From my perspective, there is a lot that doesn’t make sense (Destiny)

by Robot Chickens, Thursday, January 04, 2018, 14:33 (2458 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

How would one remove grinding from Destiny's mission design? There's no way you can get away with that in a game like this. Grinding is the bread and butter of a loot based, progression driven experience.

IMO, the story missions should be designed with quality encounters in mind and just have dedicated variants designed for replayability.

The ironic part is that the Halo missions were far more “grindable” than any Destiny mission, because they were so damn fun to replay. The combat was so dynamic and varied that the same encounter could play out differently 10 times in a row. That just doesn’t happen in Destiny. The AI is too static, the encounters too stiff. Theoretically, the variety should come from the different classes and weapons that we choose. But none of that adds as much variety as it could or should. Playing with Scout Rifles requires you to keep your distance a tiny bit more than using an auto rifle, but the difference isn’t that impactful. All the unique and diverse weapons are now crammed into a single category (power), so a lot of potential variety gets flushed down the tubes there too. And the different subclasses look more different than they play in most ways.
You sort of have to go far out of your way to create combat variety in Destiny, where other games (Halo, Titanfall, Battlefield) build the variety into the core combat mechanics in ways that are almost impossible to avoid.

This is correct. One of the biggest challenges is weapon access. We can bring any weapon we want to a fight. Mission designers has a lot more control over how an encounter could play out when you only had access to certain guns. It became a fun thing to try and break the game by finding ways to bring vehicles and weapons into the sandbox that weren't intended to be there. Now, we can steamroll anything at any range so we get bullet sponges.

I wish there was a system where we could only pick up certain types of weapons in the campaign. For instance, an SMG or a grenade launcher would be an option to pick up, but it would be your MIDI Minitool or Wicked Sister if you'd unlocked those options. If the designer wanted to give you something special, they'd give you a particular exotic to pick up. I think this would allow the designers to go deeper into how areas feel in terms of pacing and combat. Right now, combat is largely same-y outside of raid encounters.