Bungie's story goals (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, June 07, 2016, 14:36 (2931 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I, for one, do not get why nearly every game "ends" its story right around the same time the player hits max level (or, in the case of vanilla Destiny, before then). Why have levels at all if they're just placeholders that match your progression through the story? Why have a story that ends just as the player is becoming truly powerful? Why not give endgame players something to do that furthers the plot? It's all a wasted opportunity and a disappointing fact: Destiny is a game about loot, not about epic storytelling.

DIdn't TTK kind of do this? When you complete Regicide, you are not very powerful. You continue to gain levels in the subsequent quests leading up to the raid which are story based. I get what you are saying though, because story progression stops when you start to level up to tackle the hard raid. I guess if you just played the game and beat the raid once on normal, that would approximate the experience you are after.

But what you are asking goes against the broken design of the game. You're asking for a path to max level with no repetition or grinding. That's not going to happen.

TTK did do it to a small degree, I'm pretty sure i mentioned that, speaking of Touch of Malice, Beltrane, Sleeper Simulant, the swords, and No Time to Explain (which I called Fate of All Fools), all of which were great but none of which furthered the plot of the game.

That being said, it's totally easy to make max level happen without repetition or grinding. You just gate the experience such that you're done leveling up well before you're done with the story missions. In WoW when you hit max level suddenly a whole bunch of additional quests appear and dungeons unlock. There is no reason not to have the plot continue after you hit max level.

I believe vanilla Destiny would have been much better if it had been a linear mission start to finish focused only on the black garden, upon completion of which unlocked all of the other mission chains. It would have been a slightly more satisfying ending and then an excellent opening of the game world and revisiting of places you'd already explored.

Back to the subject: I feel like the leveling up process is sort of a stand-in for a tutorial. You're acquiring and learning new skills. The only reason to keep the "levels" going once all of the skills are acquired is because players like to see that glowy "ding" of leveling up - it's purely for the dopamine, which means it serves no real gameplay purpose at that point (and thus falls into what I consider to be the "abusive" category of game elements).

Or look at it in terms of gear. Levels in Destiny are literally only tied to the quality of gear you can equip and difficulty of enemies you face. They are are meaningless in all other regards. The gear grind is so long in this game that reaching max level instantly would not negatively affect most gameplay, other than letting you use your preferred weapons immediately rather than only after using some crappy green of a type you don't like for a few hours. Similarly, the level disparities between the player and enemy minions are handled in such a way that you never out-level an enemy. In fact, character level is so meaningless that they had to add light levels to the game to give you some indication of player power - and it's based on gear, not experience. All of which begs the question: Why even have levels in the game? They really serve very little purpose.

Heck, there's a third metric I use to evaluate guardians - grimoire score. Again, way more indicative of player power and skill than the character's level. I don't know why the biggest number is the most useless, but I know it is.