Change to patrol areas is a major + (Destiny)

by Durandal, Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 11:18 (2766 days ago) @ Kahzgul

So it looks like they are making patrol areas larger, adding NPCs into patrol areas, as well as outposts and such. This is a major improvement that is almost required to give players a reason to care about their characters.

The pre-mission voice overs and patrol beacons have always been a stop gap, a poor way to put characters into the game when the spaces are too small to reasonably fit some NPCs. If you look at Skyrim, Warcraft etc the random discovery of NPCs in the wild are some of the best interactions and springboards for quests.

Expanding the patrol areas and having outposts and NPCs hidden around them is a major improvement, and should not be overlooked. Expanding patrol to 6 -12 people, adding more complicated and involved patrol quests and public events, more vehicles, etc, will make D2 the go to game.

Changing the subclasses, and adding meaningful race customization would necessitate a "reset" of player characters. How they accomplish this is key. You can go the ME route, and offer the player a chance to change their character to a new class, or move them to the closest approximation of their old one, as part of the story. If they go that route they probably will be the most successful.

I think gear is the smallest concern. With the exception of some of the more iconic weapons like the Mythoclast, Necrochasm, GH and the like, there are few weapons that have been preserved since vanilla. If they keep the handful of these more iconic weapons, then a massive change to gear would be ok, especially if those iconic weapons remain for D1 players as a reward for their long hours raiding.

I think the main mistake Bungie made was making exotics drop randomly as rewards. While people like random loot, the sense of working towards a exotic quest goal added lots of value to a particular weapon, or at least affection for it.