Why Bungie Can't Get it Right (from a design standpoint) (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 18:42 (2793 days ago) @ ChaosSociety

As I'm sure I've mentioned like a million times, I used to be a Production QA team lead many moons ago. One of the games I worked on was Call of Duty: Big Red One. Cod:Bro was innovative in pvp in several ways, and I played a fairly large role in making that happen.

First: Our pvp designer flatly refused to make the guns stronger or weaker than they really were. He actually had quantified the amount of damage each gun could do based on projectile penetrations into ballistics gel. Rate of fire, recoil, ammo capacity, all similarly fixed in the name of historical accuracy. The result was that the BAR was the best gun in the game by a wide margin. Why? Because it was also the best gun in WWII. The only reason ever soldier in the army didn't have one was that there literally were not enough of them to go around. But in our PvP game where you spawned with whatever guns your chose, everyone could have a BAR and so scarcity wasn't a reasonable factor. How, then, could we balance this weapon that was a 2-shot kill above the waist, held 30-something rounds, and fired fully automatically with little recoil?

So we innovated. We made it so that different guns modified your turning speed, running speed, prone/crouch/standing speed, and ADS speed. Dual pistols became the definition of run-n-gun, while the BAR was given a slow running and turn speed, forcing BAR users to set up sightlines and camp rather than allowing them to roam the maps like some kind of 1940's era terminator.

Affecting the mobility of players allowed us to balance the weapons' effectiveness in pvp without actually balancing the weapons.

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Destiny, simply put, doesn't have this luxury. This is a game that is all about movement. Fast, agile movement. Bungie built this game to balance player speed against their armor and recovery stats, and that's the crux of the problem when it comes to why pvp is so reliant on one hit kills and superior positioning rather than primary weapon gunskill. Case and point: The TTK of most primary guns falls between 0.7 seconds and 1.0 seconds. But think about how quickly a guardian moves, how far the average distance of engagement is, and where those primary weapons' optimal ranges fall. A guardian can easily traverse 20 meters in a second. Easily. And the average distance of engagement is, what, 15 yards? And what's the optimal range for your primary weapons? Hand cannons are the shortest at... 11-17 meters depending on range values. So great, hand cannons are optimal within the average distance of engagement. Oh, but even if you achieve an ideal TTK with that guy, the shotgunner has more than enough time to close the gap and OHK you.

This is the problem right here. The TTK for a primary weapon needs to be faster than the amount of time it takes for a shotgunner to close the gap into his optimal range to OHK you. And, in Destiny, it almost never is.

Think of it this way: A shotgun fires instantly, so the distance he can close in 0.7-1.0 seconds is his optimal range. That's 14-20 meters.

Now look at This is Keen Koala's testing on Hand Cannon accuracy. While the effective range of his gun is 23 meters, he has to be at 15 meters in order to reliably land every shot. Well within Shotgun lethal range.

Other primary weapons have slower TTKs than hand cannons. Furthermore, the farther out their ideal range to engage is, the closer they get to being inside of a sniper's ideal range (which is any range at which the sniper can track you just as quickly as you can move).

Another contributing factor here is that the map design in Destiny sucks. They really do. Almost every map is designed with corners, doors, and other visual impairments such that your average range of engagement is quite short. Part of this is that snipers are so unparalleled at long ranges (anything over 30 meters, I'd say) that players complained that larger maps (first light, skyshock) were boring sniper camp-fests. They weren't wrong. So Bungie made maps where the design puts you closer to the action... and inside of shotgun ranges.

Getting back to snipers, did you notice the number I threw out there? 30 meters? Compare that to a shotgunners ideal 20 meter range and then consider the fact that the difference between those two ranges - sniper range and shotgun range - is a scant 10 meters, which is a distance so small that a guardian can close that gap in half a second. That means that there is a 10 meter window where pulse rifles and scout rifles are the best guns in the game (Hand cannons only being truly effective inside of 15 meters).

This is the issue, right? 0-20 meters... Shotguns are king. 21-30 meters... Pulse rifles or Scout rifles. 31+ meters... Sniper rifles.
It takes 1 second to close to shotgun distance and only 0.5 seconds to move through pulse and scout rifle distance on the way to shotgun distance. If a shotgunner catches a primary user looking even slightly in the wrong direction, the shotgunner will win. Add in Juggernaut and the shotgun range becomes 25 meters. It's scary, right?

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So Bungie has fucked themselves. They've made a game all about movement and then made weapons slow enough that the movement beats them. I had a game yesterday with 19 kills, of which only 3 were primary weapons. Primaries are the backups, not the - name aside - primary option in this game. If bungie wants to fix this, they have very limited options. They can't change player movement too much because that is the killer app element of Destiny. They can't nerf shotgun range with any sort of effectiveness because the issue is really players closing the gap quickly, not the range of the shotguns.

They could make primary weapons more effective. Vanilla destiny with it's two-shot Hawkmoon kills and SUROS and Thorn meta was better for primary weapons than we have now. But these exotics were so good that nothing else was ever used. It was a three gun game. Rather than nerfing just the problem exotics, Bungie screwed up and nerfed every class of primary across the board. Ooops.

The real solution I believe, is better map design. Bungie doesn't use vertical space well at all. Bungie doesn't design maps with open spaces. Bungie isn't making maps with ideal weapon ranges in mind.

I would make some big ass blood gulch type maps. Tight warrens around the outside, generous sniper lanes down the middle. I'd increase minimum zoom on all sniper rifles to something like 10x zoom so that they were only useful at extreme ranges. I'd raise their ADS time to the ballpark of 4 seconds, and/or make it so taking damage instantly dropped you out of ADS when scoped in.

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But that's not the game we have, and none of us can go home and play Kahzgul's fantasy dreamland version of Destiny after reading this right now.

So look at the real meta. Shotguns everywhere, and with good reason. What counters shotguns? Other shotguns make it a 50/50 split, but I'd argue that fusion rifles are a good counter to shotguns. They *must* have a charge time of 0.5 seconds or shorter to ensure you beat that shotgunner to the punch, but they are effective from farther out than shotguns. Of course, fusion rifles being a tad slower to fire, and forcing you into choosing engagements at longer ranges puts you squarely into the pulse rifle and scout rifle optimal ranges. Well shit.

So if you want to counter aggressive shotgunners, a fusion rifle works well until your enemies switch to their primaries. But if you want to play the meta, the fact of the matter is that you've got to join them to beat them. I'll see you (and your shotguns) starside, guardians.