I guess I'm not clear on the AAA/AAA+ distinction (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Wednesday, January 11, 2017, 18:27 (2651 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

Well... Wikipediaknows about both definitions of AAA+... It is kinda a stupid name for "a game that has microtransactions or something" though. Way too easily confused with a game whose production value / budget goes beyond that of even a AAA class game.

Even then, just because a game offers you new content (or hats) periodically doesn't mean you have to take the game up on that offer. As some of us have been saying for a long, long time now:

• Play as long as its fun.
  
• Stop when it isn't.
  
• Come back when there's something new that would make it fun for you again.
  
• Repeat

This whole "problem", as Cody puts it, where our favorite games keep getting new content and features really deserves to be carried away in a Whambulance...

To be fair to all sides of this discussion, there IS a big difference between a game like Destiny vs a game like Halo or The Last of Us when it comes to our ability as players to just pick it up and play whenever we want. Destiny requires lots of playtime to stay "current". Case in point; I used to play Trials all the time with TheeChaos. But right now, if I texted him and said "hey do you feel like playing Trials this weekend?", he can't. He hasn't played since the early days of RoI, so none of his characters above ~350 light. So he literally can't just jump back in to play the activity he might want to play for a few hours. Destiny doesn't allow that.

I'm not going to get into whether or not that is a good thing. I've rambled about that plenty in other threads :)
I just want to point out that the suggestion that you can simply pick up and play Destiny at any time is partially disengenuous. You CAN, but there are some major caviots. Didn't Dogcow say he'd pretty much stopped playing for that very reason? He'd "fallen behind", and was finding it more and more challenging to get people to play with at his point in the game's progression?

It requires more time to stay at the very edge of competitive play, yes.

But the game modes where Light Level matters all have close variants that you can just pick up and play. Trials --> Elimination (when the playlist is available). Iron Banner (when the playlist is available) --> Whatever Crucible playlist you want. Things like Strikes also come in various flavors that allow for new or infrequent players to play them.

It may not hold true at every single point in the entire 0 - 400 progression, but generally if you've played enough to make a Strike or Mission show up on your Director you've played enough to play the base levels of all of Destiny's content.

In the end, the other way to look at things is that Destiny offers several different core activities (short missions, Strikes, various multiplayer modes) and then offers additional challenges to reach for in each of those modes if and when a player wants to reach for them.