I think there are two angles here... (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Wednesday, March 04, 2026, 00:26 (1 hours, 50 minutes ago) @ cheapLEY

In regards to him saying there wasn't anything cool to do…

You're on Dire Marsh, and a big UESC ship comes in overhead. It starts to lockdown the area, and a popup comes that says "Leave area immediately".

If you follow the instructions the game gives you, then you will have no chance to even KNOW there's a lucrative event inside the lockdown. If you use anti-virus packs, you can stay inside and do a kind of wave clearing activity for lots of loot.

So… why does the game tell you to leave? Is it any wonder he thinks there's nothing to do when the game is actively telling you NOT to do the events? If you wanted to preserve the sense of discovery… why say anything at all? Just let players discover what it all means instead of actively steering them away.

Okay, I don't buy this at all. Have you ever played a video game before? I cannot fathom seeing something like that happen, seeing a message to leave, and then not sticking around just to see what is actually going on.

In a game with tiered loot, seeing something that is clearly telling you "you shouldn't be here" will make a sizeable percentage of players feel like their current easily-lost gear is not up to snuff. When presented with a new problem that they don't yet understand, and they are given instructions, most people will follow directions- especially in a high-stakes environment.

Remember when we played Second Extinction, and the majority of the map was marked off as a forbidden zone? Obviously you and I skipped merrily into it, but I wouldn't be surprised if most other players took one look at the dinosaurs in there and noped out because the game was explicitly telling them that it was suicide (you and I learned that that was where the fun was actually hiding)..

I guess we can argue about what makes for good game design, but at a certain point, you either buy into the world they're creating in Marathon or you don't. I think we have to assume players are smart enough to not take everything at face value and realize when things are diagetic.

Need I point you to videos of game journalists being clueless in the face of the game trying its best to hold their hand? Now let's look over at the "ball and gun gamer", which makes up a huge portion of the gaming population. Developers who want mass appeal have to build games around these people. Bungie needs mass appeal right now, so its fair to assume that the game will lay things out at face value, even if it's through horrible walls of text that nobody but a few players will read anyway...

If we can't even give them that much respect, what are we even doing here? There are tons of locked doors and containers around the map, too. Do players just assume those aren't accessible, or are they smart enough to think that maybe there's a key somewhere that will allow them to get in?

I wouldn't imagine that an average player comes up to a locked door while looting, and begins pondering possible methods of ingress. I think they'll just jiggle the doorknob, then look for another container to loot and never think twice about the locked door. I think those things go into "community interaction", where word of mouth and online posts begin to find ways into those locked rooms before any of that becomes common knowledge. I wouldn't waste my time looking for a key when I have more readily-available resources to scavenge and a need to find ammo.

I mean, we never even got around to getting access to that Dungeon in DMZ, and the game told us how to do it.