Tourists, Collectors, and Hobbyists (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, November 30, 2017, 14:58 (2346 days ago)

I'm listening to the latest Bungie Podcast, and the guys are having a conversation that is very hit and miss to me.

On the one hand, I think they've correctly identified their core groups of players: Tourists, who just want to finish the story and then move on, coming back only for major releases, Collectors, who want to have all the things, and hobbyists, for whom playing Destiny is a lifestyle. I think they've properly assessed that the game was made for tourists but should have focused on hobbyists instead.

But the takeaway from that is very strange to me.

Pretty early on, Luke says that - because he was able to get 3 characters all to around 300 power in about a month of casual play - they're talking around the office about whether they made it too easy to gain power level. This conversation is meaningless to me, though, because power level is basically meaningless in the game.

It's like if Luke owned a restaurant, and he noticed that diners would come in, order, wait for their food, and then leave once the food arrived, sometimes without even eating the food, and his takeaway was that it should take longer for the food to come out rather than understanding that maybe his food sucks.

I'm being a little unfair, because there are people who enjoy the progress as the game, but I am not one of those people. So, stepping back:

There are three phases of a game like this:

- Phase 1: The story. The moment to moment gameplay doesn't have to be great if the story is compelling, and vice versa. I hope we can agree that destiny 2's story is at least good enough that most people (certainly most people here) will play through it all. But what about the side missions? Well, they're not as well done, and the level of story per side mission or adventure is not consistent throughout the game. The Nessus side missions, for example, were very compelling to me, but the Titan ones (that I have played) are not very impactful from a storytelling standpoint, so I stopped doing them. Then there's the discoverable lore items on worlds - some of those tell a story, and some are lame excuses for bad jokes. Not only are they hard to find, but there's no checklist of them for someone interested in the story to even know if they've experienced all of the story in a given area. So. Frustrating. Furthermore, what if you hear that there's a great discoverable story moment during a campaign mission? You have to wait until Ikora lets you do that mission again. UGH. So this phase 1 of story experience starts strong and then peters out into frustration.

- Phase 2: The mid-game grind. It is possible to make a game not have a third phase by simply making "max power level" unattainable for the vast majority of players. This is the "get more powerful items in order to tackle harder content in order to get even more powerful items in order to tackle even harder content in order to..." part of a game. Usually this phase involves using whatever your most powerful items are (by number) rather than the items you enjoy using the most or the items that would be more ideal for a given combat situation. But Destiny 2 is in a weird place here, because power level is largely meaningless, and most players of power 280+ have access to almost all of the content of the game, and that makes this mid-game loop "get more powerful items to do the same thing as before to get more powerful items to keep doing the same things to get even more powerful items to continue doing those same things." Of note, this is also the same gameplay loop problem that the vanilla build of Diablo 3 had.

- Phase 3: The end-game. This is when you've reached maximum effective power, and the player progression goal becomes optimizing your gear through perks, mods, ideal weapons for a given situation, and so forth. While the mid-game is balanced around "the most powerful player wins" the endgame assumes equal and maximum power for everyone, and is now balanced by the designers. Destiny, again, does an interesting thing here where PvP is normalized, so every player in PvP is playing endgame PvP all the time, regardless of game mode (which is why pvp enthusiasts such as myself complain about balance so often). Looking back at how Destiny deals with the mid-game (maxing out in effective power around 280) also means that players are in the true endgame earlier than they might expect, which means that reaching max power of 305 is largely anti-climactic because at that point there's no change whatsoever to the gameplay and no additional challenges that unlock at that point.

There are a few outliers here, like the exotic shotgun raid quest thing that only unlocks after you complete a power level 300 mission, or like heroic mode raid etc.. so please don't think I'm talking in total absolutes.

When I compare this to D1, D1 had an almost endless true endgame because of three main things: First, the gameplay, especially PvP, was full of depth and had a very high skill ceiling which made it really really compelling to me. Second, the loot rolls meant that truly optimizing your gear once you hit the max power level and endgame was virtually impossible (and very frustrating). And third, your power level directly affected your performance in IB and Trials, and had a seemingly larger effect in endgame PvE modes as well.

D2's endgame is not at all distinct from the mid-game grind. It sneaks in at 280 power without anyone noticing, which makes reaching 305 disappointing. The power level means almost nothing in any game mode, provided you meet the minimum threshold for that activity. The PvP has been largely dumbed down, lacks the complex movement and is now essentially a positioning based squad combat game. Optimization is simplistic to the point of essentially forcing everyone into the same build, rather than allowing multiple S-tier options. There is less choice and the choices the player does make are less meaningful than D1, which also serves to undermine the value of optimization, thereby resulting in a further diminished true end-game.

All of which brings me back to the podcast and Luke's desire to make the time it takes to reach max power level even longer. Why? Towards what end? Without addressing the true end-game and making the experience of gameplay at maximum power compelling, all you're doing is delaying the inevitable. Whereas if you make the end-game fun, the only complaints about the mid-game is that they can't get to the end game quickly enough.