Whom Is Destiny Being Made For? (Criticism)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, June 01, 2018, 06:27 (2157 days ago) @ cheapLEY

The real problem with Warmind is the progression system. After doing all my milestones and running both raids, I gained a grand total of TWO light this week. Either I am unlucky, or the system is broken.

I went up by 5 or 6 last night alone.

I still think the entire Power Level system adds nothing of value to the game. Just ditch it in favor of Halo's Easy, Normal, Heroic, and Legendary modes (or whatever Destiny terminology you want to use to replace those). Nothing would change from a gameplay perspective, other than players not having to worry about their power level or being locked out of progressing for days at a time until the weekly reset. Drops would be only about the gear you want.

How would that even work? How could you have shared patrol spaces with scaled enemies and variations in damage given and taken relative to difficulty when the difficulty can be set manually?

This would be the biggest opportunity for griefing in Destiny ever. Set your difficulty slider to the easiest possible and cut through every activity like a hot knife through butter-- killing enemies before players at higher difficulties can.

I'm not saying this idea is bad because plenty of good games work that way-- like Halo does. But it is fundamentally at odds with the most basic assumptions of Destiny's design-- that nearly every activity is either shared, or can be, even between players with relatively wide gaps between their positions on the progression scale.

Manual difficulty setting within the context of this design is simply not going to work.

Let's take the EP example. EP's top level now is pretty darn hard even at max light, and the low levels are challenging for small groups, especially if you're below 360.

So now enter the difficulty slider. A player manually sets easy mode, foregoing the best rewards (although not even sure what that means in the context of the complete elimination of the progression model). EP's later rounds now might not be easy, but they are easier-- easier than for players in the same space with the difficulty slider set the other way.

Is every player in your fireteam forced to the same difficulty setting? If not, then teams will just take turns alternating settings-- 2 easy, 1 hard, repeat 3x, to easy mode the entire system while getting at least 1 top tier reward phase for each player.

Force fireteams to same difficulty? No problem. The same techniques used to 9-mean EP apply to this scenario, except now you have 1-2 easy mode fireteams and 1 hard mode fireteam. Repeat and alternate.

Restrict entire activities and public spaces to one difficulty mode? Great. Hope you like being frozen in loading zones. Difficulty setting now required to match in matchmaking activities? Longer wait times.

I can easily see the place of frustration that this suggestion comes from but it throws out a lot of what I think Bungie still considers to be the core concepts of Destiny's design.