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

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, January 11, 2017, 18:55 (2655 days ago) @ Ragashingo

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.

I've touched on this before, but the bad situation I find myself in is that my favorite activities in Destiny are very much Light Level dependent. Namely Trials, Hard Mode raids, Nightfalls. It's not crucial to be MAX level to play those activities, but you do need to be pretty darn close. And if I want to really enjoy those activities to their full potential, I need to get wide breadth of my gear leveled up close to max level. I don't use the word hate very often, but I hate it when I'm playing Trials, and I want to try a different strategy which would require using a different combination of weapons and/or armor, but I can't because I don't have those specific pieces of gear leveled up high enough. It frustrates me to no end. So if I want to freely enjoy Trials, or the other end-game activities, I need enough gear maxed out that I can just play and swap weapons and mess around with different exotics and just not ever need to think about the stupid light level.

The real kicker is that by the time I've played enough of the game to get my gear up to that end-game light level, I've replayed the same few strikes so many times that I'm totally sick of them. Same with the crucible. Iron Banner is so lucrative that I play more of it than I want to, just in order to cut the grind as short as possible.

I probably sound like a broken record at this point, but if Destiny didn't force this painfully slow grind into its end game, I think it would be a drastically better game. Just imagine a world where you could play the story missions, play the strikes, maybe complete a few post-story quests, and then BAM you're free to raid and do trials and whatever else you want without worrying at all about your level progression or playing activities you don't want to play because they're the only way to get the drops you need in order to reach the activities you do want to play.

I imagine that world sometimes... and it's beautiful :)