Some thoughts, then some questions for all you DBOers (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, March 31, 2016, 17:09 (3253 days ago) @ slycrel

destiny with no RNG would be a really short game.

Length has nothing to do with game quality. I know tons of great short games and tons of shitty long ones.

Point on that is that destiny, as intended, is not meant to be a short game. It's elongated by the RNG and light level systems. You may have missed some of the nuances of my post there. =)

Right, but they are simply aiming to make the game way too long. There reaches a point where it becomes too much, and making your game shorter would benefit. The good developers know this. The bad ones try to elongate the game so players have a higher hours played stat. After the influx of overly long JRPGs following Final Fantasy 7, I thought that the resulting backlash over time bloat in games would take. But it hasn't.

I think having people play as much as possible is exactly what Bungie wants. They want an MMO-style world that contains lots of random players at any given time.

That is a goal that sounds cool, but is impossible in practice without creating a grindy game full of 'frictions'. You simply cannot make stuff as fast as people will play it. Thus, you need to make them play it over and over.

So I guess, yeah, a different game could be different. But I thought we were talking about why destiny is what it is, not what it isn't or could be.

What it is (an MMO) is stupid. The fact that it is mostly fun is a testament to Bungie's skill at making action games despite it being a shitty genre.