Should Destiny adopt "Spartan Ops" till Destiny 2 comes out?

One of the few redeeming parts of Halo 4 was the Spartan Ops section. The story was middling, but the weekly mission and cutscene really incentivized you to return to the game to at least check it out and keep tabs on the ongoing story. I know Mircosoft saw it as a failure and dropped it after the first season, but in a way Bungie's Destiny is more conducive to performing this type of thing.

For those who never tried it, each week you would get a new episode with a short cutscene, some voice over and a new mission using existing assets. The missions all related to a general plot, with the characters discovering more about both their enemies and the strange Forrunner world they were on.

What if there was a something similar put in Destiny to tide us over until Destiny 2 launches?
Perhaps something to close out the Queen's events? Varkis calls you to investigate why some of his Crows have gone silent, and things springboard from there. Let players choose the difficulty for higher rewards, and perhaps some subtle dialog changes. Every week there would be a new "weekly story mission" that players could attempt and just get a little deeper into the background.

For extra fun, lets get some Mass Effect style dialog choices for our guardians. Bungie has already had voice actors, would it be too much of a stretch to let us give them some personality?

Anecdotally, we've all heard how hard it is to make new content, but the live team did manage to create those SRL tracks. These weekly story missions wouldn't need to have a whole new map area, just an existing one with different enemy spawns. But it would be worth it to see more interaction with the few characters we have in Destiny, especially if we could get some NPCs out in the field.

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Destiny would really be well served by an ongoing plotline. Right now it feels like our actions have no impact on the world at large for most of the game. TTK's plot makes sense, but after you kill oryx, it's just... over. And then you're still fighting taken everywhere with little explanation as to why they're still around.

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One of the few redeeming parts of Halo 4 was the Spartan Ops section. The story was middling, but the weekly mission and cutscene really incentivized you to return to the game to at least check it out and keep tabs on the ongoing story. I know Mircosoft saw it as a failure and dropped it after the first season, but in a way Bungie's Destiny is more conducive to performing this type of thing.

What if there was a something similar put in Destiny to tide us over until Destiny 2 launches?
Perhaps something to close out the Queen's events? Varkis calls you to investigate why some of his Crows have gone silent, and things springboard from there. Let players choose the difficulty for higher rewards, and perhaps some subtle dialog changes. Every week there would be a new "weekly story mission" that players could attempt and just get a little deeper into the background.

This is an interesting idea, although I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, this is exactly the kind of thing I was initially hoping for from the Live team. But the more time goes by, the more I've come to believe that Bungie just isn't capable of churning out that kind of content fast enough to make it worthwhile.

In many ways, the story missions in Dark Below and House of Wolves were very much "Spartan Ops" style content, without the cutscenes. New missions that reused locations from the main game and featured some new voice-over to fill out the story a little. If anything, Spartan Ops was able to shake things up a bit because Halo has a more diverse sandbox than Destiny thanks to all the different vehicles and such. Destiny's year 1 DLC story missions all felt like "more of the same".

Even now, I hear lots of people complaining that Destiny doesn't have enough content, which is an insane claim to make. As someone who just re-played all the story missions over the past couple weeks, Destiny has TONS of content... it's just that most of it feels very "samey", which is what makes people think there is less content than there actually is.

What I'm getting at is I don't know if new "more of the same" missions would really add anything worthwhile. Even if they managed to move the story forward in significant ways, I think I'd rather wait until we can play fully realized and well developed missions that do the story justice, like what we had with TTK.

All that said, if Bungie was actually able to deliver a new batch of story missions with their own little arc that were genuinely new and fun in their own right, I'd be totally excited for it. I just think it might be too much to expect.

For extra fun, lets get some Mass Effect style dialog choices for our guardians. Bungie has already had voice actors, would it be too much of a stretch to let us give them some personality?

For me, the reason the dialog choices work in Mass Effect is because the overall writing is so well done and thoroughly thought out, and it has real impact on the story you experience. I'm not against Destiny heading in that direction per say, but simply adding dialog choices that don't have much real impact is not something that has much value to me personally. So again, I think it depends how far they are willing and able to take the idea.

Anecdotally, we've all heard how hard it is to make new content, but the live team did manage to create those SRL tracks.

Based on what we've heard, it sounds like SRL took longer to put together than we might assume. Planet Destiny had a couple guys from Bungie on their podcast last month, and they were saying that SRL was born out of a little in-studio game jam back in February or March. The developers who put it together took track layouts they had already built for other games and dropped it into the Destiny engine and got it running. The interview doesn't specifically reveal whether those initial tracks are the ones that ended up shipping with SRL, or if new tracks were created from scratch, but either way that is still a relatively slow turn around (understandably so, considering SRL was just a little side project).

These weekly story missions wouldn't need to have a whole new map area, just an existing one with different enemy spawns. But it would be worth it to see more interaction with the few characters we have in Destiny, especially if we could get some NPCs out in the field.

This is something I would definitely love to see! Having NPCs out in patrol would help add more "life" to the open world, and possibly give us more to do as well.

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It really does seem like the dev tools for destiny are the major roadblock to any big content updates. The game was simply not designed, from a groundwork standpoint, to be nimble and grow over time (ironic, since that's kind of the entire point of the game). This was, in retrospect, pretty awful for them to have done. Without confirmation that Destiny 2 will be both more nimble and have netcode that is more fair (a'la CoD), I'm probably going to give it a miss.

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It really does seem like the dev tools for destiny are the major roadblock to any big content updates. The game was simply not designed, from a groundwork standpoint, to be nimble and grow over time (ironic, since that's kind of the entire point of the game). This was, in retrospect, pretty awful for them to have done. Without confirmation that Destiny 2 will be both more nimble and have netcode that is more fair (a'la CoD), I'm probably going to give it a miss.

I don't know anything about this first hand, but the buzz I've been hearing since that Kotaku article broke is that the tools themselves are great... Devs can supposedly create content quickly. The bottleneck appears to be the compiling process (where the content that has been built with the editing tools is crunched down into a launchable/playable test build of the game.

My understanding is that the compiling process is the part that can take 12-24 hours, and also has a tendency to crash. So a designer can build a new level smoothly and quickly, then they'll need to leave their build overnight to compile. In the morning they will come in and finally play their latest build (if the compiler didn't crash), discover a few little things that need changing, open the editor and make the changes easily enough, and then need to let it compile all day and night again before testing the changes.

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That's the downside of an awesome creative tool. The more amazing and smooth to use a tool is, the harder it is to convert it into actual code. Unless you hit the jackpot, of course.

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Everywhere I worked in the past had "rolling compiles." Basically there was a system (or two, or three, or four...) that did nothing but take the latest versions of everything and compile them. Then it would run a monkey code (just a bot that randomly simulated button presses) to make sure the build was stable. If it was, it would push the compiled code to the server, and that's what everyone would work from. There would always be several builds available on the server: Latest compile (regardless of if it crashed or not), latest stable (monkey) compile (which was the most recent build the monkey thought was good), latest stable (verified) compile (which was the latest build a human being had confirmed was stable, usually my job), and latest test push (which was the most recent version that we'd distributed to the test team en masse).

The point is that there was always a build to look at. The only time that you were backlogged waiting for a compile would be just before release when you were squashing one major bug at a time (and even then there were rolling builds because person A would have a fix and then person B would have their fix, etc.. just in case fix A didn't work...).

My understanding of Destiny's bottleneck was that it wasn't the compile that was the issue, but rather opening a map to edit with, which can't be pre-done because you're constantly switching between maps, and have to save a file and then push it to the compiler in order to make your changes available to everyone. Which falls into the category of bad tools design in my book. If saving and re-opening a map to make an edit takes 12 hours, my producer would have the tools team working 24 hour shifts in order to get something that didn't cost me half a day of artist time for every little change. Honestly, that kind of thing simply would not fly anywhere I've worked, and it shocked me to read about in Kotaku (though it does gel with my observations of the snail's pace at which Destiny adapts to change).

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A lot of the Taken King quests feel that way too.

Take the Quest line where you track the House of Wolves on Mars. You would think that of all the places on Mars, they could hide anywhere, and that we'd be taken to new areas… but no. Just the patrol areas. Some of the missions are also criminally short. For example, the one where you blow up the fallen walker.

Asking for Destiny Ops is kind of just like asking for a new expansion. If they could do it moving forward, they'd still be doing it.

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Even now, I hear lots of people complaining that Destiny doesn't have enough content, which is an insane claim to make. As someone who just re-played all the story missions over the past couple weeks, Destiny has TONS of content... it's just that most of it feels very "samey", which is what makes people think there is less content than there actually is.

Destiny actually doesn't have enough content… if you want to play it how Bungie wants you to play it - every day constantly. They have said repeatedly their desire is to create such a game. If they simply made Destiny like a traditional FPS, it would have more than enough content and no complaints would be lodged.

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When I first heard of Destiny and the story line my immediate thought was:

There is a city under siege by a threat from all sides and we have thousands of Guardians trying to hold back that tide.

But what I got was my personal experience of taking down a specific threat at a time. I still hear about several groups of guardians out on assignment doing other things to defeat the darkness. What I want to hear about in said "Guardian Ops" is all of the stories of those other guardians helping to support us, the apparently, more important guardians. I still have this idea that there are tons of guardians out in the word doing missions, but I never hear or see them. I want to know more about THEM and not just those guardians that killed Oryx.

It could be simple missions where you have to assinate someone, or find out what happened to a group of mission guardians, or whatever. It doesn't even have to tie into the entire plot, although it would be cool if it did. That is what I would love. Not an entire new side story arc. Just the experiences of other guardians that aren't US.

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This is one of the things that I enjoyed about earlier Call of Duty games, where the perspective jumped around between different characters all doing their own thing, but often tying into each others' stories.

One of the best was in Modern Warfare 2, where you're playing as an American soldier holding off a Russian invasion in Washington D.C. after a helicopter crash. As you're making you last stand, a mysterious bright flash fills the screen. The action cuts to a mission where you play as a member of the British SAS who helps his former commander capture (and launch) a Nuke from a Russian sub. The perspective shifts to an Astronaut who tracks the Nuke across space, and watches it explode over D.C. before being killed by the blast. Then you cut back to the American soldier making his last stand, where it's revealed that the bright flash was the nuke detonating overhead, which fries the invading Russian's vehicles, leveling the playing field for the Americans, and the player then has to fight in the quiet darkness of the black rain caused by the nuke...

Man, that game was fantastic...

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This is one of the things that I enjoyed about earlier Call of Duty games, where the perspective jumped around between different characters all doing their own thing, but often tying into each others' stories.

One of the best was in Modern Warfare 2, where you're playing as an American soldier holding off a Russian invasion in Washington D.C. after a helicopter crash. As you're making you last stand, a mysterious bright flash fills the screen. The action cuts to a mission where you play as a member of the British SAS who helps his former commander capture (and launch) a Nuke from a Russian sub. The perspective shifts to an Astronaut who tracks the Nuke across space, and watches it explode over D.C. before being killed by the blast. Then you cut back to the American soldier making his last stand, where it's revealed that the bright flash was the nuke detonating overhead, which fries the invading Russian's vehicles, leveling the playing field for the Americans, and the player then has to fight in the quiet darkness of the black rain caused by the nuke...

Man, that game was fantastic...

That was one of the best storytelling moments in any FPS I've ever played. So awesome the way it all came together. The astronaut especially stood out to me, as he only existed to bear witness, and was simply collateral in the fight. He gave us a whole lot of perspective on both a grand and personal scale. Video games can make these sorts of very powerful personal connections to the storytelling and it mystifies me why so many games just don't even try.

Like in Destiny, where your character is presented not as a special or unique hero but as one of some multitude of free agent special ops types who does stuff that seems like it should be significant but which actually has no effect on the game at all.

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They would introduce these new characters, have you fight this epic battle to save someone, and then cutscene kill you. I hated that with a passion. Cutscene deaths for player characters are the worst.

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They would introduce these new characters, have you fight this epic battle to save someone, and then cutscene kill you. I hated that with a passion. Cutscene deaths for player characters are the worst.

It was groundbreaking in the first Modern Warfare when the guy you were playing as for most of the first part of the game performed a daring rescue, only to slowly die in the ensuing nuclear explosion. You had control as he crawled out of the helicopter, struggled to his feet, looked at the too-close mushroom cloud, then died. That moment stuck with a lot of people, and unfortunately Infinity Ward felt like they had to one-up it in their subsequent games.

The upside to this was that you, the player, are not really the protagonist of these games, You're the guy working under them:

Price was the hero, you played as the newbie, Soap.
In a Flashback where you play as Price, he's a Lieutenant following Captain MacMillan.

After the events of the first game, Soap was the hero. You played as his underling, Roach.
Once Roach died, you played as Soap again, and avenged his (your own) death.

In the third game, you play as Yuri, assisting Soap and Price on their mission off the grid (and a plot point reveals that you were working under the Villain who detonated the bomb in the first game before defecting). You also play as a member of a Delta Force squad (Metal), who assist Price and Yuri.

Because you aren't the protagonist, you can die at any time, and this is a contrast to the unkillable one-man-army that most player characters end up being in games. You had a feeling that you were expendable, and more so after the protagonist of the series, Soap, dies in a cutscene while you watch. War is Hell...

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Agreed. It really gave you a sense that you had no idea what was coming, and it felt more honest from a combat standpoint. There were some great missions where you'd just fight until your guy got injured, and which point the cutscene would start, and the first time through I wondered if a different scene would have played if I hadn't been shot so many times.

Speaking of, Black Ops 2 did that really well, with interesting story branches that resulted from your own personal decisions at some key, life or death moments.

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There were some great missions where you'd just fight until your guy got injured, and which point the cutscene would start, and the first time through I wondered if a different scene would have played if I hadn't been shot so many times.

Right. You made the mistake of thinking you were playing a Game instead of a Movie. Just like the Devs made the mistake of working at a Games studio by accident when they really wanted to make movies.

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There were some great missions where you'd just fight until your guy got injured, and which point the cutscene would start, and the first time through I wondered if a different scene would have played if I hadn't been shot so many times.

Right. You made the mistake of thinking you were playing a Game instead of a Movie. Just like the Devs made the mistake of working at a Games studio by accident when they really wanted to make movies.

It seems like you're arguing that there's something wrong with me for enjoying the game.

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There were some great missions where you'd just fight until your guy got injured, and which point the cutscene would start, and the first time through I wondered if a different scene would have played if I hadn't been shot so many times.

Right. You made the mistake of thinking you were playing a Game instead of a Movie. Just like the Devs made the mistake of working at a Games studio by accident when they really wanted to make movies.

It seems like you're arguing that there's something wrong with me for enjoying the game.

Nah. My point is that your thought about maybe the game taking into account your actions when displaying a result would be a normal expectation for anyone because that's basically the core of what it means to be a video game. The word "mistake" was being used ironically.

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Not always. Sometimes they would cutscene-mortal-wound you and then the gameplay was you slowly and with great boredom drag your fatalist corpse around until you pass an invisible and un-indicated goal line. At which point you promptly die. Fun.

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Should Destiny adopt "Spartan Ops" till Destiny 2 comes out? (Destiny)

Cool idea