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Better hooks (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY @, Toronto, Monday, December 05, 2016, 17:10 (2670 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I'd rather get the cool toys quickly, and then spend all my time having fun with them rather than spend all my time trying to earn the cool toys and be burned out by the time I get them.


I would rather get cool toys in cool ways, then have to use those cool toys to do other cool things.

You ask why content in Destiny feels one note, and the real answer is that it has to be because of the randomness. In other games, the challenges can branch out and diversify, because the designers know that players have acquired a certain set of items and skills, which they can then force players to master in order to tackle unusual challenges by using those items and skills in skillful or unorthodox ways.

In Destiny, because nearly every single piece of gear is acquired by chance, you do not know what players will have. So everything has to be conservatively designed.

What if a boss can only be damaged by supers, yet he drains your meter completely at the start of the fight and prevents regen. Cool huh? Now you have to use skills, items, and weapons which make orbs to charge your super in order to damage him. Except you can't do anything like that, because it's possible nobody in your group would have items that can make orbs. If items had fixed perks and were acquired in specific ways, then you could know that your players have such items at their disposal.

Most good games take the mechanics, then push them as far as possible with the tools players have in order to create awesome challenges. Destiny just cannot do this, because there is no known progression to the experience.

I do think there is room for the designers to have their cake and eat it too in terms of creating scenarios that are demanding in unique ways while also allowing for a wide range of gear possibilities. The Crota raid is actually a great example of this. Some of my favorite Destiny memories are the early days of that raid, when we were figuring out the process of chaining supers through the abyss. We were constantly making adjustments based on the subclasses in our particular group at that time, but the general strategy of chaining supers remained. Same with the bridge section; do we send over a bladedancer first so he can cloak and hide from the knight? Or a sunsinger who can self-res? And there was always room to react if something went wrong. I remember one run where we got the bridge activated, and we needed to change our order at the last moment for some reason. So Speedracer grabbed the sword and began sprinting across the bridge with no particular way to nutralize the knight, so I turned and chucked a flashbang grenade across the gap and blinded the knight just in time for Speedracer to take him down.

The key to this kind of flexibility is that it requires larger groups of players (6 guardians are more likely to cover all bases than 1-3 guardians), as well as communication.

Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe with its own version of Destiny that was designed from the ground up as a purely 6 player experience. And that version of Destiny is way less approachable to the general public, far less popular, and a much better game ;)


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