ITT: Cody undercuts his central argument against Destiny

by electricpirate , Monday, August 12, 2013, 06:50 (3913 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Nope, I understand his argument. My point is that the gear and loot acts as the carrot to get people to that hidden content. Story bits, and world building isn't enough for all the players to go hunting through this world (and I'd guess that it's not even a significant minority).

Wrong. You don't hack into computers and find passwords or story details so you can level up your hacking, you level up your hacking so you can hack into computers and find story details and passwords! You don't pick a bazillion locks to level up your lock picking, you level up your lock picking so you can go where you shouldn't. The fact that you have to increase your skills at all is because it makes you choose HOW YOU WANT TO PLAY THE GAME. There's only a finite amount of exp, given to you as you progress.

Nobody prides himself on maxing out the lock picking skill, in part because that's trivial if you play the game and choose to spend your exp there, but more importantly nobody cares because THAT'S NOT THE PART THAT MATTERS.

Player Investment systems are the opposite.

That's a fun tangent but not important... Lock picking/hacking are skills designed to allow players to acquire more more resources (Money, ammo, augmentations) or save other resources (health, ammo). Whether or not players level them for their own sake is irrelevant; they exist within a larger context where they allow a player to grab loot and upgrades.

You stated that players will do these actions to gain more details, I simply pointed out that many players don't care about this, and use these skills, and the act of searching for new gear helps guide players to new content, and draw them into the story. That's one of the *many* advantages of using RPG systems in a wide variety of games.

Cody has maintained that no good can come from player investment systems, but he's presenting a really compelling argument for why they can be used (IE, modifying character player to draw them deeper into the story)

That is what ROLE PLAYING games do, something Deus Ex is, but Destiny isn't. We don't know what Destiny is, but it's sure not an RPG (in the true, correct sense of the term). Like real Role Playing games, the stats are purely incidental, only coming into play for things not suited to computer simulation, or would otherwise be to burdensome (imagine having to actually learn to pick physical locks or actually run real hacks to get into computers). Stats are simply a more convenient way for the game to do this.

I'd quibble with the idea that DX is more or less of an RPG than Destiny; one's about making your own stories, and the others about living in their's. But that's neither here nor there. Theirs no magic that says these mechanics can't improve other genres. They can, and they do!