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

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, January 05, 2018, 16:34 (2354 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

So you are saying, beat the campaign like everyone else in the same style but them open them up to be replayed with different variations? Because I'm pretty sure that exactly describes the strikes that were incorporated into the main mission :D

I’m not at all a fan of the “strikes as story missions” thing done in CoO. I actually thought the way the strikes were implemented in Vanilla Destiny (pre-Questification) worked well; complete a series of story missions in a given region, and cap off that area with a 3-player strike that acts as a sort of local boss fight. It had a great rhythm. The CoO thing just felt like trying to stretch as little content as possible out into a full expansion.

Besides, I think what is being suggested is not a merging of strikes and story missions. I think the idea is to have story missions built with little variants or encounter modifiers thrown in, so that they’re slightly different each time you replay them. Similar to what has been done with Strikes in the past.

I really liked the Strikes as missions. If I had to hazard a guess, your issue is more about the filling content part than anything else. Would you mind so much if every mission had the length and complexity (but not necessarily the ending boss fight) of a Strike?

I never really liked the way Strikes were done in D1 because while they did tend to usually unlock as you neared the end of a Destination, they were rarely well integrated in the story. There were more like random side quests instead of key story moments.

I'd want a combination. Have as many missions as Destiny had, but have each mission be long and complex. And then let me go into a random mission playlist or replay individual missions whenever I want...

The CoO implementation was certainly hurt by the fact that it felt like an obvious reusing of content just to pad out the expansion, but even if that weren’t the case, I like Strikes and Story Missions being distinct from each other for several reasons.

To me, part of the issue is that I don’t think single-player combat in Destiny is particularly fun or exciting. For me, Destiny’s combat doesn’t really click until you get 3 Guardians working together against complex combinations of enemies and bosses. But the single-player-focused combat in most Destiny story missions has never gotten my blood pumping. Not once.

So if it were completely up to me, I’d keep the story missions on the short side, and have them mostly focused on exploration, plot and character development, with some light combat here and there to keep things moving. Then, the Strikes would be where the serious action takes place, with longer missions and large-scale objectives and set pieces, more challenging combat, and lots more of it. The strikes could be used as crescendos to the story-mission plot lines that lead up to them, so they’d feel directly tied in to the narrative without being bogged down by exposition.

For this to work, the game would need far more strikes than Destiny 2 currently has.

I do sometimes wonder how it would work out if the Adventures were given their own 3-player playlist, along with the strikes? Or if the adventures could simply be added in to the strike playlist? That’s sort of an aside, but there is a sizeable chunk of good content there that is barely getting touched right now.