What's Your Biggest Worry?

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, July 24, 2013, 23:56 (4142 days ago) @ PerseusSpartacus
edited by Cody Miller, Thursday, July 25, 2013, 00:20

So, that out of the way, what are some of your worries?

My biggest worry is that Bungie is going to succumb to the shitty modern design philosophy of making rewards an important part of the game, through gear, experience, and player investment systems.

Imagine for a second that Bungie designed Destiny without a save feature. It would rule and here's why.

First of all, you'd probably wonder HOW such a thing could even work. How could you possibly design a game with dozens of hours of content without a way to save? All the ingredients are there. You have a game world spanning multiple planets and a way to transport between them.

So you start every session in your home, or a hub on Earth under the traveler or something. If you've played before, you have nothing from your previous play sessions. But you haven't, so you head on out. You figure out you need to do whatever it is you need to do, and wherever it is you need to go.

So you complete this mission / quest whatever you want to call it. In any normal game, this would set a flag or give you an item or something that would allow you to progress. But what if that didn't happen? What if the reward was merely information?

You finish the quest, and the dude at the end tells you about another quest. He reveals the location of a hidden entrance to an area, and gives you instructions on how to access it.

Let's say at this point you stop playing.

Tomorrow, you turn on Destiny, and you find yourself at the start, with a bare slate since you can;t save anything. But you still have that information. So you go, and instead of doing the first quest again, you go access the hidden entrance. Maybe after completing this quest you get some story information, and hints on things to do next.

See where I'm going with this? There's no need to save anything! You could have a wide variety of quests strewn about, and due to the social nature of the game, players will exchange acquired information with each other as they discover it. Some could be easy to discover, some hard. Enter any area, and the story would naturally progress to an appropriate point, or perhaps change depending on server parameters which can be changed as time goes on.

Weapons could appear around areas just like they do in most FPS levels. You just can't keep them.

What would this force Bungie to do? Well, first of all, it would force Bungie to perfectly pace missions / levels etc, and make sure that they are constantly engaging and novel, something that arcade designers generally mastered because you couldn't save. Second, it would force Bungie to create fun situations, by virtue of the fact that it would be impossible to tempt players with rewards, since you can't save exp, weapon progression, loot, or anything like that. The game itself has to be fun enough to play without bullshit player investment systems. Third, it would force impeccable planning and design in the scenario and story construction.

This limitation would force Bungie to discard all the bullshit that modern game design has heaped upon us, and distill the game to its most streamlined, pure, and elegant form. Is this mission fun without the ability to save? No? Then it's shit, we'd better make it fun!

You don't even have to give up on an overarching narrative!

I worry, because loot, player investment systems, and all that Jazz are the exact opposite of this. It doesn't force good game design. It encourages lazy game design. We are always told that players should be able to save whenever they want. Not only does that ruin many types of games (use savestates to beat a NES game, and you'll see what I mean), and ruin tension, but the save feature itself may be responsible for some of the more stupid and disgusting trends in game design today.

If ever there's an indie game that needs to be made (because publishers would never go for it), it would be the 40 hour RPG without a save system. It would work as long as your skill as a developer was high.