ITT: Cody undercuts his central argument against Destiny

by electricpirate , Monday, August 12, 2013, 06:37 (4123 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Absolutely, that's the point that I'm having so much fun making here. Cody seems to think the player powering up systems in Destiny are the latter. Why? He seems to have trouble with that part. I'm prodding him to actual explain that position, because his defenses of it so far have been very poor.

I don't know for sure, since nobody knows what Destiny really is. That being said:

There is a difference between leveling up / advancing a character to make the game easier vs doing the same to make the game harder or more complex.

Think of it this way. You level up in a JRPG or Diablo or something. You are more powerful, so the game becomes easier. You can kill enemies you couldn't before. This doesn't make the game more complex.

That's valuable in it's own right though... especially in a skill driven game like Destiny. See, Equipment, and leveling can act as a dynamic difficulty scale. Players can try, fail, go back to some easier content to improve themselves and their gear and come back and conquer. It's a much more organic system than difficulty sliders, or settings. Demon's/Dark Souls is a game that does this wonderfully.

Leveling up in Deus Ex on the other hand, DOES make the game more complex, because the designers made this cool world which you could tackle in many different way with many different skill and augmentation combinations, each enabling a very different experience.

The level and encounter design contains that complexity. Leveling up gives you the ability to steam roll the game with the same solutions again and again. Especially once you level up your guns.

Think of it this way:

Bad: You should always level up, since there's no downside and it can only help. You can always level up more if you put in time to gain exp.
Good: Leveling up has tradeoffs or is a strategic decision. Only a set amount of exp that's the same for all players (roughly), so do with it what you wish.

Even in Diablo leveling up is a strategic decision. Since you have a level cap, every choice you make means you can't invest in a bunch of other choices. And even without a level cap, a players limited time acts as kind of a natural cap. There's no functional difference between Diablo's skill trees with a level cap and Dues Ex's augmentations which are limited in a play through.

As said, we don't know the decisions Destiny is using, but this isn't some crazy hard problem to solve.