Something that Bungie (and all devs) could learn from DE... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 15:24 (3220 days ago)
edited by Korny, Tuesday, May 03, 2016, 15:46

Even if you have zero interest in Warframe, Digital Extremes' bi-weekly Devstream is a great watch, as it gives a ton of insight into game development, developer relationships with the community, the addressing of issues within the game (and the difficulties that cause delays), and other great behind-the scenes looks into what has been done (and what is to come).

One thing that really stood out to me this past stream was the introduction of the "Bourbon List" (<Creative Director> Steve Sinclair starts explaining it at 23:10 in the video), which is the list of the ten most common issues that the community has brought up since the last major update (along with some lingering issues). Not only are they putting the list up for display (which Bungie could learn to do, in order to let the fans know that their concerns really were being addressed), but they go into detail about how they're going to address these issues, and that is what really got my attention, because they get it. Instead of punishing players, they're fixing things on their own end, which is something that Bungie hasn't done (or has taken far too long to do). "Dracoville" is probably the most pertinent one for Destiny fans, but they are all relevant.

• Onboardin'
  One of the game's biggest problems is that it overwhelms new players. Despite many tutorials and the in-game Codex (Grimoire of sorts), much of the game is left for players to figure out on their own. There is a steep learning curve, and with over a dozen different mission types, it can get confusing. In response to this, DE plans to make things easier for everyone, which includes a handful of quality-of-life tweaks and an overhaul of the game's Director in order to make it easier to find players to join (and stay with) your Fireteam.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  An in-game Grimoire has always been the obvious answer, but more importantly, an opt-in feature for matchmaking. One of the biggest issues with Destiny has always been that if you're not in a pre-made fireteam, you're mostly SOL when it comes to finding people to play with. If you don't have existing friends or an LFG, Destiny can be a very lonely experience, and folks don't stick with the game for too long because of it. One of the things that I love about Warframe is that you can sit in the Director and look for specific people to play with. One of the things that I love to do is look for low-level players who need help, and hopping into their Fireteam, or inviting them to taxi them around the higher-level stuff. One of our real-world friends started playing Warframe last week, and because Sammy and I got him up to speed and helped him out, he already has two extra Warframes being constructed (including an end-game-tiered Prime version of his starting one), a handful of loot, and has become familiar with lots of the game's mechanics, and he only has time to play for a few hours a week. Imagine if you could help get a new Destiny player set up that quickly.
  
  
  
• Cheese Pizza, 3 minutes and it's free!
  One of the biggest things that separates Warframe from other games is that you are super overpowered by design. You are a space ninja supersoldier, so of course you need to be overpowered... The only problem is that people have become so powerful, that it can be possible to one-hit-kill bosses and other special enemies, making them boring. Instead of nerfing the players, they want to address the bosses themselves (likely adding combat mechanics). They've already overhauled a few bosses, but will likely expand the battles themselves.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  This is where Bungie falters. They punish the players for outwitting the design or being too good, and though they've definitely learned a few lessons when it comes to bosses, Guardians have steadily gotten nerfed since the game launched. Bungie could instead focus on the enemies themselves rather than hurting players in order to add challenge. Imagine if your Bladedancer could actually kill a decent number of enemies with a single super. Imagine if instead of nerfing Gjallarhorn, they had made it so that enemies could counter it (Taken Vandals already do a good job of it with their expertly-timed drop shields).
  
  
  
• Grindin'
  There was a time when one of the valuable resources in the game (Oxium) only had a chance to drop form a specific enemy (Oxium Ospreys) with a Kamikaze attack. It was a rarely-encountered enemy, and you had to kill it before it struck with its divebomb attack in order to have a chance at getting 1 or 2 Oxium from it. The problem? One of the Warframes that needed Oxium to be constructed required 900(!) Oxium... It was a painful grind. DE fixed that by making the Ospreys more common, with a 100% drop chance when killed, and with 8-12 Oxium dropped per drop. Now, players can quickly rack up the Oxium.
  DE will soon be applying that same philosophy elsewhere, such as the Void (special high-end missions). While you always know what the loot table is for each mission, it can often take a dozen runs of the same mission to get the thing you're looking for, and they want to address the fatigue that this causes players by giving you alternate paths to the gear, as well as reshuffling the loot pools.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  Imago Loop. How many runs of the same strike have you done without getting a Loop, and when you finally get one, was it the roll you wanted? And that's just one of the things that you know how to get, as most everything else is completely RNG. This equals grind on top of grind, which can be exhausting for most players. Three of Coins help a lot in this regard, but even they have a low chance at giving you what you want. And how many raids have you run without getting a helmet? Bungie did great by adding the Challenge mode and the revamped Prison of Elders, but the game is still far more grind than it needs to be. There is a balance between having players work towards something, and forcing them to play slots for hours on end.
  
  
  
• Samey-Same
  Missions are always more or less the same. Despite a randomly-generated environment, each piece of the tileset is always the same, which eventually leads to repetitive environments and the same strategy for each room. Although they are constantly adding new pieces to the tilesets (as well as entirely new environments, such as the recently-added Orokin Moon) DE will address the issue for their existing environments by refreshing them to include new things (enemy turrets, new reward containers, interactive elements).
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  The environments in Destiny are painfully stale. Other than the enemies (and the rare, but mostly pointless turret), there is nothing interactive about the environments. Bungie somewhat addressed this by making Taken variants of existing strikes, but for the most part, a mission will always play out exactly the same. The only exceptions are the final knights in the Sunless Cell strike if you're doing the sword quest, and the Pikes that might show up on the moon if someone brought one into your instance. There aren't enough interactive elements to the levels, and the game would be better if there were.
  
  
• Dracoville
  Essentially Warframe's Loot Cave, Draco is where players go to quickly grind and level their gear (small map, enlessly spawning enemies that can be killed nearly as fast as they spawn. Instead of getting rid of the mission, DE wants to address the issue of WHY players want to do this instead of playing the game. Instead of punishing the players, they acknowledge that it is the symptom of a bigger problem, and one that they want to fix. So they're wanting to change the way the leveling system works, rewarding higher-level players by reducing the amount of Grind that they have to do, allowing them to make the most of their new gear faster instead of worrying about having to level it. They are also changing the ways that you level your gear, in order to reward you for using it, rather than just having you level it in your backpack. They want to make the Loot Cave less appealing, rather than getting rid of it.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  Imagine if Bungie had increased the amount of loot drops in Destiny instead of just closing off the loot Cave and nerfing Three of Coins.
  Letting players use Motes of Light to level gear was a great step towards reducing grind, but imagine if leveling your gear was directly tied to your level? If you're 335, all of your gear's Nodes could be filled in, letting you experiment with different loot instead of leaving you with more grind/Mote+Resource consumption. You'd be rewarded for being a higher level, and your incentive to play with the loot you got would only go up. I'm reminded of all of the Doctrines that I dismantled because I wasn't impressed with the unleveled weapon, and I didn't want to waste my Motes and Resources leveling it. You could focus more on wearing the gear you like, rather than dismantling an Exotic armor because you don't want to burn through 50+ motes to get that extra point of Discipline.
  
  
  
• Mo' Money Mo' Boring
  Endgame content. Once players are super powerful and with the optimized gear, playing the game can get boring (1HK bosses and the like). True for any game, but they want to take some cues from MMOs that let you continue to build and refocus your attention in order to keep the game fun for you. They added Sortie missions, which are great (and which I plan to make a separate post about), and they're working on their third Raid, but they want to have more options available for the Endgame players. Some of this new content isn't even gameplay related. They'll soon be adding the ability to invite people onto your ship, and they want to give players stuff that they can spend their resources on once they have all of the gear and weapons that they want.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  Prison of Elders 2.0 is great, but it's not endgame content because of how easy it is. It's also pretty short. King's Fall is a breeze now, and Trials no longer gives you incentive to get to the Lighthouse (unless you want that Scarab Heart). Destiny lacks any sort of persistent content for Endgame players, and I'm surprised that Destiny didn't come with a "Wilderness" area common in MMOs (the "Dark Zone" in The Division is pretty much a Wilderness area). Bumping the Light Level every once in a while does nothing for players who want an actual challenge, and so we're left running Raids HUDless, or with specific weapons only, or other stuff, which is fun, but there is no content in the game that recognizes playing with such handicaps or anything. Again, the Sortie Missions in Warframe are a great way to address this problem, and Destiny would do well to add something similar. Stay tuned for that post. Another bit of stuff for the endgame-fatigued crowd? Guardian Apartments. Wish those 100 Exotic Shards sitting in your Vault could be used for purchasing rare decorations for your apartment? Wouldn't that be neat?
  
  
• Sounds of Silence
  General stuff to do. The past few months haven't had many events (outside of the excellent Shadow Debt event), so they're working to have more options available for all players, as opposed to just the endgame content. An upcoming overhaul to the factions will further flesh out the missions and rewards available to them, and that's starting with the current event (Rathuum), which overhauls one of the bosses and tracks Clan scores (for Clan rewards).
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  Prison of Elders 2.0 was a great addition, but it's just one new thing added. Iron Banner just passed, but that's a common PvP event that really doesn't add new or limited-time stuff to the game in the same way that Queen's Wrath did. Sparrow Racing and Crimson Doubles are long-overdue for a return, and there are no active events, such as the loads-of-fun House of Wolves patrol encounters that you could do as a fireteam of Six (if you were clever). Destiny needs more small stuff to do while we wait for the big stuff. Hopping on to go through the motions for loot can't be how they wanted the game to be played. Also, Destiny really doesn't implement Clans into the game proper, which makes them somewhat pointless.
  
  
  
• Flies with Chopsticks
  Warframe is primarily a PvE co-op game, but they have added (and are working on) a number of PvP modes to it. The problem is that because the Warframes are ridiculously fast and agile, it can be frustrating for the more casual crowd that isn't skilled at hitting moving targets with a bow while flying through the air... This is being addressed in a number of ways, one of the biggest is the addition of a specialized "Lunaro" gametype separate from the normal gameplay (They compare it to the Mayan ball game featured in "The Road To El Dorado"). It adds the ability for more causal players to reap the rewards and satisfaction found in normal PvP, but with a more balanced playing field. On top of that, they're looking for ways to improve the PvP networking by working with community folks in order to implement dedicated servers.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  It can be frustrating to hop into Crucible when you don't have a MIDA or 1000YS, and you're repeatedly cut down by the folks with all of the god-rolls that wreck your low-ROF Auto Rifle. Instead of constantly nerfing the guns and Guardians, Bungie could add a specialized playlist with preset loadouts and gear, providing unique/guaranteed rewards to promote people hopping onto the playlist. This could even be where they apply more traditional gametypes, such as CTF and Super-less, Special Weapon-less Slayer. Bungie's philosophy of the same guardian and gear across all game modes is admirable, but has led to a weakened PvE experience because of so much focus on balancing for PvP. As far as networking goes, there could be solutions to help reduce stuff like IB lag, and some of that could be limited dedicated servers.
  
  
• Musty Smell
  A Faction of enemy that has been hinted at since the game's Closed Alpha (the Sentients), and has been slowly trickling in in the past year is going to be brought in as a full-blown enemy faction. Apart from that, the most recent major update added an all-new feature to the game, and they are going to give players incentive to use and improve upon the new gameplay elements while they wait for the next major questline that will take advantage of it.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  The new subclasses had some interesting story missions to go with them, but after obtaining your subclass, the storylines flat-out stopped. The characters and neat mission strings are nowhere to be seen, and the missions themselves aren't replayable. To add to that, there aren't any missions or gameplay elements that take advantage of the range of subclasses. Storylines (such as the Warmind and Exo Stranger) are dropped left and right in favor of a focus on the Hive/Oryx. There are hints of what's to come, but historically those hints go nowhere in favor of closed storylines (House of Wolves) that ultimately underwhelm. Nothing is really persistent or meaningful.
  
  
  
• Gang of New 'Yolk'
  Clan Dojos haven't been updated in a long while, and after an Armistice was declared last year, Clans and Alliances haven't been able to fight each other for control of planetary Rails (Two nodes on each planet with high credit payouts that can tax people playing on the missions, with the tax going to the winning Clan/Alliance for further Dojo projects), so they plan to work on Clan stuff/events.
  
  How it could be applied to Destiny:
  Clans aren't really implemented in any way. No competitions, no interactions, nothing. Just a clan name on your emblem and that's it. Other than a couple of Trophies, there's no incentive to be in a clan. People might not want to log on to the website just to use it as an LFG when there are more efficient LFG sites around.
  Again, if we aren't getting Guardian Apartments, a Guardian Safehouse could be implemented that we could decorate and add to (as well as sell unique gear and such that could benefit the clan). There could even be clan-based Bounties similar to the Bungie Bounties that we could participate in.

Bonus: at 44:25 in the Video, they start talking about (and showing off) the community-created content that they're adding to the game. I really wish that Bungie would allow stuff like this, since some of the fan-made stuff is amazing, and Destiny's cosmetic options are often underwhelming.

But yeah, tl;dr, Bungie could be more open about their creative process, and they could let us know that they acknowledge Destiny's problems, and how they plan to address them, even if it's down-the-road solutions.