The fundamental unresolved tension in the design of destiny (Destiny)

by electricpirate , Thursday, June 25, 2015, 19:44 (3260 days ago) @ Oholiab

The standard response, and one that I sympathize somewhat with, is that the same content is stretched pretty thin by the rewards system. For Me, as a player who entered Destiny at the release of HoW, that has been less of an issue. I've been spared from some of the worst grinds, so while I've probably had less overall playtime to get to level 29, it's been of higher quality.

All that said, even if Destiny maitains it's current ratio of content to cost for expansions and DLC, I think it's generally a fair deal, and a better deal than many other games. Destiny has much higher costs to continue than a halo or a call of duty. It requires a massive matchmaking infrastructure. It's got an active team maintaining servers, teams working on patches and content for all players etc etc. Traditionally you fund that either through subscription costs or microtransactions. Destiny has neither, instead it' funded through expansions. The way I see it, I view 10 dollars of every expansions as "Server funds."

The anxiety over amount of content gets at a fundamental, unresolved tension in Destiny. Destiny is a game designed for you to replay it, but the content feels like it's designed to be consumed and discarded. The problem is exacerbated the reliance on a few design tropes (eg: How many boss fights involve a bullet sponge ringed by cover with a massive damage weapon where adds spawn in? Sekiron, Valus T'Arc, the Ogre on the moon, so over half the original strikes used this design.) The large complexity of the build system, and the addition of more players helps this. Additionally there are some bandaids in place, some of which work really well (Nightfalls, heroics), some are less successful (patrol missions, bounties). POE is designed to address this problem, but I haven't been able to try it out yet. It's not totally sufficient though, and I think that's where a lot of the problem lies.

I think you can tackle it in a few ways, and I dislike specific suggestions, so I'll keep them vague.

1. More procedurality in the content. Enemies that spawn in randomly? Encounters that play out differently every time? this goes against Bungie's central "Polish it or cut it ethos" in a lot of ways, but I think something along these lines could help. Yea, sometimes you'll get unsatisfying content, but the variety and the peaks make up for it. Sometimes Bungie has a tendency to over polish so maybe this would help them ;)

2. Non binary win states Reward people not just for completing the strike, but for HOW They completed it. Halo's scoring system was never successful, but I think it was on the right track. This turns each strike from being about, "How do I get through" to being about "How do I MASTER" this thing. The road to mastery is longer.

3. More lose states. How does a strike change if it's on a timer? How does a strike change if you have to keep some bauble alive through the whole thing? Having ways to fail that aren't "Got out of cover for too long" could do wonders. Ideally you can start mixing and matching to create wildly different experiences even with the same basic content.

If there is content that is deeply repayable, I think the communication about the value proposition of smaller amounts of content becomes easier.