ITT: Cody undercuts his central argument against Destiny

by kapowaz, Wednesday, August 14, 2013, 09:30 (4121 days ago) @ electricpirate

If you build your synergies right, the line between the two gets even more blurred. Take a look at something like Path Of Exile wherecrazyass builds are possible, mostly due to a series of small statistical tweaks that build up.

There is another fundamental problem with this approach, in that it leads to an objective ‘best’ set of choices which players should take if they want to be competitive / do the most damage. This problem is exacerbated if you have a lot of talents, since the overall outcome isn't necessarily that clear to the player when they make the decision (in software design this is called analysis or choice paralysis).

This is a problem WoW's talent system suffered from up until the most recent expansion; the outcome was that a large number of players (basically everyone who wanted to be competitive in PvP or raiding) would refer to third-party sites where the optimal build of talents had been tried and tested. This actually leads to even less choice, since you're effectively choosing between optimal and suboptimal builds, and niche/‘fun’ builds end up left by the wayside.

The solution WoW and Diablo III went with was to give players a choice between a set of mutually-exclusive options at various points, with the choices made interesting and less damage/healing-focused. Games like Path of Exile and Torchlight still use the old-fashioned talent tree system, and whilst that will obviously appeal to some players, ultimately they're sub-optimal gaming systems which don't lead to fun gameplay.