Play Immortals Fenyx Rising. (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Monday, November 14, 2022, 22:40 (739 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I'm not sure that single 'secret' missions really accomplish what secrets are intended to do: Make the game feel bigger and more expansive by letting you know there's more to it than meets the eye.

Traditionally you'd have tiers of secrets. Some are easy to find, others tougher, and several very hard. Critically, the easy ones lead you to realize that there's more to the game than it seems. And there are many. The game is full of them. They can range from neat little bonuses, to more substantial things.

The entire game is built around discovery and seeing the puzzles all around you. Some are simple combat encounters (often at the mercy of the narrators), some involve physics, and others use the environment to set up a sequence that builds off of another area. But the game very rarely tells you what the puzzle even is. You have to use the power of common sense to find the starting steps and solution all on your own.

The whole thing feels like it was built of the question “what if Breath of the Wild had fun puzzles?”.

I highly recommend it, and I think it’s on Gamepass.

Also critical is that they not be tracked or labeled. There must be no expectation that the player will find any of them. Doing so immediately turns them into a checklist, explicitly letting players know everything there is to find, which is the opposite of what is described above. It'll be perfunctory, with players just following guides to get the achievement. No sense of mystery or wonder.

Where would a secret mission with a gun as reward fall here? Closer to the latter scenario I think. Everyone will simply look it up on /r/DestinyTheGame. It might as well just be a regular mission.

The game also does a fun balance of rewarding you for doing the puzzles with seemingly random rewards, usually cosmetic, occasionally with unique gear that’s part of a set. There’s nothing explicitly telling you that any puzzle will give a certain reward, so it just comes down to you going out there and solving things because you want to.

Only a few can have the awesome moment of discovery before the secret is simply known to all. Information travels too quickly these days.