Whom Is Destiny Being Made For? (Criticism)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Friday, June 01, 2018, 14:19 (2148 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Who said anything about selectable difficulty? They could absolutely have that for instanced things like raids, strikes, missions.

I am at a loss to explain what

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)

means if not selectable difficulty, because in Halo, those are selectable levels of difficulty.

Patrols would be a mix, much like it is now.

That's not like how it is now. There's a range of publicly available activities, and the difficulty a player experiences is a combination of their power level and the power level of the enemies in the activity. A player can increase their own difficulty by de-leveling their gear, but they can never make a world activity any easier except by raising their power level normally through the progression system.

A Halo-style difficulty selector allows players to arbitrarily decrease their difficulty level, equivalent in Destiny's current model to increasing their power level. Presumably the easiest difficulty level would essentially be equivalent to being at the level cap.

Normal patrols would be Easy or Normal. Lost Sectors could be a mix. Set some at every difficulty level. Public Events are Normal with the Heroic versions.

I'm having difficulty understanding what you mean by difficulty in this context.

Escalation Protocol could start at Normal for a wave or two, and work up to Legendary by the end.

How is that different from what it does now?

You already can’t really over level activities, so nothing really changes from that perspective. All you get rid of is the bad progression system and let Bungie define difficulty for activities with a descriptor instead of a number. Folks are no longer gated out of activities because they didn’t grind enough. The difficulty is just the difficulty. They could go as far as to make something like Escalation Protocol slightly easier when new content comes out, giving folks a chance to go back and get that gear if they want.

There is no way in nether hell Bungie is going to abandon the progression system. It is at the absolute core of how the game is designed. Like it or hate it, but it seems to me this is saying you just want a different game. Which is totally fair!

I don’t know. I’m not a designer by any means. I just don’t think the level system adds much of anything to the game. Again, you can’t really significantly over level activities, so it only really serves to gate content. I just think there’s a better way to accomplish difficulty than the light level difference they’re leaning on in Warmind.

I buy the argument that it’s neat to hit EP for the first time and get destroyed, then slowly level up and get farther and farther each time. I don’t know how you replicate that without a leveling system.

That's the same situation that applies to raids, that applies to activities that already have explicit difficulty choices (normal vs prestige raids, normal vs prestige nightfalls, heroic strikes vs vanguard strikes, heroic adventures vs regular adventures, story missions vs heroic story missions (now called meditations). Plus challenges.

It's not just gating content, it's the core of Destiny's design assumptions. It's certainly OK to not like it, but saying one wants Destiny without the progression I would argue is just saying you want a different game, because Destiny's progression system isn't just something tacked onto a Halo-style shooter.

Heck, I even miss some of the bits of progression they've taken out, like leveling up weapons to unlock perks. That gave me a reason to use a bunch of different guns in actual activities, so the XP would unlock them. (Motes were the coward's way out.) In D2 I've got a loadout where I basically only change the heavy based on the type of encounter or burn if required. I collect some of the other guns, but I almost never use them-- there's no reason to.