Really good to see this level of honesty and understanding (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, August 27, 2015, 15:04 (3158 days ago) @ Cody Miller

You see that goal oriented perspective here and I'm guilty myself. Most posts aren't about appreciating the game--they're about how I got or how can I get that thing I don't have. With your tagline every post from you is that.

That is my biggest frustration still. I want to enjoy the game as a game, and that means kicking ass in PvP with hand cannons. I can't get a certain one that looks very fun and matches my play style. It can be hard to enjoy the game as a game when it fights you.

I know I keep saying this, but they brought it on themselves by making the end game loot focused rather than experience focused. People are only doing what they are actually being asked to by Bungie and the game design. Gear IS the point of the end game the way Bungie set it up. So you or they can't really get mad when players are gear focused. Halo didn't have this problem.

Fully agreed.

Also, to the earlier post about them resetting characters: That's hogwash. I worked in QA for 13 years and seeing the problems with their endgame design would have been obvious to me from the moment I looked at the design plan. RNG based loot? That's a mistake, especially when the gating off of high level content is based entirely on your access to loot.

This leads me to believe that they either :
(a) did not playtest this at all (which is obviously not true).
(b) told their playtesters to only focus on bugs, and not to comment on design (which is what you tell noob playtesters, but holy god the production test team should really have been giving copious feedback on the experience of playing), or
(c) just totally ignored the testers' feedback (most likely scenario). I've worked on games before where the design lead just didn't give a shit what the testers thought and told the coders to ignore them completely. It's a combination of putting on blinders, drinking your own kool aid, and outright disrespecting the professionalism of your test team. Now, sometimes it's systemic in terms of how the test team is allowed to interact with their co-workers - whoever set up the company just locked the testers in a room and said to put all the bugs in a database. Sometimes it's the test team lead's fault for marking opinion bugs as "NAB" (Not A Bug) and preventing the design team from ever seeing them. Sometimes it's an arrogant person in charge (Design lead, producer, powerful and important coder) who just tells everyone else to ignore the feedback because they believe in their own opinion more than that of the testers etc. There's lots of different ways it can happen and I'm not privy to how Bungie is structured so I have have no idea which scenario is most plausible (or if it's something I didn't think of to type here).

But the end result was the same: They published a game which was - at it's core - awesome, and yet was bedecked in the trappings of amateur design and poor planning. It is a beautiful game with incredibly play control and a vast and complicated setting, with really linear level design, repetitive AI, and - just as Cody says - an endgame designed around loot rather than experience.

2.0 looks like it'll improve on almost all of that, which is good, but the failures of the initial launch will always leave me skeptical of the Destiny team. There's something very wrong with how they built the initial game, and while it's clear that they listened to our feedback about it and are fixing things, it remains unclear as to whether or not they've discovered where their design and feedback systems broke down internally and were able to address those problems in order to prevent future mistakes before they every get to us, the players.