Things warframe learned from Destiny... (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Sunday, May 03, 2015, 14:02 (3282 days ago) @ Cody Miller

You made a beautiful point about how aesthetically-pleasing games need good mechanics, but then just stated an absolute for the inverse, blundering terribly.

Can you really not think of an example on your own and have to be spoon fed?

Racing game. You've programmed it to be realistic, calculating tire friction, weight shifting, and the like. But if you are on the Sega genesis, and you only have 8 sprites for your car, you can't even represent all the subtleties of your game physics! You'd need to upgrade to a 3D renderer where the car can lean, have individual tire rotation, and skid for that to even work.

You're letting the tail wag the dog in your argument here. Journey is a beautiful game and it sucked ballsack. There's no gameplay. It's just "walk around and do nothing." Frankly, Destiny is only slightly different, in that it's "Walk around a shoot everything" but there's almost no variation. The player's tactics don't need to adjust to what's on the field, the environment you're in doesn't matter, and there are no goals other than to kill everything. There's not even plot justification for the action, nor do the missions change on replay.

It's quite possible to have incredible art and crap gameplay, just as it's possible to have incredible gameplay with crap art.

I favor gameplay over art 100% of the time. You don't have to, but I do.

And, frankly, Warframe is a very good looking game. You talk about it as if it's some kind of 8-bit pixel game, but it's fully rendered, next-gen, and quite pretty. It has a slight stylistic bent that can make it seem a tad cartoony at times, but if you buy into that artistic theme, it's great. There have definitely been moments where I just stopped for a second to take in the vistas.

For me, it feels like this:
Art: Destiny: 10/10. Warframe: 8/10.
Gameplay: Destiny: 3/10. Warframe: 8/10.