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Destiny and Multiplicative Design (Destiny)

by Cody Miller @, Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, April 06, 2017, 16:43 (2549 days ago)

(Note, I have not yet played the new Zelda, but I kind of want to now)

I was listening to a podcast where the topic of discussion was the new Zelda game. The people on the podcast were talking about "Multiplicative Design", which is the term Nintendo is using to talk about the game. It essentially means the same thing as when people use "Emergent Gameplay", but it's a much better term since "Emergent Gameplay" makes it seem like what's happening is materializing out of nothing, and gameplay is a stupid meaningless word. Multiplicative Design better describes what's really happening: The mechanical elements of the game are combining to create complexities, which are the result of design decisions.

One of the examples had to do with electricity. Electricity is attracted to metal things, so players have been doing cool things like throwing their sword at a group of enemies so that lightning strikes the sword vaporizing the enemies around it. There was a puzzle in a dungeon involving getting electricity to flow from one place to another. You're supposed to do it by placing metal objects found throughout the dungeon so that the current flows through them, but apparently one player just laid out a bunch of swords, and the electricity jumped from sword to sword completing the circuit, bypassing the puzzle essentially.

What was said next was important: "I feel like if this were Destiny, and a player did something like that to bypass a puzzle in a raid, that Bungie would patch it out almost immediately".

To me, that seems true, and it occurred to me that that's why Destiny pretty much completely lacks multiplicative design, but much worse than that can never really have it. When Cayde riles up the crowd with the promise of loot, that's not a joke: that's how Bungie is actually designing their game. The loot is the focus, not the experience. If it were, it wouldn't matter how you beat a raid, and we could still push off the templar or stand on the sniper platforms.

This lack of multiplicative design is why I think Destiny never really rose to greatness in the hearts of gamers or critics like Halo did. Halo had a lot of it. I remember being blown away when Mike Miller tossed a grenade at a turret, sending it flying into a Gold Elite killing it instantly. Can you do anything like that in Destiny? It was commonplace to blow enemies off cliffs in Halo, but in Destiny, that warrants a patch.

In retrospect Destiny has very good shooting mechanics, but they are very rigid and don't build upon themselves to create complexities. Even with the skill trees for the classes, I don't feel like there is any sort of interesting synergy that you can exploit by combining things.

This is what you lose when you base your game around loot and MMO mechanics. This is what you give up when you have a prominent investment system. And this is why Zelda has a 97 on Metacritic, and Destiny had a 76.


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