels like a mission picker... but that may change with the final game, once other areas on Earth (I hope there are other areas on Earth...) and other planets / moons are available? I also hope the single player campaign is very very long... like 100h long if you play the explore areas and all difficulty missions... That's what I really like about BL2, how long it is
Gonna play my Hunter a bit more, try to unlock the triple jump and see how it works out. The double jump is really awesome for getting around I still need to decide, but I think I'll be pre-ordering it (digital edition).
EDIT: Also, for being a Beta, the game is rather bug-free, I found a few bugs only (posted to Bungie.net too):
1) Changing special and heavy weapons removes all ammo. No idea if this is intended? I hope not, cause it's rather annoying... Especially for the rare heavy ammo.
2) Can't open some loot chests - the icon shows up, I press and hold square (PS4) and the wheel almost fills up. Then it just disappears and the chest doesn't open. I tried several times. I found this buggy chest in Skywatch, where you hunt for dead ghosts. There's a cave next to a chopper from which some of the Fallen spawn. Inside it was the buggy chest.
3) I can't store any items in the Vault. Going into the Vault and then into your character screen, hovering over an item (on any of the non-equipped ones), the store (X) button shows up but clicking it, the item blinks red and nothing happens. I tried on several characters. I watched some YT videos (I thought I did something wrong), but there after pressing X the item just goes to the Vault. For me, any item blinks red and can't be stored for other characters / later.
4) Flickering shadows - in several places, the shadows are like a mesh that flickers and changes as you turn your character's head. It's very distracting and doesn't look too good, especially since the game looks great! Seeing it on my PS4, no idea how much worse it is on a PS3.
5) Enemy AI - seems the enemy, if you attack from far away, does not really react. They move around a bit but not really engage you (or at least head towards your location - I just killed one of them!).
6) LOOONG loading times - especially when going to the Tower. The loading times are really noticeable, which is surprising since the PS4 has 8GB of memory and the locations aren't really *that* big.... No idea if anything can be done about this so late in development? Having to go to the Tower all the time doesn't really help forget about the long loading either