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"50%" (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY @, Toronto, Wednesday, May 24, 2017, 15:50 (2499 days ago) @ narcogen

Sure. But if they didn't even hit the level cap, are they really relevant to the discussion?


Maybe not.

If 50% of the player base at the level cap did the raid, and 22% of the entire player base completed a raid, that means that about half the players who played Destiny didn't reach the level cap.

I reached the level cap on the final story mission, without doing anything unusual. If we use that as a benchmark, that means about half the people who played Destiny didn't even finish the story missions. I was going to say that this was a huge deal, but that seems roughly in line with other games.

Looking at it from that perspective, it kind of seems like 22% is a lot actually. A raid is the hardest activity in the game (ostensibly). Most people are clearly casual players. So a 22% completion for the raid actually seems pretty high when you look at it broadly. According to my trophy data, 5.8% of the people completed Uncharted 4 on Hard mode (not the hardest mode). 41.8% beat the game at all.

I actually don't see a problem with Bungie's numbers. In fact, they look pretty good to me.


Exactly.

That's why I was more than a bit surprised at the reveal of Guided Games and the focus on getting more people to do the raid.

That's also why I wondered whether it was publisher pressure to spend less time developing raids. If story level 20 doesn't take more time and effort to make than story level 5 or story level 10, the only thing you need to tune is how many of them you make, knowing that not everybody will finish the game.

It's a different kettle of fish when you're spending more time tuning a set of encounters that are more complicated than any story mission, to make content that only 50% of eligible players, 22% of players overall, will ever see. That same effort put into making more patrol destinations or more story missions would get more exposure and perhaps reflect better on the game as a whole.

So Guided Games is a way of saying that Bungie will get the raid completion percentage up so they can continue to justify spending extra effort on those encounters. IMHO.

The other element to all of this is that even if the raid is only experienced by 22% of the player base, it generates HUGE hours of playtime from those players. From an investment point of view, I'm sure that is something Bungie and Activision would take into consideration. I bet I've spent triple the in-game hours playing raids than I have playing story missions, and I'm sure I'm not alone there.


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