- Phase 1: The story. The moment to moment gameplay doesn't have to be great if the story is compelling, and vice versa. I hope we can agree that destiny 2's story is at least good enough that most people (certainly most people here) will play through it all. But what about the side missions? Well, they're not as well done, and the level of story per side mission or adventure is not consistent throughout the game.

- Phase 2: The mid-game grind. It is possible to make a game not have a third phase by simply making "max power level" unattainable for the vast majority of players. This is the "get more powerful items in order to tackle harder content in order to get even more powerful items in order to tackle even harder content in order to..." part of a game. Usually this phase involves using whatever your most powerful items are (by number) rather than the items you enjoy using the most or the items that would be more ideal for a given combat situation. But Destiny 2 is in a weird place here, because power level is largely meaningless, and most players of power 280+ have access to almost all of the content of the game, and that makes this mid-game loop "get more powerful items to do the same thing as before to get more powerful items to keep doing the same things to get even more powerful items to continue doing those same things." Of note, this is also the same gameplay loop problem that the vanilla build of Diablo 3 had.

Phase 2 is nice and all, but as it presently stands with D1 & D2 it's just repeating content over & over to gain light. In essence it's just sitting in a playlist of random strikes for enough time. That grind gets boring, and Luke's desire to make it longer is a bad idea IMHO. How about we have several strikes of increasing difficulty, the strikes can be unlocked by completing the previous strike & side-missions surrounding/prefacing the new strike. The important thing here is that these are presented as short stories in the game, as if they were smaller bits of phase 1, not just as optional side-quests, but as actual story content. The strikes a true ladder to climb in preparation for the raid!

- Phase 3: The end-game. This is when you've reached maximum effective power, and the player progression goal becomes optimizing your gear through perks, mods, ideal weapons for a given situation, and so forth.

There are a few outliers here, like the exotic shotgun raid quest thing that only unlocks after you complete a power level 300 mission, or like heroic mode raid etc.. so please don't think I'm talking in total absolutes.

I love the idea of quests for weapons, but Bungie has totally lost me on this. They're just not communicated well enough for me to pickup on them and complete them. I have no idea what possible weapons quests are out there & I don't feel that I should have to research it on the internet in order to figure out how to start these quests. There should be some in-game way to communicate what possible content/quests/weapons there are for me to achieve.

Edit: Although blank-spindle was way cool, perhaps after a mystery like that becomes "public knowledge" it should be listed in some quest log / bounty tracker so that I could know about it w/o reading internet forums.

All of which brings me back to the podcast and Luke's desire to make the time it takes to reach max power level even longer. Why? Towards what end? Without addressing the true end-game and making the experience of gameplay at maximum power compelling, all you're doing is delaying the inevitable. Whereas if you make the end-game fun, the only complaints about the mid-game is that they can't get to the end game quickly enough.

I think there is an assumption that those who dumped thousands of hours into Destiny 1 are the players who like the grind. However, I don't think that's actually true. Instead I think most of us who dumped that many hours in were there to enjoy PvP, raiding with friends, tackling difficult challenges with friends etc. We joke about caring about loot, but in reality we don't care that much about it.

If it were me, I'd just dump the light level/power level/phase 2 entirely. Instead, make "gaining power" be unlocking new abilities during the story. Make "gaining power" be about having more tools of destruction at your disposal instead of some random numbers that don't make sense (at least to more casual players).

I'm listening to the latest Bungie Podcast, and the guys are having a conversation that is very hit and miss to me.

On the one hand, I think they've correctly identified their core groups of players: Tourists, who just want to finish the story and then move on, coming back only for major releases, Collectors, who want to have all the things, and hobbyists, for whom playing Destiny is a lifestyle. I think they've properly assessed that the game was made for tourists but should have focused on hobbyists instead.

But the takeaway from that is very strange to me.

Pretty early on, Luke says that - because he was able to get 3 characters all to around 300 power in about a month of casual play - they're talking around the office about whether they made it too easy to gain power level. This conversation is meaningless to me, though, because power level is basically meaningless in the game.

It's like if Luke owned a restaurant, and he noticed that diners would come in, order, wait for their food, and then leave once the food arrived, sometimes without even eating the food, and his takeaway was that it should take longer for the food to come out rather than understanding that maybe his food sucks.

I'm being a little unfair, because there are people who enjoy the progress as the game, but I am not one of those people. So, stepping back:

There are three phases of a game like this:

- Phase 1: The story. The moment to moment gameplay doesn't have to be great if the story is compelling, and vice versa. I hope we can agree that destiny 2's story is at least good enough that most people (certainly most people here) will play through it all. But what about the side missions? Well, they're not as well done, and the level of story per side mission or adventure is not consistent throughout the game. The Nessus side missions, for example, were very compelling to me, but the Titan ones (that I have played) are not very impactful from a storytelling standpoint, so I stopped doing them. Then there's the discoverable lore items on worlds - some of those tell a story, and some are lame excuses for bad jokes. Not only are they hard to find, but there's no checklist of them for someone interested in the story to even know if they've experienced all of the story in a given area. So. Frustrating. Furthermore, what if you hear that there's a great discoverable story moment during a campaign mission? You have to wait until Ikora lets you do that mission again. UGH. So this phase 1 of story experience starts strong and then peters out into frustration.

- Phase 2: The mid-game grind. It is possible to make a game not have a third phase by simply making "max power level" unattainable for the vast majority of players. This is the "get more powerful items in order to tackle harder content in order to get even more powerful items in order to tackle even harder content in order to..." part of a game. Usually this phase involves using whatever your most powerful items are (by number) rather than the items you enjoy using the most or the items that would be more ideal for a given combat situation. But Destiny 2 is in a weird place here, because power level is largely meaningless, and most players of power 280+ have access to almost all of the content of the game, and that makes this mid-game loop "get more powerful items to do the same thing as before to get more powerful items to keep doing the same things to get even more powerful items to continue doing those same things." Of note, this is also the same gameplay loop problem that the vanilla build of Diablo 3 had.

- Phase 3: The end-game. This is when you've reached maximum effective power, and the player progression goal becomes optimizing your gear through perks, mods, ideal weapons for a given situation, and so forth. While the mid-game is balanced around "the most powerful player wins" the endgame assumes equal and maximum power for everyone, and is now balanced by the designers. Destiny, again, does an interesting thing here where PvP is normalized, so every player in PvP is playing endgame PvP all the time, regardless of game mode (which is why pvp enthusiasts such as myself complain about balance so often). Looking back at how Destiny deals with the mid-game (maxing out in effective power around 280) also means that players are in the true endgame earlier than they might expect, which means that reaching max power of 305 is largely anti-climactic because at that point there's no change whatsoever to the gameplay and no additional challenges that unlock at that point.

There are a few outliers here, like the exotic shotgun raid quest thing that only unlocks after you complete a power level 300 mission, or like heroic mode raid etc.. so please don't think I'm talking in total absolutes.

When I compare this to D1, D1 had an almost endless true endgame because of three main things: First, the gameplay, especially PvP, was full of depth and had a very high skill ceiling which made it really really compelling to me. Second, the loot rolls meant that truly optimizing your gear once you hit the max power level and endgame was virtually impossible (and very frustrating). And third, your power level directly affected your performance in IB and Trials, and had a seemingly larger effect in endgame PvE modes as well.

D2's endgame is not at all distinct from the mid-game grind. It sneaks in at 280 power without anyone noticing, which makes reaching 305 disappointing. The power level means almost nothing in any game mode, provided you meet the minimum threshold for that activity. The PvP has been largely dumbed down, lacks the complex movement and is now essentially a positioning based squad combat game. Optimization is simplistic to the point of essentially forcing everyone into the same build, rather than allowing multiple S-tier options. There is less choice and the choices the player does make are less meaningful than D1, which also serves to undermine the value of optimization, thereby resulting in a further diminished true end-game.

All of which brings me back to the podcast and Luke's desire to make the time it takes to reach max power level even longer. Why? Towards what end? Without addressing the true end-game and making the experience of gameplay at maximum power compelling, all you're doing is delaying the inevitable. Whereas if you make the end-game fun, the only complaints about the mid-game is that they can't get to the end game quickly enough.

Guess I'm a tourist who aspires to be a collector and wishes he had time to be a hobbyist.

Haven't listened yet, but I'm frightened by your post. Of course I liked the fact that I leveled up with ease and could stop, have a life, and come back a few times a week to play with friends. This is normal. I sometimes resented what D1 demanded of me. I almost always enjoyed playing, but there were times where I was just trying to tick a box.

All of which brings me back to the podcast and Luke's desire to make the time it takes to reach max power level even longer. Why? Towards what end?

Think about the kind of people who WANT lots of grind that takes longer. This is the hardcore crowd that has nothing but time, and wants their time spent to be rewarded, because there is a false equivalence to time invested and skill at the game.

People like Datto say stuff like this. A guy who had to make a life change because he was sad, played Destiny all day, and had no friends. Do you really want to make a game that encourages THAT? Do you really want to listen to advice from someone who is so obviously dysfunctional? I'm doing my best not to sound like a complete ass, but lengthening the grind really only ultimately helps people like him 'enjoy' your game.

Time spent on a game is not a statistic to be bragged about. It doesn't represent anything of actual importance. But it easy to fall into the illusion that it does, especially if massive time investments have 'rewards'.

Have the advancement to the top take as long as it takes to not exhaust fun from the game. If you want it to take longer, put in more meaningful things to do.

So I just listened to the podcast...

Regarding Luke’s comments about the current speed of the level climb:

IMO, your interpretation of Luke’s words is the most negative interpretation possible, which is not to say that I necessarily think you’re wrong... it just is a fairly pessimistic interpretation.

As others have pointed out, Luke seemed to be trying to present both sides of an argument. He explicitly said that on the one hand, having a quick, easy level climb was great for a lot of players. Then he went on to make a counter argument.

But there is another assumption built in to your interpretation that you might want to keep in mind. When Luke starts talking about leveling up, and increases in power, he is talking in very broad, high-level terms. I think it’s presumptuous to assume that what he was saying is “Take D2 exactly as it shipped, but make it take longer to level up.” This entire portion of the conversation was framed within the context of “how do we make Destiny 2 appeal to each portion of the player base?” As Luke and Mark both point out, they decided to lean in favour of the “tourists”. But that’s likely not a late-development decision. That’s a design goal that would probably have been in place fairly early on.

So when Luke is musing over the possibility of a longer level climb, there’s no reason to assume that he’s talking about the exact same game. In his head, he could very well be picturing a version of Destiny 2 that was built around a longer level climb, where the post-campaign activities made up a larger portion of the game. A version of D2 that puts less emphasis on the linear campaign, and leans more heavily on the open-world, shared spaces, and repeatable activities.

I’m about to go a bit tinfoil hat here...

Remember this thread where I talked about Patrick Klepeck’s thoughts on D2? Where he was wondering if Bungie doesn’t nail campaigns the way they used to because perhaps their heart isn’t in it anymore? That a linear campaign just isn’t what Destiny is really about, and that itteretive storytelling through strikes and other activities is where Bungie has potential to really break new ground...

Doesn’t all that fit quite well with a theoretical version of the game that puts less emphasis on a quick 1-20 climb for the tourists, and is instead built around long-term investment and group play? It’s almost like Patrick and Luke are talking about a similar vision for Destiny, just from different angles. Could be a total coincidence... or it could be that they’ve actually talked about it together, since they’ve been friends for years ever since they worked together at 1-Up ;)

"When I compare this to D1, D1 had an almost endless true endgame because of three main things: First, the gameplay, especially PvP, was full of depth and had a very high skill ceiling which made it really really compelling to me. Second, the loot rolls meant that truly optimizing your gear once you hit the max power level and endgame was virtually impossible (and very frustrating). And third, your power level directly affected your performance in IB and Trials, and had a seemingly larger effect in endgame PvE modes as well."

PVP's depth was more a flavor of the week. There were seldom more then one or two combinations of weapons and classes that seemed ascendant on any given basis. Suros Regime Strikers early on, then it rotated as things were nerfed or buffed.

The grind for gear was a frustrating extension of PVP woes, were lack of vary rare drops on weapons with RNG roles on top consigned players to a lower tier no matter their skill level. I know people who devoted several hours for a perfect roll Grasp of Malloc. Likewise Doctrine of Passing or a LitC high impact hand cannon were highly sought roles. This mechanic really added to the frustration side more then the exploration/discovery side, as most people followed internet posts to determine loadouts as the PVP was too "Sweaty" to experiment or relax.

Power level didn't affect performance unless you were substantially off. Pre-raid gear seldom seemed to impact my performance in IB at all. Several times I went with someone still in blues and they were hampered, but could still get kills. If you could reliably perform the nightfall, you could play on roughly the same level as someone in trials gear/raid gear.

Really, much of the game was driven by elitists. You had to have a rare weapon/emblem/armor set to show off that you had accomplished a difficult task. That's why trials gear was such a big deal. It's perks seldom were a huge benefit but the emblem and gear showed one had repeatedly done something very hard.

This is the same as COD, where prestiging and unlocking all the same guns is a big deal.

Elitists want to show off how much time they have spent in game. Grimoire score, rare weapons, rare emblems, ships etc. They want to go into the tower and be seen immediately as cool because they have this rare loot that no one else has.

D2, because the loot is all fairly accessible, has downplayed that aspect of the game. Now you have people asking for random loot back, because they don't feel that their character has any differentiation from any other. If only they could play long enough to get that rare item that would then become some sort of advantage that would grant status.

The loot grind wheel is really a status wheel. That's why the armor decorations were so big at the end of D1, even if the base armor was the same as stuff people already had.

There must be a way to grant said status without more RNG to cloud the issue. I think the best way is to have difficult content, rather then gating things behind a effort wall. So stuff should be more like the Arms Dealer Strike for the Arcus, or the Black Spindle quest, or Trials, where certain gear requires practice and skill to obtain rather then just rote time invested. One of the largest complaints about the prestige raid gear for D2 is that it looks identical to the normal raid gear (with a shader).