Nightfalls (and some somewhat relevant Strikes discussion) (Destiny)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, February 08, 2018, 16:26 (2267 days ago) @ bluerunner
edited by cheapLEY, Thursday, February 08, 2018, 16:31

https://www.bungie.net/en/News/Article/46627

- Strike scoring and removal of time limit fail on nightfall.

All the other changes sound good, but this is a bummer. I loved the timer and all the different mechanics to increase it. Made Nightfalls fun and challenging without resorting to bullet sponge enemies that players just hide from and slowly pick away at. It does sound like speed is a variable they're measuring in the new scoring system, so this could end up being a better system in the end. I'm eager to find out!

I've been meaning to make a post about Strikes, but my thoughts aren't fully collected, so I'll just throw up the short version here for the sake of discussion:

I've been playing a lot of Monster Hunter. The quests are all just "Hunt X Monster." They're limited to 50 minutes (typically, sometimes it's different), and you get three lives. The fights are often multistage things, in that, when you deal enough damage, the monster runs away from you so you must chase it down. There are mechanics that allow you keep it around longer, and good players can do enough damage fast enough to just kill it before it runs.

It made me think about Destiny strikes, and, more specifically, the boss fights. Most Destiny strikes are just missions with a bunch of fodder enemies that then lead you to a big boss fight. The one exception I can think of is Taniks, whom you encounter pretty early in the mission and then sort of chase through the rest of the strike. We get a very tiny taste of that in the Arms Dealer strike in D2, but it's literally only for the one room before the elevator. The difference is in that Taniks strike, it's just a damage threshold, and then he runs, but once that threshold is reached he becomes immune to any further damage.

How difficult would it be to design a strike like The Shadow Thief, but without that immunity once the threshold is reached? Some additional mechanics that require some skill and coordination to accomplish that prevents him from running and lets you continue to damage and possibly even kill him? Is that compelling, or do we end up with a situation where killing him early becomes the goal, and having to actually play out the rest of the strike because you didn't accomplish it is considered a failure?

I would say look to public events, and the ability to turn them in heroic versions, but those are so short that I don't think it's a good judge for doing something similar with strikes. No one is likely to just quick a public event that only takes four minutes just because they failed to make it a heroic. I can see folks abandoning a long strike because they missed the trigger for making it heroic (or failed to kill Taniks in my Shadow Thief example). I guess you could design it in such a way that it's not a single trigger for a heroic, but rather a series of triggers throughout the mission, or just a single trigger late in the strike to make it feel worth it to just stick around rather than quitting, but that sort of gets away from the "chasing the boss through the level, maybe kill him early" thing that I was considering when I first started thinking about it.

I think strikes are some of the best content Destiny has to offer, I'm just trying to think of ways to make them more fun, challenging, and repeatable.

EDIT: I also just wanted to say this is an absolutely killer THAB. This is what communication looks like, and I'm glad to see Bungie continuing that trend. I'll still be playing Monster Hunter for a bit, but stuff like this is really making me eager to jump back into D2.