Bungie is getting it :) (Destiny)

by electricpirate , Monday, September 11, 2017, 10:52 (2479 days ago) @ bluerunner

Last night Disciple, INSANEdrive, and I ran the nightfall. We failed our first time by running out of time. We beat it the second time, but we were nowhere near completing the challenge with 5 minutes on the clock. The timer eliminates cheesing it by hanging back in a safe area. It also really does force the team to have specific rolls. Not only is damaging the bosses important, but with every kill adding time to the clock add control is also just as important.

The rotating burns also adds to the specified rolls of each teammate. Before our second run we coordinated our elements on our loadouts and we tried to call out when our burn was active. We forgot about it during some of the hectic fighting, but I see having your burns, especially on power weapons, well coordinated would greatly speed things up. Insane melted a tank in seconds with his rocket launcher when his burn came up.

I'm looking forward to running the nightfall every week and improving on techniques. This is way better than sitting behind crates and shooting the boss for 1 hour.

I've long felt that for a game that's in many ways designed for long term play reward structures, it features short term play game systems. The new nightfalls are the first place where I think they are acknowledging that and leaning into the idea of a deeply repeatable game.

First point, is it's harder, and it's harder in a way that you can't cheese. This stresses the core systems which gets players to translate some of the breadth of options in destiny into depth of strategy.

Secondly, the mechanics of this are more widely applicable than bespoke raid mechanics. You can't just take Golgoroth and plop it into other strikes, but you can layer the timer, or the new modifiers, or the new timer mechanics (See BWU: Upcoming nightfalls play with the timer in different ways. 3 were mentioned, Rings, Anomaly, Zero Hour, and we already saw killing time). You can take these mechanics and put them into Ikora memories to make "Nightfall single player" You can layer them over the raid.

They also give an important element that destiny content lacks: the results of an encounter within content matter for the later pieces of content. It makes every part of the raid important, not just the boss phase. This also lets them exposes a lot more of the sandbox. Crowd control matters, movement matters, elements matter. In the past really just DPS in the specific element mattered, the rest you could fudge.

I'm not arrogant enough to make an "I was right post" but I'm just excited they are pushing the game in a direction I think has a ton of potential.

Gawd I can't wait to play when the PC version drops :)