Diablo 3's solution (Destiny)

by Jabberwok, Monday, October 27, 2014, 15:26 (3471 days ago) @ Cody Miller

With the expansion, I think Diablo 3 does a pretty good job of making the end game meaningful. Once you reach the end of the skill tree, you can still keep leveling up for small stat bonuses (there might still be a limit, but it would take a looong time to reach it), which means experience is still useful. And the game adjusts enemies to your level, so the level of challenge is more based on the difficulty you choose, and your build, than how leveled and decked out you are. With the expansion, there's free roaming and a random selection of bounties for each session (much more interesting than a lot of Destiny's bounties). Then best of all, there are 'Rifts', which are actual randomly generated, unique dungeons filled with high level enemies.

Not all of that would be possible in a game like Destiny, but there are probably still some things they could learn from it. I'm not a big fan of Blizzard's approach to game design, but when it comes to progression systems, and extending the shelf-life of their products, they seem to know what they're doing.

I think Bungie fell into the pitfall of most loot based games when it comes to end game rewards. What I mean, is that all the hardest content gives the best rewards. The problem of course, is that what good are all the great rewards, when you've already conquered the hardest challenge? The whole point of getting good gear is to be able to do harder stuff. If you've beaten the Vault of Glass or the Nightfall, and you get a reward it's pretty good. But what's left to use the reward on? Nightfall and Vault of Glass again…

So you run into a situation where you are getting new guns and armor just for the sake of getting getting new guns and armor more efficiently. It's gear for gear's sake. After all, if you can beat the nightfall and Vault on Hard, you don't really need better gear do you?

I never thought I'd say this, but Diablo 2 had the solution. Early, it suffered from the same problem. You could beat Hell difficulty easily at around level 60. You could get to level 99. 60-99 was just getting gear, which of course is dumb because you can already beat Hell. Why do you need better gear? In order to do gear runs faster. See why that's dumb? Later in its life, Diablo 2 offered crazy hard challenges and optional quests via game updates. You had to have all the best stuff and a lot of patience to do it, but the interesting thing is that you did not get gear for completing them.

One such quest has you killing insanely buffed up versions of the three main bosses, and if you kill them you get a charm that increases experience earned. A charm stays in your inventory, and gives you a passive effect. The exp gain was small, I think 10%. You'd think it'd be useless, since you are already high level. But it's not.

It's actually brilliant. You've mastered the game with one character, so what would be left to do? Master the game with another character class or build. They all play very differently, so it can add variety. So give the charm to a new character, and you can more quickly speed past the boring part of leveling up and get to the fun part: playing with a new class and using new skills.

Imagine if upon beating Atheon on hard, you got maybe a universal class item that could be worn on anybody. You give it to another character you start, and you earn exp at twice the rate. This would be fabulous, since you can bypass the part that you've already mastered, takes no skill, and is boring (leveling up and grinding), and get to the fun part of trying a new class.

THAT is what you do when your players finish all your content - you encourage them to take on a new challenge. In this case, mastering another class - rather than just running the same stuff over and over in the pointless cycle of getting gear just to get more gear.