Not necessary (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, May 24, 2017, 22:20 (2527 days ago) @ Cody Miller

If you were to say "There's around a 1:4 ratio of players who have completed a raid." Then folks will be like "What's the point of investing so many resources into a Raid then?"

Yup!

I'm betting someone somewhere IS saying that. Guided Games is the response to it.

Less than half the people who play your game see the ending. Why are you spending money on the ending? This line of thought is ridiculous.

Just because it is ridiculous doesn't mean it isn't happening.

Also, the line of thinking there has a natural counterpoint in the debate over game length.

After all, a game's length is arbitrary. Even if you've predetermined your game's beginning and ending, you can make that journey take longer, or you can make it shorter. You can design encounters to slow the player, or you can speed things up. You can add side missions or leave them out, you can cut levels you don't like as much, you can add places that require players to grind.

So you've got pressure to make games shorter because the numbers TELL you that people aren't finishing your game.

You also have pressure to make games LONGER because user feedback and the press tell you that hours per dollar is important, and games that deliver more hours, even if all those hours aren't of even quality, are well thought of and sell reasonably well.

The shooter genre absolutely is facing pressure to get shorter-- to focus on gameplay mechanics and forget story, and it's been facing that pressure a long time.

The RPG genre generally falls prey to the other pressure-- bigger areas, more encounters, more quests, campaigns that last hundreds of hours instead of tens. Halo games clock in around 10 hours.

Destiny, being an FPS-RPG hybrid, feels both kinds of pressure. Campaign wise, D1 is way shorter than most self-respecting RPGs and is threadbare compared to any Halo game. But now we're seeing D2 get a Far Cry/Assassins Creed type map with a bunch of "stuff to do".