Concentrated coolness (Gaming)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Monday, December 10, 2018, 14:09 (1962 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I've brought this up before, but one of my favorite tidbits from the old Bungie podcast days was the episode with one of their producers (Jonty Barnes, I believe). The guest brings up the concept of "concentrated coolness" in reference to his job as a producer. His point is that it is his job, along with the other high level producers and directors, to decide early on what features or mechanics are going to get the team the best bang for their buck. In other words, in a world where their time and resources are limited, what can they do that is within their scope that will make the largest possible impact on the game. Sometimes, these decisions can be made mathematically. But usually there is a bit of creative instinct needed. At some point, somebody on the Halo 3 team said "we need theatre mode in the game, even if that means we don't get feature x or y. Theatre mode is worth it".

From the outside, looking back in hindsight, I would argue that somebody should have decided early in Destiny's development that 8 really amazing, unique boss fights would have been more impactful than 30 repetitive variations of the same couple boss fights. As others have pointed out, the Raids are a version of that, and for what they are, they work quite well. I personally would have enjoyed the majority of D1 a great deal more if there were 1/3 as many missions, but the quality of those missions was set higher. Destiny has never had a "lack of content" problem, despite what some people say. The issue is that too much of the content in Destiny bled together because it was too similar.

There are ways to address this issue beyond adding more unique boss characters. The early Gears of War games did an admirable job of taking the same basic mechanics against the same set of enemies and repeatedly finding new, fresh, and exciting ways to contextualize it through different environments and set pieces. Halo, too. Destiny's many patrol spaces look different in superficial terms, but very few of them offer a unique gameplay experience compared to the other zones. You're usually doing the exact same thing over and over with a different skybox in the background. Again, that's a place where somebody early on needed to step in and say "for this mission, the player is going to be riding on a huge vehicle swarming with friendly NPCs, and its going to be a unique scenario unlike anything else in the game". Or "2 Scarabs. You heard me. 2 of them. I feel like those kinds of bold calls are largely missing from most of Destiny, with a few exceptions along the way. All that said, I do think things are improving on that end. The Dreaming City alone is a really special achievement, I think.