Tourists, Collectors, and Hobbyists (Destiny)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Friday, December 01, 2017, 08:42 (2346 days ago) @ Kahzgul

- 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.

- 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 2 is nice and all, but as it presently stands with D1 & D2 it's just repeating content over & over to gain light. In essence it's just sitting in a playlist of random strikes for enough time. That grind gets boring, and Luke's desire to make it longer is a bad idea IMHO. How about we have several strikes of increasing difficulty, the strikes can be unlocked by completing the previous strike & side-missions surrounding/prefacing the new strike. The important thing here is that these are presented as short stories in the game, as if they were smaller bits of phase 1, not just as optional side-quests, but as actual story content. The strikes a true ladder to climb in preparation for the raid!

- 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.

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.

I love the idea of quests for weapons, but Bungie has totally lost me on this. They're just not communicated well enough for me to pickup on them and complete them. I have no idea what possible weapons quests are out there & I don't feel that I should have to research it on the internet in order to figure out how to start these quests. There should be some in-game way to communicate what possible content/quests/weapons there are for me to achieve.

Edit: Although blank-spindle was way cool, perhaps after a mystery like that becomes "public knowledge" it should be listed in some quest log / bounty tracker so that I could know about it w/o reading internet forums.