ITT: Cody undercuts his central argument against Destiny

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, August 09, 2013, 14:05 (4129 days ago) @ electricpirate

Nope, I understand his argument. My point is that the gear and loot acts as the carrot to get people to that hidden content. Story bits, and world building isn't enough for all the players to go hunting through this world (and I'd guess that it's not even a significant minority).

Wrong. You don't hack into computers and find passwords or story details so you can level up your hacking, you level up your hacking so you can hack into computers and find story details and passwords! You don't pick a bazillion locks to level up your lock picking, you level up your lock picking so you can go where you shouldn't. The fact that you have to increase your skills at all is because it makes you choose HOW YOU WANT TO PLAY THE GAME. There's only a finite amount of exp, given to you as you progress.

Nobody prides himself on maxing out the lock picking skill, in part because that's trivial if you play the game and choose to spend your exp there, but more importantly nobody cares because THAT'S NOT THE PART THAT MATTERS.

Player Investment systems are the opposite.

Cody has maintained that no good can come from player investment systems, but he's presenting a really compelling argument for why they can be used (IE, modifying character player to draw them deeper into the story)

That is what ROLE PLAYING games do, something Deus Ex is, but Destiny isn't. We don't know what Destiny is, but it's sure not an RPG (in the true, correct sense of the term). Like real Role Playing games, the stats are purely incidental, only coming into play for things not suited to computer simulation, or would otherwise be to burdensome (imagine having to actually learn to pick physical locks or actually run real hacks to get into computers). Stats are simply a more convenient way for the game to do this.