Run speed... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, March 29, 2018, 08:01 (2375 days ago) @ Durandal
edited by CruelLEGACEY, Thursday, March 29, 2018, 08:05

I'd still like to see the mobility stat affect run speed and super speed, instead of locking those to one value independent of anything else. It doesn't seem like there is still enough incentive to put points into mobility over resilience in many situations.

The best explanation I've seen so far is that Bungie wanted to avoid the scenario where you match into a strike, and 1 or 2 players take off sprinting ahead while the player with lower mobility falls progressively further behind with no hope of catching up. So to avoid that, they flattened the sprint speed across all classes and detached it from the mobility stat.

Personally, I'd rather address that problem in other ways, and bring back some more diversity in movement speeds, including sprint speeds. I'd also like to see sprint speeds increased across the board.

I see lots of screaming about TTK on the destiny reddit still. It seems to me this has taken on a talsmanic property, where players believe if only they are blessed with lower TTK across the board in PVP (and they can have sniper+rockets) all things will be good again.

I think a lot of that discussion is kinda circling the key point, but over-simplifying it a bit.

The ideal "time to kill" in any shooter needs to work in a balance with the other aspects of the game, including movement speed, map size and complexity, etc. This is why I'm skeptical any time a developer starts making sweeping sandbox changes to a game that's already released. You can't adjust things like player speed or weapon range and accuracy without tweaking map sizes and layouts along with it. They all interact together. So the chances that you can change movement speed and have it scale in a way that it just "clicks" into place with the existing maps is, in my experience, slim.

We saw this back in Halo Reach, when they reduced/removed bloom. Players were suddenly cross-mapping with the DMR to trap enemies in their spawns because the maps were not designed to be played with guns that were so accurate from so far away, AND the player movement speed was too low to effectively counter such accuracy.

We saw it in Destiny 1 as well. Certain weapons were tweaked right out of being usable because their effective ranges were not balanced around the size and layout of the maps. There never seemed to be a clear, well defined concept of "what is the desirable effective range of a close-quarters weapon, a mid range weapon, and a long range weapon" that remained constant. Because of this, the maps were sometimes incompatible with certain loadouts and playstyles. You'd have maps where the "close quarters" sections were still too big to use any of the short range weapons effectively.

Back to the TTK issue... In my mind, focusing on TTK is kinda putting the cart before the horse if the movement speed isn't nailed down. And movement speed, along with map layout and geometry, often comes down to what feels "fun" or satisfying to control. You want the act of running and jumping, sliding, vaulting, or gliding around the map to feel fluid and smooth and fun all by itself. If you nail this, you have a fantastic base to work from. That's a huge part of why I love Titanfall 2 so much. You could throw me into a map with no enemies, no guns, no objectives of any kind, and I'll still be able to have loads of fun just running and flying through the air and bouncing around the map. I'm not saying Destiny 2 needs to have movements equivalent to Titanfall, but I do believe the movement needs to be equally fun. And right now, I don't think they've quite nailed it. This is totally subjective, but even after like 150 hours playing D2, I still don't find the movement intuitive. The jumps never move quite the way it feels like they should, my character's movement feels like it has no momentum of its own... like I'm about to grind to a halt at any moment. But that's just me.

At any rate, once the movement and map layout is nailed down, that's when the precise TTK needs to be dialed in. I don't think the TTK in D2 is too slow in a vacuum, but I think the map layout, movement speed, and effective ranges of many of the weapons lead to situations where it is often possible to engage and enemy, trade a few shots, and then disengage and retreat to safety. I don't have any problem with that, if that's the sort of combat the game is about. But I think there are other design choices that would better facilitate that style of combat. Like, for example, having health that didn't regenerate or only regenerated partially. Ragashingo is going to hate me, because I'm about to reference Titanfall 2 again, but that's exactly how they approach the Titan combat. The Titan's are bigger targets that move relatively slowly (compared to the ninja-like pilots, although some of the Titans still move quite a bit faster than a guardian in Destiny). But the Titans also have lots of armor, which allows them to take a few punches and then retreat to safety. However, their health doesn't recharge. So if you nail an enemy Titan with a few hits and then he retreats, your attack is not negated. You've done lasting damage.

I suspect that Bungie is not interested in that particular style of combat with regards to Destiny. So if that's the case, they need to tune the game such that it isn't quite so easy to disengage from combat, sit and wait for a few seconds, then jump back in as if the previous damage had never happened. That can be achieved a few ways. It could be done by changing the player movement speed, or increasing the distances between cover, or increasing weapon damage to shorten the TTK. It's tough to mess with those first 2 elements without detracting from the potential for player movement to feel "fun", to shortening the TTK does seem to be the optimal solution in this case. But I certainly don't think its as simple as "shorter TTK is always best".