False, as usual, Cody. (Destiny)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 15:52 (3383 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I don't know all the answers. It's going to be different for PvE and PvP, which is also why it's an extra handicap given that weapons have to not be overpowered in either.

Or, maybe they found a happy medium.

I would start by having fewer weapons. A lot fewer. If you look at Halo 1, every weapon except the needler has a place in the game and a spot where it's useful. Of course in Multiplayer the pistol dominated.

And here we arrive at the sandbox problem again. It doesn't matter how small or large the sandbox is, there will always be some weapons that excel overall that a certain contingent of players will gravitate towards. A larger sandbox (with a proportionally larger pool of ideally-performing weapons) is going to allow for more players to play at that level without forcing them to use a specific weapon.

To Bungie's credit, the types of weapons seem relatively equal in PvP, pulse rifles excepted. There's a reason to use fusion rifles over shotguns for example. So the balancing would have to be making sure that no fusion rifle is better in every situation than any other fusion rifle.

Suuuure...but you still have the sandbox problem within each class of weapon. There will still be only a slim handful that anybody chooses to use. The fact that there is a range of weapon classes mitigates this, to degree, as each class of weapon will have some overlap with other weapon classes.

It's a super hard job, but the bottom line would be fewer weapons, more differences between weapons, and more diversity of situations in both PvE and PvP to bring out the usefulness of those differences. The differences have to manifest themselves in advantages in common situations. This is probably easier in PvE, which is why in my world regular crucible would be Quartermaster gear only, and Iron banner when you bring your own guns in. (However Iron banner would always be running).

Right, so fewer and more widely differentiated weapons isn't going to happen. That's not the game that was designed here. I will, however, take a second to posit that we need to see new weapon classes and more interesting weapon behaviors out of them in future expansions (think Grenade Launcher heavies, various alien faction weapons, etc), as even during the beta there was talk of the current stable of weapon classes feeling a bit...standard.

I think differentiating the weapon tasking is not only impossible, but would be far less fun than what we deal with now. More differentiation would turn it into a clear cut rock-paper-scissors scheme for weapon selection. That certainly works in some games (like Halo), but this isn't one of them.

Overall, I think the best possible balance has been struck between how weapons and their specific traits work between PvP, PVE, and in the Iron Banner. The current system doesn't force you to level your gear in each of those modes independently, it factors in the extra materials investment where appropriate, and it caters to the largest body of players possible without conferring unfair advantage. If Iron Banner ran all the time, I'd warrant most players interested in PvP would end up there, where ALL material investment confers advantages, and vanilla crucible would be largely shunned except by those who don't normally run PvP (unless they have bounties that demand it). I don't think many folks would end up bringing less-levelled gear in, as they'd get crushed by the polished killers with highly tweaked builds.

As it stands with special events occurring periodically, the community is focused on joint activities during those times and left to roam at their own discretion at others. I don't think Iron Banner or the Queen's Wrath bounties would hold as much allure if the loot those vendors hawk was available whenever the player liked. Sure, one could argue that this is artificial investment-gaming, but I'm not seeing microtransactions skewing ingame behavior yet; nor do I feel like the big bad Activision is shamelessly cleaning out my wallet every time my console loads a new area.

~m