Not the categorization I was expecting...

by kapowaz, Friday, August 23, 2013, 02:15 (4112 days ago) @ NsU Soldier

At first I shared the sentiment about it being overly-restrictive, but then I came to realize that this system probably won't be *that* restrictive.

I suspect this will work well, because of the collaborative team-play design of the game. It's also important to remember that when designing a game which is intentionally asymmetric (class-based, with each class having strengths and weaknesses) in order to ensure the game is balanced, you have to have certain things be consistent. I imagine a lot of people hear ‘balance’ and think of PvP etc, but it's also got a lot to do with ensuring that every player has a minimum viable toolset for playing the game.

As always, I'm going to fall back on WoW to explain by analogy. Let's take the example of the tank role. As you probably all know, the role of the tank is to keep the attention of a boss in an encounter so as to leave other players free to do damage or heal. To do this role effectively, they have to be able to survive the boss's (usually deadly) attacks. There are lots of ways of achieving this goal though, and so earlier in the game's life there were a few competing models: you could tank through avoidance (by dodging attacks), blocking (using a shield to deflect attacks) or mitigation (having massive amounts of armour, to reduce the damage attacks cause). Ultimately though, these competing models led to problems with encounter design: you could only design a boss's potential attacks within a very narrow range of possibilities since all of the tanking models had to be able to still work. You couldn't, for example, create a boss who did an un-dodgable, high-damage attack, because the tanks that focused on dodging might not actually be able to survive that attack. This did indeed lead to a situation where a lot of bosses would ‘splat’ the tank the second they failed to block/dodge or a heal didn't arrive in the half-second or so before the next attack, which killed them.

The solution was to build in a degree of homogenisation. All tanks now take advantage of both mitigate and avoidance. To be sure, there is still a fair bit of flavour to make them interesting and different (Blood Death Knights do a fair bit of self-healing, for example), but they were all reworked to give them ‘cooldown’ abilities that could be used every couple of minutes to give themselves extra-strong defences, and abilities to interrupt a boss's spells etc. whenever the encounter permitted it.

To bring this back to Destiny, I think that Bungie is aware of the fact that players may find themselves in both group and solo situations where they need to have certain core abilities. To this end, they always want you to have a primary weapon that is a reliable damage dealer, that isn't overly specialised or dependent on scarce ammo, that isn't excessively powerful in too many situations. But they also want you to be able to switch to a specialised choice as you see fit if that makes sense. Maybe the way the game will work will mean you have to make a decision about what that specialised choice will be in advance of going into combat; maybe you'll be able to change it relatively easily so long as you're not under fire. Either way, you'll have to make interesting choices there, which is why I refute any suggestion that this is a ‘boring’ limitation.