360 life on destiny 1 (Destiny)

by cheapLEY , Thursday, October 25, 2018, 08:23 (2065 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by cheapLEY, Thursday, October 25, 2018, 08:48

If you need to be rewarded to keep visiting planets and characters, then you've not got much intrinsic fun.

I see what you’re getting at, but I disagree. I like everything I can do in Destiny right now. Literally the most fun I’ve ever had with either iteration of the game. Including just going to the Destinations and screwing around in patrols.

The problem (if you can call it that) comes from the fact that there’s so much to do. The grindy stuff isn’t just for shits and giggles. It serves to get players moving around and doing other things.

The exotic quests mostly have you jumping through different activities, which moves people around. The challenges obviously do the same. I used to get frustrated at the inventory cap for certain items (10 Ghost Fragments, seriously?), but I’ve even come to understand that. Sure, it can be annoying to go buy a Wanted bounty only to realize that you only have 2 fragments. But it makes you get out in the Tangled Shore and do some stuff. If it wasn’t capped, I’d probably be sitting on hundreds of those things, and it would be a long time before I had to actually go into the Tangled Shore for anything. I think it’s a smart way to keep the player population moving around and doing a little bit of every activity. And, at the end of the day, they’re not forcing anything. There’s so much stuff to do, there’s always another option available.

Cody, sometimes it feels like you play this game out of stubbornness. You complain about the grind and intrinsic fun, but you never want to acknowledge that for lots of us, the game is intrinsically fun and enjoyable in nearly every way, and the the grind that you hate so much just gives us a little more direction, a goal to chase. There’s so much to do that I probably wouldn’t choose to go just hang out on Mars very often. But the Flashpoint is enough to point me there, and I enjoy my time there when I go.

I agree with a lot of stuff you’ve said. Forsaken is far from perfect, and I’m still not a fan of the soft cap system (although I’d be completely fine with if it I wasn’t rushing to a blind raid, which I still don’t think I’m going to do again). You call all those things frictions, made to slow down the player. You’re not wrong, but I’m not convinced it’s a bad thing. Destiny players need to be slowed down sometimes, and the realities of making a live game like Destiny means that they need to encourage players to move around, they need to keep everything populated, and those frictions serve that goal. We can argue all day about whether Destiny would be better as a traditional single player game rather than an MMO, but it’s not a discussion worth having—that ship sailed a long time ago.