30 Changes That Would Make Destiny A Better Game

First, you play Destiny. Then, you complain about Destiny. Then, you play some more.

That’s been our process over the last few weeks, anyway. Several of us here at
Kotaku have been playing Destiny regularly, and every time we play, we come up with more things we wish the game did differently.

Bungie has already
improved the game’s loot system and says that more fixes—like expanded chat options—are coming in the near future. So, I polled Luke, Tina and Jason on which issues we wanted Bungie to address first. We came up with 30 things. Some of them are small, some of them are big, but all of them would help make this game easier to play and more complete-feeling.

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Two notes, before we begin: First, these suggestions are mainly for PvE play as opposed to The Crucible; we’ve been spending most of our time doing that, so that’s where our focus is. Second, we have no idea how technically feasible most of these additions would be, or how much of a headache it would be for Bungie to add them after the game’s launch. Doubtless some would be easy fixes, while others would require a huge amount of work and re-shuffling. But hey, we want what we want.

It’s nice that you can go to this site to preview a shader you’re considering buying, but it’d be even nicer if Bungie built in a preview feature for shaders similar to how it lets you preview other gear. Surely there’s space for a dressing room somewhere on Tower…

11. Meaningful Clans

The clan system in
Destiny feels like a very thin start—it’d be nice to see clans become more meaningfully integrated into the game, similar to other MMOs. It’d be nice to be able to create and manage your clan in-game, and even to have access to a shared pool of money or bounties. It’d also be cool if every clan could be given their own space on Tower (they’d all occupy the same area, of course) that you could customize, where people in the clan could go to hang out, get clan-specific bounties, that sort of thing.

12. Custom Emblems

The expensive legendary emblems are all pretty cool, but they also feel a touch haphazard and random, since they’ve all been designed by Bungie. We’d love the opportunity to design our own emblems, the better to help our clans stand apart. Bungie’s offered that sort of customization in
Halo games, so hopefully it’s only a matter of time before it makes its way to Destiny

13. Opt-In Proximity Chat

It’s great that Bungie is adding opt-in chat for crucible multiplayer and strikes, but it’d be nice to see something similar for proximity chat while out exploring in the world. If you find a high-level player while doing patrol missions and you’re thinking of going on the Nightfall Strike, wouldn’t it be nice to just ask them if they’d like to come along? Speaking of communication options in the field…

14. A Bunch More Emotes

Destiny‘s built-in emotes are woefully undercooked. Dancing is fun, and should stick around, but the other three options are basically useless. Worse, they’re inconsistent between classes, and each one occupies an entire d-pad button. This game direly needs a wheel’s worth of emotes that are actually useful, some of which relay information through the other players’ ghosts. “Help!” “I’m ready to revive.” “Come here.” “Go there.” “Shoot that.” That sort of thing. They wouldn’t have to all be practical, though—as dancing has showed us, more goofy/fun emotes would be welcome, too.

While in-game chat options are nice, there should be a built-in emote system that actually facilitates communication with players who don’t want to chat or who speak other languages.

15. The Ability To Change Your Handle

Bad enough that Sony won’t let us change our PSN names. (Seriously, get on that Sony, what the heck.) Whatever platform you’re playing
Destiny on, you can’t customize your character’s in-game name. Coming up with a cool name for your MMO character is a time-honored tradition, and Destiny should allow players to create custom names for each of their characters, rather than having them all operate under their Gamertag/PSN name.

16. A Helmetless Option

We’d love to be able to show off our fabulous haircuts outside of the Tower. A helmetless option would be pretty cool—if Bungie wants to keep things “believable” they can always have players wearing rebreathers over their noses and mouths while gallivanting about on the surface of Mars or the Moon. But if they wanted to keep things “believable,” well, maybe they shouldn’t have included space magic and moon wizards, ya know?

17. Character Re-Customization

Maybe you’ve grown tired of your funky blue hair or your white face-tats? Well, too bad. At the moment,
Destiny offers no option to re-customize your character after you’ve created them. It’s a feature that should be available in every role-playing game. If we’re going to continue to develop these characters over the next ten years, we’d better be able to change our minds about how they look. For some set amount of glimmer, players should be able to completely change the look, race, and gender of their character without having to start from scratch.

18. The Option To Hide Other Players’ Handles

While we’re happy to know that we’re undertaking this public event with xX_TheDoctor1986_Xx, it’d be nice to have an option to turn off other players’ handles in-game. It’d be entirely optional—their level could still display, since that can be useful information, but it’d be nice to have more control over what shows on our HUD at a given moment. Speaking of that…

19. A HUD-Free Screenshot/Selfie Mode

It is far, far too difficult to take good videos and screenshots in
Destiny. This is a beautiful game, and it’s been designed to take advantage of the social features offered by the new generation of gaming consoles. But every angle you try to get is covered in text and other junk, and the camera seems to actively work to crop your teammates out of shots. Destiny would hugely benefit from a HUD-free screenshot mode, as well as a good selfie mode. It’d be even better with the aforementioned helmet-free option, which would make every random battle look far more interesting and photo-ready.

20. More High-Level Solo Activities

At the moment, most of the best high-level activities—the nightfall strike, the raid, the weekly heroic strike—are limited to groups of three. Which is fine, but we’d love to see more solo-friendly activities outside of bounties and the daily heroic story mission. If a player just wants to play for an hour or two each night, there should be more than a couple of things for them to do.

21. New Missions With Actual Variety

It’s clear that both of the coming expansions will bring
new strikes, raids, and missions. But it’d sure be nice if the missions in those expansions could add some actual variety to the game, rather than simply having us defend Ghost as he unlocks all-new doors.

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Here’s hoping the new missions channel the sorts of challenges seen in the Vault of Glass raid, with enemies who buff and debuff, bosses that require careful strategy to defeat, and environmental challenges that test the limits of
Destiny‘s long-distance jet-jumps. Show us what you’ve got, Bungie. We can handle it.

While it’s nice that there arewebsites that let people hunt for teammates for the nightfall strike or the raid, it’d be even nicer if the game itself could feature that sort of tool. (And of course, even nicer if they could integrate matchmaking into every type of group activity in the game.) Failing that, a “beacon” system, perhaps, where you put out word that you’re looking for teammates for an activity, then are given a list of potential matches to message and try to coordinate your schedules. This would also be great for assembling teams for specific crucible challenges, and so on.

24. Vote To Skip Cutscenes And Pre-Mission Briefs

It is absurd that
Destiny doesn’t allow players to skip cutscenes. Embarrassing, really. The Queen’s Wrath bounties tasked me with completing the “Restoration” mission multiple times, and each time I did, I had to sit through the interminable cutscene where the Speaker talks about how the children are frightened anyway. I didn’t really like this game’s story the first time through, Bungie. Why are you making me watch it again and again? Furthermore, I like to plan and strategize with my team as a mission loads, but it’s often hard to hear what we’re saying while Ghost blathers on and on about stuff that doesn’t really matter. Players should be able to vote to skip cutscenes, as well as Ghost’s pre-mission briefs.

25. A Way To Undo Gear Breakdowns

Everyone’s done it: Looked at that amazing exotic auto-rifle in your inventory and thought, just for a second, what if I just pressed the breakdown button? Just for a split second. Just long enough to let the bar get a quarter way across. Why not live dangerously?

In truth, it’s likely that someone or other will accidentally break down a legendary or exotic piece of armor and regret it afterward. It’d be nice if there were some sort of short-term undo option for breaking something down, like the buyback option most RPG stores offer.

26. An Inventory Wheel

It’s much too difficult to access our inventories at the moment, particularly when under heavy fire on a high-level raid. It’d be nice to have an inventory wheel that lets players quickly access different weapon loadouts, ammo packs and other consumables, and check the status on various bounties. There’s no reason we should be fiddling with in-game menus while taking damage from enemies.

27. Shared Bounties

If you wind up out patrolling with a friend and they have a (non-exotic) bounty that you don’t, they should be able to share that bounty with you and have it turn up in your bounty inventory. You shouldn’t have to return to Tower just to get on the same page. That would make it much easier to casually pop into your friends’ game without so much worry about whether your short-term goals are the same.

28. A Home For Exotic Bounties

Exotic bounties are cool and everything, but they’re also time-sinks, and they shouldn’t hog an entire spot in your bounty inventory for the multiple days it usually takes to complete one. Rather, exotic bounties should be relocated (maybe to the missions inventory spots?) so that players can still carry the usual number of bounties each day.

29. An In-Game Map

While we’ve all learned the basics of Old Russia and the Moon, it’d be nice to have an in-game map that shows our location relative to the overall world we’re exploring. The map wouldn’t have to give away secret locations or anything, but it’d be nice to be able to orient ourselves while we explore.

30. A Way To Pause The Game

Look. We know it’s an always-online game. We know that every player exists in the same space and time, meaning that no one player has the ability to pause time to go to the bathroom. All the same, there simply
needs to be some pause option in Destiny. If you’re playing solo, maybe the game just puts your character in an impervious stasis. If you’re playing in a group, maybe you all “vote to pause” and something similar happens.

Regardless, Bungie: As adults with roommates, spouses, children, and pizza delivery guys occasionally asking for our attention, we cordially ask you to add some way to pause your fucking game. Thanks.

31. Let Players Trade Items… Or Maybe Don’t

Item-trading is actually the 31st thing on the list, because we’re not sure if we really want it. Sure, it’s a standard feature in most MMOs, and it’s incredibly annoying to get a legendary or exotic item for a class that you don’t play. However, giving players the option to trade items with other players would significantly change the entire dynamic of
Destiny‘s economy and post-level-cap play. It seems inevitable, but we’re not sure that it would actually improve the game.

So, there you have ’em: 30 things we think Bungie should add to
Destiny, and one extra big one we’re not sure about. Given how much the game has already changed over the last month, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that some if not most of these things will be added at some point over the next year. Here’s hoping it happens sooner rather than later.

I’m sure you all have your own tweaks you’d love to see in the game—and your own thoughts on whether item trading would improve or hurt things—so I hope you’ll share them below.

To contact the author of this post, write to [email protected] or find him on Twitter @kirkhamilton