Destiny and Multiplicative Design (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, April 08, 2017, 01:50 (3011 days ago) @ cheapLEY

What if a step in getting the gjallerhorn was to "beat X boss in under Y time." No restrictions on *how* to do that. Or maybe "Jump 50 feet in the air on a sparrow" again - no limitation on where to jump. So this is a fun thing players can figure out for themselves. "Kill an ogre with a melee punch" or "get a noscope headshot with a sniper rifle."

I get what you're aiming for, but that sounds awful in my opinion. It doesn't really fix the problem--it still forces players to play the game and do shit they don't necessarily want to do. Okay, now instead of farming strikes, I have to go to patrol and hit that one spot that everyone will figure out for ramping sparrows, or try and punch an ogre. At least when I farm strikes, I can do it in my preferred play style, instead of having to do very specific things.

I get what you're saying. The game should reward you for having fun rather than pigeonholing you into specific tasks. Unfortunately, it really doesn't. More often than not in Destiny you're punished for doing something novel, or for messing around in a new way.

I suppose it comes down to that optimization problem again. Destiny, sadly, has trained us to see the path of least resistance. Two thoughts here: The actual game isn't fun enough when you're not playing optimally to make you ever really want to be non-optimal, and second the punishments in the game for failure are way, way too harsh so you simply can't just dick around for funsies because the higher chance of failure means you're going to be put back 30 minutes to an hour of your gameplay.

I think a lot of this has to do with encounter design and AI (or the lack thereof). After playing a boatload of Horizon Zero Dawn, I've started challenging myself for funsies by trying to beat, say, a thundermaw without shooting it's disc launchers off, or using only traps, etc.. Destiny is not only a game where that sort of experimentation is barely possible, but if you did find something weird that worked well, Bungie has shown they're happy to nerf that away next patch.