Jason Schreier interviewed Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy (Destiny)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Thursday, June 13, 2019, 07:45 (2009 days ago) @ Korny

On the latest episode of Kotaku Splitscreen, Jason interviewed Luke and Mark for nearly an hour. I haven't listened yet, but here's some interesting info copied from a reddit post.

[*] They want to change the economy of glimmer to make it more valuable. Essentially, they don't want you always sitting on 100,000 glimmer. They want players to perhaps farm for glimmer and find optimal ways of farming, a staple of MMOs.

Resource starvation is terrible. "Finding optimal ways of farming" is a result of poor game design, it shouldn't be their goal.

What they should do is make Glimmer more readily available in certain events, that way people funnel to them more if they're chasing that one item. Say "Doing Patrol activities in the Flashpoint rewards double Glimmer. Consecutive activities without returning to Orbit increase Glimmer gains."
So now you're funneling players into the Patrol Spaces, and encouraging them to stay there.
From there, you can give them Boosters. "Complete three Heroic Events in the Flashpoint, and total Glimmer gains will double for two hours".
Now they can go off and play their activities of choice, knowing that their work has yielded more reward.
You can even extend this to stuff like Guided Games: "Successfully complete a Guided Games run (Host or Guest) and all Enhancement Core drops have a chance to count as double".

I like those ideas! But I'm somewhat confused by your argument. Yes, resource starvation is terrible, but it happens naturally in waves when content comes out. Then you mention that finding optimal ways of farming is a result of poor game design but immediately follow that up by giving examples of ways to improve the system by giving people optimal ways to farm glimmer. How is this not exactly what you are saying is poor game design? In my mind, you either need to make it so glimmer is never really a problem by just playing the game, or as you have given examples, find a way that people can double down on farming a particular resource. They have implemented that for almost all resources in the game except glimmer.

[*] They are worried about file size but are finding ways to try and keep the game from getting too bloated. However, they do not have an answer to this problem and they believe they cannot keep growing the game indefinitely.

Destiny 2 really needs an integrated Launcher like Warframe has. It's allowed them to do "Remastered builds" where they've cut the game size nearly in half, without requiring you to reinstall the entire game (and which bypasses the annoying file check that the PS4 has to do before every update). Optimize the code, remove the excess, and hotfix on the fly.

I would agree something like this would be nice, but this is also something that might not be feasible at this time because of how integrated everything is at this point. I think they are thinking about this going forward with the a la carte DLCs. I imagine they would have to wait for a D3 for implement something like an integrated launcher. Also, maybe it's just me, but I thought launchers for games were universally hated? I mean, I have never liked them...

[*] Saying Destiny is an MMO is a matter of identity in Bungie's eyes. They recognize that Destiny has had an identity crisis and they have been trying to please many different crowds of people. By saying it is an MMO, they are fully committed to making the game for hardcore fans instead of casual players. They are no longer concerned with pleasing the casual masses.

That's a bummer. "You have to do both".
One of Destiny's biggest issues has always been the falling-behind-if-you-don't-play-religiously problem. Sounds like they're embracing it as a means of encouraging people to play Destiny every day, as opposed to making it the type of game where you check in every once in a while and throw some money at if you like what you see.

This is a bummer, but this comment really sounds like the emotional response from someone who listened to what Luke and Mark said not a summary of what they said. I reserve judgement about this and am going to wait to see what this really means.

[*] They were a bit vague, but it seems like they are less focused on reaching the high profit margins and player counts that Activision required... however, Luke Smith did reinforce that their goal for New Light was to get more people invested in the game, and they are a company trying to make money, so obviously they still have profit goals and such. That said, Luke did firmly state they will not be changing the game to make a larger profit. They will stick to their fans and what they want out of the game.

That's all nice on paper, but with the budget that the first two games have had, plus the cost of keeping the franchise? Bungie needs money, and the Eververse overhaul sort of goes against those claims. But who knows, if the content is solid, there's nothing wrong with a little extra content in the Eververse market.

[*] Regarding recycled content: They want to utilize previous spaces by updating them and recontextualizing them. An example Noseworthy gave was the Taken King mission where you ascended the colony ships and fought a Shade of Oryx. In this mission, players revisited the Sepiks Prime boss room and got to see the corpse of the boss. They then traveled further into new territory and got to play in the colony ship people had always seen in the distance. They want to continue with these experiences and this utilization of old content. The Moon in Shadowkeep is a test to see how well this will work.

This is a great and smart thing to do. Recontextualize the familiar, and you make everyone (except Cody) happy. Revisiting the Sea of Storms? Great! It's another chance for Bungie to grow and expand on the foundation laid by the first game. They can increase the Patrol space size, add more secrets, improve the interactivity with the environment, and add more story. The potential with the time you have saved by reusing assets at scale is huge.

I talked to you about all of the additions they made to the Plains of Eidolon in Warframe. The foundation was the same, but they kept trickling in more and more content and technical improvements to it, to the point where it's an entirely different and more fleshed out experience, and which has all sorts of rewarding minigames and endgame content, all while running better and faster than when it first launched.

Bungie could do this (and to a degree, they have, with the new Forge areas added). I'd love to see them embrace their less-fleshed out areas (such as the Archology).

Yep. I don't know what people get so defensive about reusing content. Yeah, if it's exactly the same content sure, but going back and reimaging old content makes it actually feel like a live game! Let's go back to the moon! Oh wait, it's not the same moon we remember it to be! This is great. Also, this might help the budget problem. Reuse assets to create more content faster and progress the story line.

[*] They sort of have a plan for the story. They have concept art for future story events that direct them to where the story is heading. I'm sure the writers have a much clearer idea of where the story is going, but for the studio as a whole they have a general idea of the main story beats.

As long as they do more Story, and not just thinking that Lore is a good replacement for Story, I'm all for them following loose points.

I like both. Give me both please.

[*] Crossplay is on the table. They definitely want it and are coming up with plans for it. Resource and technical limitations are the reason we're only getting crosssave this year, but in the future they want to add crossplay.

Hope hope.

Yeah, I'm glad they are thinking about this.