“You were oblivious to the magical bits beneath the hood” (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Sunday, August 03, 2014, 16:20 (3562 days ago) @ Claude Errera

- you don't really have any idea what sort of changes DeeJ was referring to, so assuming they're MMO-style changes might be short-sighted
- Bungie has said, over and over and over, that Destiny is a shooter, not an MMO. You can continue to treat it like an MMO, but that might be short-sighted

Ignoring the 'is it really an MMO?' debate (which I think a lot of games journalists are more or less in agreement with now), the main reason I framed it in those terms is because of the nature of the software in such games, and how it is architected:

You have a game client which is installed / run locally by the player. It must connect to a game server to do anything: it can't be run without a persistent connection. Whilst playing the game, your client has knowledge of your game's state.
You then also have the game server which runs continually, but crucially it also maintains state for every client's game. This way, you can't (for example) somehow fool the client into thinking you've killed an enemy when you haven't, because the server will be able to verify what you have and haven't done in the game world. It's more accurate to think of the game as running on the server, but you're issuing commands to your character via the client.

This means that when an issue comes up that the developer wants to fix, there's two ways of going about it. The first is to issue a client patch, which changes the way the game behaves locally, but also potentially what commands it sends to the server. The other option is to skip issuing a patch entirely and only deploy a change to how the server runs the game state. A hypothetical example of this would be changing the health of an enemy: provided that the game client only communicates what damage you're doing to an enemy, but waits for the server to report back what that enemy's health is, then fixes like that can happen without any need to update the client; this saves on forcing potentially millions of players to download a fix before they can play.

In WoW they've used this to hot fix the behaviour of player abilities: the tooltip usually needs a client patch to fix, but if a given ability was allowing an exploit, say, they could change how it behaved *on the server* instantly and it'd take effect for everyone. This is the kind of thing I imagine DeeJ was talking about, as I have to imagine Destiny would be engineered to allow server-side behaviour fixes independent of the client. It's less whether the gameplay is/isn't MMO-like (which is debatable, although I think it is) and it's more to do with whether the client/server is MMO-like (which I'm certain is the case).