On Scoring (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, April 14, 2016, 16:35 (3239 days ago)
edited by Cody Miller, Thursday, April 14, 2016, 16:43

Scoring has made its way into Bungie games before, namely the Halo series with campaign scoring and Firefight. As I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong), the PoE challenge mode is based around accumulating a high score in order to get gear. That, and scoring as a whole, is generally kind of dumb.

Think about it this way: failing to achieve the required score for loot is a failure state. Don't get the score, you don't get the loot. So why not bypass the scoring thing entirely, and simply make completing the activity result in the loot? The various modifiers help your score. For instance, headshots give you more points. So why not simply have headshots either do more damage and adjust enemy health so that you need to hit lots of headshots to kill before running out of ammo, make critical hits mandatory, give ammo back on critical hits, or some combination of all of these?

I think the first of my suggestions is probably the best because it is functionally equivalent, but makes sense and is still immersive. Points are anti immersive. Tracking a number has nothing to do with killing Taken. You are taken 'outside' of the game when you compare scores.

You get more points for chaining in Ikaruga. If chaining is fun and challenging in and of itself, why not just make chaining necessary to win? Maybe you only get bullets back if you chain. The harder the difficulty, the more you have to chain to get shots back.

Instead of points, Bungie should tweak the mechanics such that you need to exploit the modifiers somehow simply to win.

Scoring made limited sense years ago, but in modern games it has no place at all.