ITT: Cody undercuts his central argument against Destiny

by electricpirate , Tuesday, August 13, 2013, 11:42 (3912 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Here's an example, there's this boss, you need to be a really good player to get past it. You could play and play and keep trying, and butt your head against a wall to get better. Eventually you beat him, and while it feels great you had to go through a ton of misery to get there.

Again, failure to properly balance difficulty. Designing a proper difficulty curve fixes this without the need for leveling. The only bosses that should require you to be a good player to beat are the ones on hard mode, or far enough along in the game that the player has become good by that point.

I'm assuming that the rest of the bosses and challenge has been skill appropriate up to that point.

That assumes a couple things.

1. It assumes linearity. Which is great for a baggy pipe design like Dues Ex or Halo, but less appropriate for something more open like destiny, as it would effectively make the game more linear (Kind of like old MUDs, where you even though you could go anywhere, you always had a fairly linear path you had to follow in terms of difficulty), or flatten the challenge in unpleasant ways.
2. It ignores variances within the skill set of similarly experienced players (IE, player A is good enough to get through, but player B lacks some certain skill for the boss in particular)
3. Difficulty spikes can be a tool for good design. They give a player something to see, fail at, and come back to later to measure their progress. Something like Havel or the black knights in the undead burg in dark souls.