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

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, January 13, 2016, 18:01 (3476 days ago) @ Durandal

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.