I think you guys are thinking about it the wrong way. (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 10:31 (2348 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Again, you don’t have to make guns rare and locked behind luck and grinding to make them fun. You just have to be able to competently design the rest of your game around good, fun weapons, and Halo showed us that Bungie is more than capable of doing so.

The problem with this is that you don't know what a given player will have at any given time. With traditional single player games this is easy. You would have players acquire skills or weapons, and then scale the difficulty of the content to match. So you might learn the basics of a new move and dominate, but then the next section of the game forces you to not just know the basics, but master the nuances of this move. But if you don't know what the player has, you can't design for that.

The solution is difficulty levels. The idea of Prestige is great. First of all, every single activity, from campaign level to strike to raid should have a prestige mode. Second, the prestige mode should be markedly different than the normal mode. It should not be 'do almost the same thing, but with minor changes and bullet sponge enemies'. It should be such that you have to master and exploit crazy weapons you might have come across. Out of the box thinking. Different scenarios entirely.

If care is given to design a wide variety of good guns, and design the prestige modes with a wide variety of usable tactics, then you minimize the risk of nobody having something that they can masterfully use to win.