http://blog.bioware.com/2017/01/31/a-note-about-our-new-ip/

Word on the street is that this new IP is intended to compete with Destiny, and is coming mid next year.

So far nothing has really measured up has it? I never played the Division, but I heard it was bad. I thought Mass Effect was bad mechanically, but all I hear is great things about the story and RPG elements.

I would love to see a real competitor so both studios up their game.

http://blog.bioware.com/2017/01/31/a-note-about-our-new-ip/

Word on the street is that this new IP is intended to compete with Destiny, and is coming mid next year.

So far nothing has really measured up has it? I never played the Division, but I heard it was bad.

I don't think The Division is great, but it did a few things right that I'd love to see Bungie adopt/learn from.

I thought Mass Effect was bad mechanically, but all I hear is great things about the story and RPG elements.

I would love to see a real competitor so both studios up their game.

Mass Effect 2 & 3 have excellent combat mechanics (not as silky-smooth as Destiny, but more interesting and diverse from a tactical point of view).
I wrote a post ages ago about how ME3's multiplayer mode could almost be seen as a precursor to Destiny in certain ways. Destiny is obviously a much larger animal than ME3 multiplayer, but where they do overlap, I think ME3 is a better game. I prefer the way they handled loot & random drops, the characters & abilities allowed a more diverse range of play styles, and they did a better job of keeping the missions fresh and exciting over time.

So yes, I'd love to see what BioWare can add to this space :)

Division had the inverse problem of destiny. They had a somewhat coherent story arc, and a much more explorable area, but the actual gameplay involved 3 enemy types and a difficulty that scaled by adding HP to super huge bullet sponges. Weapon balance and perk/ability balance was very off.

PVP was also a disaster, where high level players rolled over everyone else, and effectively formed a blockade for gear. Imagine if they only way to increase your light level from 365 was to farm Trials flawless runs. At least that was my impression. I have friends who played after the patch, and now there are more varied ways to get the good loot, but the first couple of months were extremely annoying once you finished the story. People would kick you from the match made activities if you weren't higher level, and you couldn't solo the dark zone well.

I have to say I enjoyed the ME multiplayer, and if Bioware expanded on that they could have a very good competitor. It really seems that you need the core play mechanics to be good if you want to have any longevity. I think we are seeing the start of a merger between MMOs and FPS type gameplay, with large overlapping sections of both. The loot/reward system seems to be very effective in addicting the player base, and every game is adding that as a must have in some form. Same with customization.

So really it falls back to the gameplay itself.

http://blog.bioware.com/2017/01/31/a-note-about-our-new-ip/

Word on the street is that this new IP is intended to compete with Destiny, and is coming mid next year.

So far nothing has really measured up has it? I never played the Division, but I heard it was bad.

The Division was great as you leveled up. I actually LOVED the leveling game. Then, inexplicably, the game completely 100% changed at the endgame and became garbage because the enemies changed from being one or two shot headshots to fifty plus. Completely changed the feel.

I thought Mass Effect was bad mechanically, but all I hear is great things about the story and RPG elements.

The multiplayer in ME3 was some of the best gaming I've ever had. So. Good.

I would love to see a real competitor so both studios up their game.

Yeah, so much this. For some reason no one has figured out how to properly design an investment game, even though Diablo 2 gave everyone that roadmap more than a decade ago. There are, in fact, a bunch of Japanese games that have great investment play, but they're almost entirely investment with minimal other elements (Puzzle and Dragons is probably the best of those, really fun).

Anyway, it only really takes one team to make it work. I'm hoping that ME:Andromeda gets it right. The pieces are all there just waiting to be put together.

Division had the inverse problem of destiny. They had a somewhat coherent story arc, and a much more explorable area, but the actual gameplay involved 3 enemy types and a difficulty that scaled by adding HP to super huge bullet sponges. Weapon balance and perk/ability balance was very off.

I didn't stick with the Division long enough to really dig in to the end game, so I can't comment much on that.

My biggest problem with the main story missions was the pacing and level gating. During the early missions, I was having a decent amount of fun. I'd finish a mission, and earn just enough XP and loot to get me where I needed to be in order to tackle the next mission. But as I got deeper into the campaign, the story missions grew further and further apart in terms of level requirements. It got to the point where I would finish a story mission, then I'd need to grind XP in the open world (Division's equivalent of Patrol Mode) for a couple hours before I could do the next story mission. It was a total drag.

I did really appreciate the way Division handled on-the-fly matchmaking for all activities, including story missions. The advantage of having everything take place in a single "overworld" is that you can literally just walk to the "mission location" on your map (no menu or loading screen, unless you fast travel), and when you get to the mission entrance there is a little button prompt asking if you want to matchmake with other players. If not, you just continue on in and do it solo. Destiny is more complicated thanks to featuring multiple planets, but it did always seem strange to me that if I'm patrolling the Cosmodrome, I need to fly back to orbit and select "The Last Array" from the director just so I can fly back down to the location I was just patrolling and start the mission. It would be nice to see Bungie handle those transitions a little more seamlessly.

I have to say I enjoyed the ME multiplayer, and if Bioware expanded on that they could have a very good competitor. It really seems that you need the core play mechanics to be good if you want to have any longevity. I think we are seeing the start of a merger between MMOs and FPS type gameplay, with large overlapping sections of both. The loot/reward system seems to be very effective in addicting the player base, and every game is adding that as a must have in some form. Same with customization.

So really it falls back to the gameplay itself.

Obviously, we don't know anything about what Bioware's new IP will be like, but I can't help using ME3 as a "jumping off" point in my imagination :)

ME3's multiplayer was fantastic. On the surface it is just another "horde" mode, but in practice it ended up feeling like a lot of the best parts of Destiny, distilled into a far more streamlined experience. You team up with other players and travel to locations around the galaxy to play repeatable co-op missions with simple but varying objectives. You collect random loot drops as mission rewards. You can customize your characters with a wide range of different abilities and gear. Then you replay the same missions over and over and over, earning better loot as you complete higher difficulty levels.

Rather than take that framework and build it into an MMO style game, I would love to see Bioware take that initial blueprint and build outwards in ways that make sense. By which I mean "don't add resource gathering just because you're making a hybrid MMO and those games are supposed to have resource gathering". (IMO this train of thought lead to a lot of clutter in Destiny). ME3's multiplayer works as well as it does because Bioware had a firm understanding of what the gameplay loop was going to be, and none of their design choices came across as punishing to the player. Yes, there were random loot drops. But instead of having a thousand different guns cluttering up the sandbox, they made like 15 of them, so it really isn't a struggle to get the one you want. And if you get a duplicate drop, it automatically "infuses" into the one you already have, making it slightly more powerful. They knew that playing their game meant replaying the same missions over and over, so they continuously added new objectives, added new threats or hazards, reworked level geometry, all to improve the experience and help keep things fresh. And they also saw to opportunity & fun that came from playing with different character classes, so they leaned into that BIG TIME. They added boatloads of new characters, all with their own unique sets of powers. The different characters ended up being a huge source of replay value for the game. Every time I started to feel like I'd had enough, I would switch classes and it was like playing a whole new game again.

One thing that both Destiny and The Division have in common (IMO) is that in both cases, the developers created this massive framework for the game, then struggled to create enough fun things to do to fill out that whole framework. I think there is an opportunity for a developer like Bioware to come along and create a tighter, less sprawling, refined alternative. Start with a fantastic core (like ME3's multiplayer), then add pieces to that as long as they don't detract/interfere with the core loop.

Yeah, so much this. For some reason no one has figured out how to properly design an investment game

Why do you think that is? Oh wait, it's because investment games inherently suck. The proper way to design them is to make them something else. Aspects of your game are required to suck in order for an investment system to work.

Yeah, so much this. For some reason no one has figured out how to properly design an investment game

Why do you think that is? Oh wait, it's because investment games inherently suck. The proper way to design them is to make them something else. Aspects of your game are required to suck in order for an investment system to work.

I disagree. I think Diablo 2 is the pinnacle of investment archetecture. You have some bosses who are loot pinatas from specific loot pools (which are very large). The loot from boss 1 can gear you up for boss 2 which can gear you for boss 3 etc. along the way.

As you go with the linear progression, you're also unlocking access to non-linear progression in the form of runes and rune words. This seems, at first, like all RNG, but when you factor in that the player can modify items to give them sockets for runes using the horadric cube, and combine like runes to make better runes, you've created a parallel path of progression. The runes take longer to acquire, but the rune words are, ultimately, more powerful than most non-rune items, so it all works out. The progression game of D2 was fantastic. The only real issue with it was that it was very bot-able, which made lots of the game feel automated and samey instead of fresh and new.

Similarly, Puzzle and Dragons has a spectacularly good investment game, whereby you use your weaker minions to evolve them into progressively stronger and stronger minions. Each element is basically farmable in 1-3 runs of specific dungeons, so you have a strong element of agency in deciding what to improve first and which monsters to evolve (and how).

So there are two different models for investment games which both live on the long game investment, and they're both very, very good models. I am flummoxed as to why the D2 investment system was scrapped in favor of D3's "your choices are all the same" system, which led directly to "optimized" farming locations (whatever's easiest) rather than requiring specific player skill to beat designed encounters like D2 had. D3 remains a failure in my book.

Path of Exile is close to D2 in terms of investment game design, but I haven't delved deep enough to know if it really holds up in the same way once you're in the late / endgame.

My point is that your game doesn't have to suck in order for investment to pay off. If the investment, itself, is fun and rewarding, then you can just plug it right in. The Thorn quest would be a good example of the right and wrong ways to do this. The initial tiers of the quest were fun investment. Get void kills, do this other thing, a third thing I forgot about, etc... Fun! And then, prior to the latest patch, you hit the bullshit problem where skeleton keys never dropped so the last step was literally impossible for some of us. Before the patch, that was a great example of horseshit RNG screwage "faking" an investment game scenario. Post-patch when you get skeleton keys, it's now fun again.

As long as the player is able to see tangible progress when undertaking an investment, you're in good shape. It's when the progress is stalled despite the player doing everything right (RNG screwage) that an investment game because bullshit.

If the investment, itself, is fun and rewarding, then you can just plug it right in.

If that's the case you don't have an investment system. It's just a part of the game.

Your assessment of Diablo 2 I don't think is quite right. As I said in my mini review, on Normal you can indeed go through and not have to worry about the investment system. But want to play on Hell difficulty? Then you need really good stuff. Don't have mana steal or + to mana on kill items for your barbarian? Too bad. It was made even worse when 1.08 hit and hell difficulty became much more difficult. There's no way to do the optional uber and pandamonium bosses without a ton of grinding. Why else do you think most of the games on bnet were bloody hills / cow / pindleskin runs? Runes were also so rare, that there was virtually no chance of getting the good ones (by drop or synthesis) that were used to make powerful weapons.

One thing that both Destiny and The Division have in common (IMO) is that in both cases, the developers created this massive framework for the game, then struggled to create enough fun things to do to fill out that whole framework. I think there is an opportunity for a developer like Bioware to come along and create a tighter, less sprawling, refined alternative. Start with a fantastic core (like ME3's multiplayer), then add pieces to that as long as they don't detract/interfere with the core loop.

You're not wrong, and ME3's multiplayer seems like a great starting point for that. If they can blow that out to a bigger experience worthy of a full game, I don't think Destiny would even come close to measuring up (in its current form, anyway--we'll see what Destiny 2 has in store).

Mass Effect 3 is probably my favorite online game of last generation. To think that basically everyone heard about online multiplayer in a Mass Effect game and said, "Yeah, that'll be some tacked on garbage," and then it ultimately turned out to be the best thing about that entire game.

Ultimately, to make something feel valuable in game it needs to require significant effort to obtain. In some cases, like ToO or Raids, it means that the action itself is hard to do and only a limited number of players can martial the skill to accomplish it. In other cases, grinding is used to turn a long time investment into value.

If I had my choice, I would prefer more of the former, then the latter. I hated grinding in WoW, or World of Tanks, and currently in Destiny. The randomness factor is just a multiplier, a grinding mechanic. I played the heck out of ME 3 and never got all the guns. I know people who still play it and still don't have all the classes unlocked.

Part of the fun is exploring the new and different options. there has to be a way to allow people to experience that without forcing them into long slogs through the game. I just don't know what that is. I'd love to pull some friends into Destiny, but at this point they would have to grind so long to get all the gear that they want they won't do it. Some of my friends love war frame, but likewise I don't want to drop the time into it to level up just so I can play with them every so often.

At least when I have friends over I can loan them one of my 40k armies and we can still duke it out.