Tourists, Collectors, and Hobbyists (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, December 01, 2017, 15:28 (2626 days ago) @ dogcow

- Phase 2: The mid-game grind. It is possible to make a game not have a third phase by simply making "max power level" unattainable for the vast majority of players. This is the "get more powerful items in order to tackle harder content in order to get even more powerful items in order to tackle even harder content in order to..." part of a game. Usually this phase involves using whatever your most powerful items are (by number) rather than the items you enjoy using the most or the items that would be more ideal for a given combat situation. But Destiny 2 is in a weird place here, because power level is largely meaningless, and most players of power 280+ have access to almost all of the content of the game, and that makes this mid-game loop "get more powerful items to do the same thing as before to get more powerful items to keep doing the same things to get even more powerful items to continue doing those same things." Of note, this is also the same gameplay loop problem that the vanilla build of Diablo 3 had.

Phase 2 is nice and all, but as it presently stands with D1 & D2 it's just repeating content over & over to gain light. In essence it's just sitting in a playlist of random strikes for enough time. That grind gets boring, and Luke's desire to make it longer is a bad idea IMHO. How about we have several strikes of increasing difficulty, the strikes can be unlocked by completing the previous strike & side-missions surrounding/prefacing the new strike. The important thing here is that these are presented as short stories in the game, as if they were smaller bits of phase 1, not just as optional side-quests, but as actual story content. The strikes a true ladder to climb in preparation for the raid!

I mean, I know some people like phase 2, but I'm of the opinion that it should only last long enough to serve as a training ground for phase 3 so that players aren't just completely drowning in options once the endgame unlocks. Fully agree (in case it wasn't clear from my post) that phase 2 should be as short as possible and should definitely *not* be made longer (Luke's statement that phase 2 should be made longer is what spurred this entire post, initially).

I really, really like your idea of having strike progression serve as both character power challenges as well as storytelling elements. Ideally, that's how it should always be. Remember how WoW dungeons used to work that way in Vanilla, where you did normals, then the harder normals, then heroics, and then the raid, and the plots kind of interwove? And then they totally borked it in the burning crusade by making heroics doable the moment you hit max level without ever needed to enter a max level normal mode dungeon and everyone was annoyed by this? D2 does the burning crusade thing, except you jump right into the raid without ever needing to do any intermediate steps at all, and the adventure whose plot relates to the raid is totally optional and easily missed. Wheeeee.