GameSpot's The Lobby: Which is better -- Halo 5 or Destiny?

[MUSIC] [UNKNOWN] guardians comes out today. Destiny, I guess it finally came out about two weeks ago. 15th. [UNKNOWN] And that was September. Yeah. Sorry, I'm an independent educator. You sound very independent. [LAUGH] [LAUGH] [UNKNOWN] in this conversation. Hi, how are you doing? We're here to talk about destiny. And Halo 5, which is the better first person online multiplayer/single player experience for your home video game console. I'm joined by Erick Tay. What up? What's up? Mike Mahardy, how you doing? Good, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm looking forward to this one. All right, both of you have played both. [INAUDIBLE] you've played the campaign for Halo five, you've played more Destiny than I have had hot meals in my entire left. And Mike you reviewed Taken King and Destiny, sorry and Guardians Guardians Yeah and Halo 5: Guardians for gamestock.com. Yeah And we're here to talk about which one is better. First of all, I want to talk about, I guess where this all kind of starts, which for me is with Campaign, or at least that's the traditional way we've had it. Destiny has a sort of a non traditional or like online experience. Halo obviously is more traditional, then Campaign. Mike first of all, I'm gonna go with you. Why do you think Halo 5 has a better campaign than Destiny, considering in your view for Halo 5 You didn't think that campaign was all that good. Yeah. So, I didn't think the story was that great. The campaign itself was well designed and fun to play. And they introduced this new level design. I think my love for Halo just stems from how fun it is to just play. And Destiny feels great, but in my opinion, and my experience, In that. It's just Destiny is constantly shooting a bunch of different enemies in the head. Yeah. Taking things he did a little bit better by introducing these enemy types that have abilities. Still the best way to kill them is just to shoot them in the face. Which Halo, you can say the same for that I'm sure. You sure can! Each different enemy has these more subtle ways that change how you play. And the firefights all unfold differently and feel different to me each time. Because you have so many different. I mean in Destiny you have these supers that you can use. But Halo, especially in Halo 5, you have the ground pound, you have the smash and [CROSSTALK] You're rubbing your neck already man, that's not a good sign. No, no, no. [INAUDIBLE] Your shaking your head, what do you think about that? Let's talk about the ground and pound and should charge, first of all. Both are Titan abilities. [LAUGH] One of the classes in [INAUDIBLE], that came out first obviously. Okay. And in terms of story, yeah it took us a little while to get to where we were. [LAUGH] But. Woah, is that a course for Activision. Yeah I sure do, no but it took a while to get there. I think. They learned a lot. As you said, it would take [UNKNOWN] a lot more just continuity in between missions. It's just more story-telling, little cinematic trailers, not trailers, but little cinematics in between the storytelling, just better back and forth with the [UNKNOWN] And I think part of it too is that destiny's evolving, right, and the raid is kind of the harder portion of the story. That's where you end up at, right, because that's where the big bad boss is. And that's where all the kind of bigger mechanics are, right, that are outside of just your shooting. Things in the head or in the gut, but I mean, it's the same in Halo. There's a knight, you're shooting him in the armpit so that his head opens up. Yeah, I'm shooting a vex in the stomach, like it's kind of the same thing. But I think with Destiny there's a little bit more to it, because you do have your supers and your subclass for each class and then on top of that. With the taken enemies this time around they have different things that they do. Captains will go blind walls at you. You have to avoid it. And so I feel like there's more, like, movement than in Halo where it's like you're just hiding more in Halo, I guess. All right. In the interest of making sure everyone has the same amount of time I'm gonna pass it back over to Mike to retort to that. Okay. Anything you have to say about that? Yeah so I don't. In Halo 5 were you really just hiding behind cover and then shooting and pop out and shoot? Well yeah, because when you play campaign by yourself with three dumb AI, if you die. [CROSSTALK] campaign by yourself. Then chances are you're done for, right? Is Destiny a fun solo experience? No. I think it's okay. At least it's scales a little bit better and I think you're less frustrated from the fact, like if you die, you know why you died, right. And like it's like Halo you kind of just feel like someone should revive you. Well, no, that's, but that's, if you get down in Halo, that's your fault. It's not Not your fault and [UNKNOWN] too dumb to provide you, every time I got down it's because like oh I ran into the [UNKNOWN] room- Safety net. That's your safety net, that's not why you're dying. Yeah that's more of their attempt to keep it going from checkpoint to checkpoint especially if it's really tough. But in Halo 5, especially more than any other Halo you have so many options laid out before you, you can run up a path, do a ground pound from below, sprint at the next [UNKNOWN]. Spartan smash him across, turn around obviously fire off a few shots of your battle rifle and throw a grenade. Which like not saying he doesn't have that movement, but I felt I actually played destiny more of like take cover and then shoot at these enemy's who would take varying amounts of bullets to kill. Which again taking king did improve on that but I still felt like Halo, the subtle nuances that they added to the movement just completely changed how I looked at maps. Especially cuz the map design was, I think there's more focus on creating a good level. Whereas Destiny's a lot more open than Halo 5. Which, they're not going for the same thing. But I think that I personally prefer Halo 5's style, which is Sort of linear but these arenas where you can kind of, it's like a playground almost. And kind of get on this turret or get in this banshee that you just found. Or just completely find this new weapon cache you didn't even know existed. Where as you know, you're more attached to your characters in Destiny, because it's an RPG. And you're getting new weapons and you're getting new powers with your character up until certain. I know, and I really appreciate it. All right, let's move away from the campaign stuff and talk about multi-player. And Eric, I'm gonna let you have the first Sure. Swing on this one. Obviously Halo, more traditional, much better experience, different game modes for the isolators from the campaign. What is it about Destiny, you think, that makes it a better multi-player experience than Halo Fluff Garden? I think on top, I think max in Halo is four, right, four people? That you can party up with. So, in Destiny you can do six. And Co-Op. And Co-Op. Yeah, if you're playing online, like in one of the other modes, you can have like 12 buddies, right? Yeah, easily. Okay. Well, I don't think so. He's talking about Co-Op campaign. You're talking about multiplayer, right? Yeah, multiplayers. Well, no, I'm talking about multiplayer though. Can you have more than four in your party? In arena you can only have four, but you can have, in a fire team, no, but you'll be with at least five other people. But in War Zone you could have [CROSSTALK] You can have eight other people in addition to your three friends, yeah. No, but in addition to his friends. What I'm trying to say is that, in Destiny you can Party up to six people, which is two people more than Halo, so you can get more buddies in that you want to play with, maybe four people is not enough. Two is more but it doesn't necessarily mean better. Sure, that's fine but I like to bring in John Carlo or Josh to my raid because you can do six people raids that You can't do in Halo. And I think that's one of the big proponents there, and I think that multiplayer's ever evolving in Destiny. And one of the things that's pretty cool too is there's a committment from Bungie to keep patching and making things better. So when PVP gets out of hand, if a gun is out of hand or if guns are out of hand, they will patch that, and they will fix it. And they've been doing that more, and more, and more. and on top of that, because of how Destiny is set in this world they can do fun events like the Halloween event that happened yesterday. Nobody saw it coming and it has this school little thing that everyone gets to try out like you don't even have to have a fire team or anything or you could just do it on your own and experience all this fun little Halloween things with you know masks and doing all these little side One mission that you can never do in Halo. What do you think of that Mike? Where's you god damn Halo 5 Halloween mask at? Well they do do special events playlists for multiplayer, but you can't swap out. Well you can different aesthetics appearances now in Halo 4 and 5 and 3 and Reach. But yeah, they don't have the certain ones that are actually designed to really pull you back in. Although Halo 5 the DLC models, the free maps that they'll just keep introducing throughout the year. But I, that's the thing for Halo, I feel like when I play Destiny, I return almost out of obligation. Like, I know you yourself call them chores, just as it like certain things like complete bounties, completing arms day In Halo I return cuz I want to, cuz I think it's fun and it's not something I feel forced to come back to because I'm gonna miss the weekend that Xur is selling Gjallarhorn or power weapons like that. Halo I just think the gameplay itself is enough to bring me back and I think that's a little more what I want out of games. It's something that doesn't demand that I come back, it's just something that encouraged me Yeah, I agree with Ted, I think that Bundy does a great job at keeping his community involved with these events that come out of nowhere. But Halo I think the purity of it's gameplay has more longevity. Let's talk about I guys the variety of this game. At least when I think about multiplayer Halo or I think about Halo generally. They're out in Forge obviously in December. There's a lot of different ways to play that game. Do you think that's the same in Destiny? Do you think Halo has sort of a more content, as it where? Or do you think Destiny does, if you were to take everything into account? If you were to take everything into account, I think Destiny has more by volume. But I think Halo is, from each. But just again, going back to each match itself, I think especially with Warzone introduced now. It's that PvE and PvP, I don't know how much you like Warzone or how much you've played it, but its just more like this emerging gameplay that happens. Like when you're going for a certain AI Boss or a certain capture point there's a lot of options to chase after. And then in Arena you have a bunch of different game modes. And I think there's a lot of variety and I think it changes up How the games unfold a lot. Whereas I think I feel like Destiny a lot of times is like these chores that might get me a slightly better weapon or just might be like the exotic bounty chain that I'm chasing for a week or two. That's like for Halo the journey is the reward. Whereas in Destiny maybe the journey is a means to an ends to the reward. Is that fair to say? A little bit, I think again just using the world evolve, cuz that's what I've been doing. I mean evolve is better than both of these games, you can already tell that. No definitely not, let's just not even go there. But here's the kind of cool thing that has happened in The Taken King. There has been these little missions that come up. Daily missions that come up, that all of a sudden if you unlock some of these secrets. Then you actually Kind of go down this path for a special mission that gets you a special weapon and they have had two of those now and those are like super awesome and I think just part of it too is I like weapons in destiny they're more unique. I think again I've invested the time to get them so I feel more affinity with them right and I still think the, no knock on the sound and the sound of the gun play in halo because I think it's pretty good too, but there's just something about when I hear a Hawking get shot or a Booey in Gemini, like I can tell what gun I'm shooting because it just has a unique sound, it's awesome. But yeah, there are tours. Things that are built in to try to get you to come back. And I feel like there's so many now that I can't even come back to do them all. Which is a good or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. But that means there's always something to do. Right? Like here's something like Court of Works, it's part of Thus means taking King expansion that was not in the game. Where you and potentially eight other strangers or two other people on your fire team could do if you wanted to. To you know, get some loot or just have some fun together. So they just have so many activities you can do and they also have PTP modes. That they come every month or two for Iron Banner, or they have a more serious one in child of the Cyrus where it's the more competitive mode of here's three on three, almost like WoW arena style, you know, the higher you get the better items you get. And yeah, you are chasing stuff. But I think that's Part of I guess, maybe the addiction. I'll admit that, that's fine. Like that's part of why you are playing the game. Well that's the game they're trying to make. That's why you're playing the game though. But it's one that keeps growing and they keep adding more things. As long as you can pay first. What would you say to that? Yeah I think by and large Halo and Halo 5 especially it always definitely, undoubtedly has more to do. I think I just feel as if Halos is more worth doing, again because I don't feel obligated. I don't feel like I'm missing out if I'm not playing. It's just all on my terms and I'm coming back at my own leisure. I think inheritantly, it's not designed the same way as Destiny. I think Bungee did a great job in encouraging people to stick around and come back. But I think [INAUDIBLE] did a better job with Halo 5 to actually make me just love playing it And just in terms of, you're right, up to now there has been a lot of money spent on Destiny. Again, it's like a value proposition for me. I think it's fine for me, because I spend a lot time, so the money spent is not that bad. But I will say, the have added my co-transactions, which is kind of weird, but it doesn't affect the game so I'm totally fine with it. It's [UNKNOWN] It's stuff like that, dances, you know, and whatnot that you can buy for silver. And I've heard that they're testing these emotes and these micro transactions because they might use these, the funds they make from this, to give free story DLC and stuff like that going forward. And so, maybe this Halloween event that they had that's pretty big It's like a test case of let's see what the people, how much they spend and like if they spend enough money maybe they won't pay for DOCs anymore. And the whales can maybe pay for everyone else. Yeah. Doesn't it seem weird that a company that's, sorry. I'm supposed to be part of, have no partisanship in this. But if you're talking about a team that has a ten-year contract with Activision to make a game, Who employs plus 200 people to really think DLC sales is what's going to make them make a new story, content for the game? I mean it's possible. Again that's just what I've seen in stories. That's what they've been putting [UNKNOWN] Yeah, exactly those could just be missions, or Events, right like, but it's It's a nice little [INAUDIBLE] It's just interesting, I think like half, because both of you enjoy both games and think there's pluses and minuses in both, but it seems like so much of it has got to be down to the way we play. Whereas you kind of want an experience where. You don't get criticized for not keeping up with it, where you don't feel like you're being manipulated and you can go in and have some fun and then leave. Where as you're very much into the idea of having a character that's yours. That you couldn't have in Halo, because you couldn't have a character that had the gun that you earned. And like the rep that you earned, and the various currencies and level that you were. Because if you were playing Halo then you basically be hitting reset, largely, every single time that you went to play it. Do you think it's just like a different strokes for different folks kind of situation? Probably. I mean, I thought Halo 5 Campaign was pretty good, I thought it was okay, I think Some of the story and some of the marketing for it was in May. You know, it kinda got me there. And I think war zone is kinda fun if you have enough people but, again, you can have like weird experiences with any PvP FPS where you get rolled and you're just like, well that sucks, you know what I mean? But, you know, in Destiny you end up being able to play single player if you're not a PvP person. So you like