Boy, their approach is weird... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Monday, August 22, 2016, 18:59 (3107 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY
edited by Korny, Monday, August 22, 2016, 19:09

So having very controlled damage windows during boss fights became a really important aspect of making those encounters work for us. You’ll notice we very tightly control the damage windows and make that an important event.

Maybe it's just me, but "Damage Windows" are a very not-entirely fun aspect of a Raid, and it may be one of the reasons that I (and other folks) love Vault of Glass so much. With the Templar, once you got past his shield (which was an important task entirely controlled and communicated by the Relic holder), players could actively keep his shield down permanently by blocking his teleport. With Atheon, the players could create a scenario where damage against the boss was optimized, but it wasn't a mandatory thing (and the Flawless Five took him out without a single Time's Vengeance buff).

That's a thing that bothered me with King's Fall. Most of the encounters involve a lengthy setup, followed by a short window in which you can do damage to the boss, rinse and repeat. Golgoroth was the only Boss that subverted that by putting control in players' hands without game-controlled clockwork, and sadly, players more often than not choose to play it safe anyway by going into the repetitive "One Pool" cycle (Challenge mode Golgoroth with second damage pool is best Golgoroth).

And even worse, it feels like only a few players are ever really doing something important. The rest are either standing around in arbitrary spots, or they're "floaters" who don't really have anything better to do than add control. VoG was great, because players felt like they had a wealth of strategies and options, not simply waiting to make the arbitrary steps to create that small "damage window".

Have you learned anything the hard way? Is there anything you’ve learned that you should never do?
Yeah, I mean certainly that’s one of them. We have two golden rules of bosses, [they] are that the boss has to be able to threaten you from any location and you can’t use geometry to avoid it. Those are actually the two rules to direct what we’re going to do. We understood that from Vault of Glass on.

But VoG and Crota both had areas where folks could catch their breath (and even exchange taunts with Crota). The Oryx fight was stressful because it's just constant movement and gunfight from beginning to end. Which has its place, for sure, but to say that its avoidance is a "Golden Rule", you're just making for another "if any of you screw up at any point, it's all over" scenario that heavily loomed throughout all of King's Fall. Folks need a place to fall back, to regroup, and rethink mid-boss-fight.

When you guys first started developing raids for the first time, philosophically were there things that set a raid apart from the rest of the content in Destiny that you’re like ‘Okay this is what makes something a raid as opposed to a strike?’
The fact that we can account for you having voice communication is big.

[Insert side-eye at Cruel]

You’re only going to let the one guy pick the sword who’s amazing at the sword. We sort of had this naive idea like people are just naturally going to share responsibility and people will distribute it among themselves. That's actually the opposite, we learned early on people want to concentrate responsibility on the fewest number of people as possible. The only way they will break that is if we force you to.

And yet, we still have the "Runner", the "First Platform" folks, etc.
It's great to get folks to participate, but I feel like Skolas' Devouring Essence was an inspired step in the right direction by combining Random selection with choice, and the need to adapt mid-fight, and maybe precision-jumping wasn't the best way to play this out. That said, I do love that some of our more... flawed players... got to practice and improve their jumping skills, which is really great... It'd just be ideal if the entire fight didn't hinge on them nailing it 100% every single time...

I think what you are actually describing though is the experience that players have when – like I went into a raid for the first time playing people who have played it before. Because that is truly bewildering. People are giving you all kinds of instructions. ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this, I just have to stay here and shoot this thing and now people are yelling at me for some reason because something happened and I don't understand what it is.'

Definitely the biggest issue with raids, and why some folks, like Rev, haven't really done them. The feeling that you're the screw-up just because you don't know, combined with folks wanting to Get It Done. How do you combat that? Clearly by making it mandatory that you do things perfectly the first time throughout the encounter, or else the team wipes. Fun!

I think when you look back, people talk a lot about the magic of Vault or what that experience is, there are so many people where we were all sort of exploring it together and none of us knew what to do and it was new to us. So that’s not a moment that’s very easily re-creatable, because now we all have expectations and we go to it thinking ‘well let’s see, this is like that encounter and this is going to be like that encounter.

The issue is a bit more complicated. With VoG, the mechanics had been seen before, to different degrees. Platforms were in Crucible and in some story levels. Confluxes were from public events, The Templar was similar to Sekrion. Throughout the raid, we also learned that Oracles were a bad thing to be destroyed, and that the Relics could block damage and heal teammates. These things showed up at the first part of the raid, and at the end, in different ways. If you just throw new stuff at folks, and demand tons and tons of trial and error for them to learn exactly how they're supposed to do things and where to stand, it's not fun for new folks.

And then with King’s Fall we really wanted to push the boundaries of mechanics, and I felt like Vault of Glass is sort of like raid middle school. Now it’s like, ‘let’s do raid high school and raid college, you know?’ Let’s take a higher level class and sort of see what we can do with it. That feels like sort of the limit that I want to go in that direction so. It’s always like what is some new way of looking at the raid experience with some new lens.

Definitely what it felt like. "How do we make it even more complicated? How do we demand more precision than last time? How do we avoid people exploiting, or learning multiple ways around it?" Personally, I didn't like it. I don't necessarily need my next raid to be more complex than the last, I just want it to be as fun and unique. I remember when we first the the abyss run in Crota's End, and it was a new experience that was a ton of fun. Then you look at the Basilica portion in King's Fall, where someone can die with one glyph to go, and it's a wash.

It’s weird to say that it’s disappointing, but King’s Fall kind of went like clockwork. The most efficient way of playing turned out to be the way we designed it, which is good but at the same time there were no big surprises.

When the entire encounter is set up against players by strongly discouraging improvisation and experimentation, that's what happens (still, there will always be Warlocks). I value fun over precision. I remember when we took Tex through her first Crota's End, and the entire final fight was the definition of FUBAR, but we still recovered and beat it without a single wipe. Great times. Oryx is just frustrating to play.

I mean it’s better that than the player goes through all this effort to get some exotic weapon that just feels like “ehhh.”

Let's give them two Shards instead.

We started with some highfalutin' ideas and literary themes that we were trying to achieve, and through iterations it actually became about smashing s--- into other s---. So I guess the smart version of [the RoI Raid theme] would be collision.

Hopefully it doesn't have an odd contrast by demanding precision. I want a mess to be a glorious mess, so that we rise from the debris...