Friendly Fire in Destiny, or "sry i nova bombed ur face lol" (Destiny)

by Beorn , <End of Failed Timeline>, Monday, January 27, 2014, 01:14 (3750 days ago) @ ncsuDuncan

Yet despite being a seasoned victim of ill-timed sniper shots, poorly placed grenades, and overeager (under-steering) Warthog chauffeurs, I prefer Halo with friendly fire on. Consistent weapon/damage feedback is important to me in the physics-driven sandbox of Halo, and disabling friendly fire creates an "unrealistic" experience where the rules don't apply to everyone equally. It feels like a glitch in the simulation, just like that Keanu Reeves movie where he flagrantly breaks the laws of physics. (Point Break)

You said it better than I would have, but I'll try to add my thoughts to the mix, redundant as they will be.

I've also feel that disabling friendly fire in multiplayer environments makes the experience feel disjointed. If supply a certain input (rocket!), then I expect a certain output (carnage!), but disabling FF breaks those rules and the immersion that comes with them. Case in point, when Halo 4 launched with friendly fire disabled, it completely changed the Halo experience for me and made multiplayer much less enjoyable despite the fact that I didn't have to worry about being team-killed.

In multiplayer (especially), territory control is often the deciding factor in a skirmish. I believe there should be strategies and consequences around the idea of controlling a territory and coordinating with your teammates while avoiding friendly fire. You shouldn't be able to stick the guy with a shotgun on the staircase killzone while the rest of the team spams grenades from 50 feet away. Disabling friendly fire undermines some specific pillars of balance and generally leaves the competitive experience lacking for me.

Now, that's all true for competitive multiplayer, but I think cooperative mode is a slightly different beast. I still think that errant grenades should cause friendly splash damage (for the same reasons given above about territory control and coordinated teamwork), but I also believe that it's 100% Grade-AA-Okay to prevent some jerk hunter from being able to snipe you through the brainpan just as you're about to land the finishing shot on a boss during a Public Event just because he/she* wanted to wreck your gameplay experience. I don't understand them, but we all know those people are out there.

<sidestory>Back in the Vanilla WoW days I started my original character on a PvP realm, and there was absolutely nothing worse than being ganked and having to corpse-run my ass through Stranglethorn Vale because a bunch of level-capped griefers decided they were bored and wanted to screw with other players. It got to be so bad that sometimes I would have to leave my character dead on the ground and either switch to a different character for a while, or just forego that game session altogether and do homework (boo!). And this was in the days when there could be an hour+ wait to even get onto the server in the first place, so logging-off hurt extra bad. (It's worth noting that I consider this behavior to be different from legitimate PvP combat between similarly-leveled players, which could actually be—and was—a ton of fun.)</sidestory>

It's late and I'm rambling, but my point is that I completely see where Bungie is coming from by disallowing Guardian-on-Guardian combat in the cooperative world of Destiny. My ideal balance would be enabling accidental friendly fire on splash damage and stray shots, but disabling it on deliberate jackassery. In the "real world", though, that sounds like an incredibly complex system that's rife with opportunity for exploitation once people find the edge-cases, so I think a blanket no-friendly-fire policy in the cooperative modes is probably the best we can hope for. Who knows, maybe friendly fire will exist in areas where you're just with your Fireteam (such as inside the Wall in Old Russia), but then it gets disabled during Public Events or when other Fireteams are nearby? Something like that might work, but I also trust Bungie to do the Right Thing. They haven't let me down yet.

*Seriously, though, I have yet to meet a female griefer, but I'm sure there are one or two out there. Maybe it's a guy thing… I wouldn't put it past us.