Destiny: Wot I think (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 01:23 (3810 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I'm interested to hear what you think how player skill differentiates itself. In other MMO games you don't have concepts like headshots in combat (the damage you do is more determined by your gear) but it sounds like more of a hybrid approach here; you (presumably) do location-specific damage as well as having your overall output be determined by gear. But what differentiates a good player from a great player? The scenario you describe where a boss takes a long time to kill presumably will be variable based on this player skill, but it's unclear to me how the gameplay offers opportunity to do optimal or just okay damage. Is there such a thing as a skill rotation (using certain abilities when off cooldown, in a particular order)? This is interesting to me because it affects PvP as well as the co-op experience.

Your description of boss combat sounds disappointing, but it's hard to say if this is because - as an alpha - the boss encounters aren't fully tuned yet, or if they're actually broken by design. In WoW almost all bosses have what's referred to as an 'enrage timer'; even if you're surviving and chipping away at the boss's health, if you don't defeat it within that time limit, the boss will suddenly and quickly kill all of you. It's a necessary feature to prevent otherwise underpowered characters from being able to defeat a boss, plus it also acts as a 'gear check'; a way of ensuring that players have a certain mandatory level of power before allowing them to proceed. As well as that, by having an enrage timer hanging over you, there's a sense of peril to every encounter: you either win in the next 5 minutes, or you die.

It doesn't sound like this exists in Destiny (yet) which based on your experience sounds like a mistake. Hopefully that's just because it's only alpha.

I'm surprised to hear you have little to say about the player investment system so far, but you've touched on something I always wondered about: just how much your character's gear level impacts on the difficulty of combat. The answer appears to be: substantially, which is disappointing but not that surprising. What it does mean is that areas of the game will be either trivial (and thus, probably ignored) or impossible (and similarly ignored) at different stages as you level. Again, based on my experience of WoW (a game with millions of players) this leads to 'ghost towns' in the underpopulated areas, whilst everyone focuses on the content they can actually play. It'll be interesting to see how much this affects co-op play in the final game, and whether it might result in areas feeling devoid of (human) life.

The tower sounds like it could be frustrating with the way you have to literally walk around to perform otherwise mundane actions. This kind of thing always walks a fine line between tedium and immersion, but whereas in other games vendors and the like exist in a shared, busy place that has many purposes it sounds as though the only real reason to visit the tower is to perform actions that would be easier done with a menu. There's no voice chat yet, I take it? I'm wondering just how many players will bother to hang out in the tower rather than head out and do something more fun in the wilds. In WoW there's lots of reasons to sit around in a capital, but it seems like there's far fewer here.

Anyway, good write up - lots of detail there to absorb. I'd better go get a PS4 so I can try it out when the beta launches.