Forgiveness (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Wednesday, April 04, 2018, 12:08 (2204 days ago) @ cheapLEY

This thread is great - I really like thinking about what makes some encounters really fun, and others a chore.

I think the idea of mobility is important in whether an encounter stands the test of time... but it might be a side effect. When I look back on the Raids (we have 6 now! Wow.) the ones that are most replayable, for me, are the ones that don't let anyone off the hook.

I think Bungie didn't like the idea of someone getting comfortable doing one thing. We saw this in the very first raid; during the Atheon encounter, the three players furthest back in the room were teleported in time, and so teams split up to put the people most comfortable with that encounter in the back. Bungie's response? They picked the three transporters at random. Your whole team had to learn to be comfortable in both tasks.

Crota was more forgiving; there weren't any encounters that forced players to do things they weren't comfortable with (as long as their team contained people who WERE comfortable, of course). This made Crota both less and more replayable, I think. For normal raiders, it was less interesting... but some of the groups I played with played it endlessly... but with twists. (It was the only raid where people of MY caliber could 3-man it, for example.)

King's Fall was a refinement in the 'everyone needs to be able to do everything'... and was the least forgiving raid yet. Totems and Sisters, specifically, could crush even seasoned teams, because of the lack of wiggle room. One person dies, and it's almost always a wipe. Sisters threw in the random factor, with teams being (mostly) unable to pick their runners - so you could be good at all the tasks except one, and your team could still fail, because the game assigned that one task to you. There was a TINY bit of forgiveness on the final encounter; if you didn't complete all 4 orbs on each round, you had one extra round to play with... but mostly, if you failed somewhere, you were better off wiping and starting the encounter over.

That, I think, is the biggest lesson Bungie learned: that lack of forgiveness made a lot of people hate KF.

Aksis allowed screwups. By the time we were max light, you could finish him in 2 rounds, 3 if you were sloppy... but you had 5, so there was plenty of wiggle room. Vosik could be downed, even on Hard Mode (so no revives), by a less-than-full team; it wasn't a mandatory wipe if someone died. You still needed to know how to do all the roles (if someone died, someone doing a different role would need to take over)... but the emphasis wasn't on precision any more. You had to be good, but not perfect.

I feel like that carried over into D2, and I'm glad. There's still an emphasis on knowing all tasks (even more so in the Challenge and Prestige modes, where you're FORCED into every role on some encounters)... but you're allowed to make mistakes, as a team. For the most part, they're recoverable-from.

There are some decisions I don't understand. Some encounters are skippable; Tombships in KF, for example. If you simply can't make the jumps, just wait on the starting platform; when the first member of your team goes up the elevator, you'll be dragged forward. Some encounters are not, though. Golgoroth's cellar is confusing, and some people have real trouble with it. There's no skipping it, though; the door at the end won't open unless all team members are there. (You can get around this, of course; the person having trouble can go to orbit, the team can go through the door, and then the orbiting person can rejoin... but it's DESIGNED to force everyone through the maze, which is a weird decision given that you're allowed to skip the tombships.)

Bottom line, though: I think what Bungie has been morphing towards, with each raid, is an encounter where everyone has to be able to do everything... but nobody's required to be perfect at anything. You have to be a well-oiled machine, but Bungie's willing to let you pack along a bit of WD-40.

It's amazing how well they nailed Vault of Glass; it contains a lot of the design decisions they have honed in the past 4 years... but that they moved away from after VoG and are only now getting back to. In hindsight, that seems like a lucky accident more than a thought-through plan. ;)