Hypothetical - Guardian Trainer (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, June 23, 2014, 15:08 (3600 days ago) @ Cody Miller

From what I've seen, I would rate Destiny's "investment system" as part of "all the content."

Now we are getting academic, because technically it CAN'T be part of the (fun) content. If it WERE, then the investment system would undermine itself!

Except I gave you examples where it can. The leveling curve in Skyrim is fun to me. My first time playing I enjoyed the heck out of shooting an arrow at a giant and getting hit with a club so hard that I flew into the upper atmosphere, and then later after gaining power and skills, I enjoyed killing the same giant with a single shot. And I enjoyed the large amount of time between those two instances as well. Your simplistic view of either fun or not fun is broken.

So the proper way to design the puzzle game is to remove the IQ point system, and either have the three big puzzles, or have the little puzzles (which now have to be fun!) included between the big puzzles.

That's the crux of it. Investment systems are designed to make tasks that aren't fun fun, through the addition of a reward system. And if the investment system was itself fun and complex, it'd just be a normal part of the game, which would itself not need an investment system.

Your pretend puzzle game is not Skyrim, Mass Effect, or Destiny. At the very least you, again, ignored what I said about growing from an unknown to a Legend in the eyes of the residents of the game worlds. The growing from one to the other is fun to me. Leaving it out and just giving me every power, upgrade, and weapon would take that away from me. I truly enjoyed Skyrim's and Mass Effect's leveling. From what I've seen I'm pretty sure I'll Destiny's as well. Your theory here is, again, broken because it would clearly make games less fun for me.

If you want to do a level 50 strike, and you've played all the content up to that point and are level 50, then there's no need for the level requirement: simply order the content as in a traditional level progression with the level 50 strike at the end. You can mix it up and allow for some choice if you like. You can choose to do the first 8 stages in any order in megaman, but to play the castle you have to finish all 8 stages. So make the level 50 strike the castle, and the content before it the robot master stages.

What about going back and seeing the results of becoming Legend? That's fun to me, being able to smash the giant with the exact same character as the one who got launched earlier. Your way the best I'd be able to do is replay the level over and over. I'm starting to wonder which of us is advocating grinding here? Is it more or less of a grind to play the same level over and over but get no new powers, weapons, abilities or in world recognition from it?

But if you play all the content you can play at your level and you AREN'T level 50, then that means replaying boring content. If it wasn't boring, then it would have been designed and ordered as described in the previous paragraph since it would be fun on its own and you wouldn't need a reward to play!

If you could replay 10 missions to get the exp to get to level 50, then the level lock would function the same way if instead of requiring level 50, it said "REQUIRES: replay 10 stages". Functionally it is exactly the same from the perspective of the player, but when worded this way it seems strange and dumb. Because it is.

It only is because you worded it badly, ignored things like story and playing with friends and in game results awarded to the player for repeating something, and completely disregarded that some do in fact like leveling.

But if investment systems are there to try to make things that aren't fun fun, why not simply just make everything you ask your player to do fun? Ideally you would do this, but the real answer is time.

The investment system ensures a minimum investment of time to progress through content. This is necessary because Bungie wants people playing their game for ten years, and actually designing fun content takes waaaaay more time to make than to play. By adding what is essentially a time gate, you get the most bang for your buck so to speak when it comes to playtime / development cost.

And if I find Destiny's core gameplay (the shooting and exploring and Nova Bombing and what have you) to be fun, and the upgrading and leveling and being blocked by higher challenges also fun, what then? Your theory says I am wrong. It says "no, you can't have fun that way!" Heck, just look at the Alpha. People had *gasp* fun skirting past those ??? level enemies and seeing what was beyond. Where does that fit in your no levels system?

But haven't you ever played a free to play game with content locked out through time, like an action meter that takes time to charge to let you do something? And isn't that fucking annoying? Investment systems are the same thing, just wrapped in a prettier package.

I disagree. F2P games that stop you from playing, and a game like Destiny that doesn't stop you from playing are entirely different things. Again, so you don't try to ignore it as you sometimes do, I find being less powerful than enemies fun, I find being merely as powerful as enemies fun, and I find being more powerful than enemies fun. And I enjoy games that smoothly let me transition from the first to the last and that let you go back and see the results of our power and go forward and get smashed because you aren't yet powerful enough. Your ideas would take some of the fun, some of all the (fun) content away from me.

Everything, including finding and customizing gear, your guardian's skills, and weapons can be done without the need for an investment system.

So when you have a fun game, necessarily burdened by filler, would you skip the filler if able?

I think maybe the core of your problem is you have correctly identified a fundamental fact of game development, that games take longer to make than to play, but instead of trying to find a balanced solution to the problem (like strong core gameplay with some repetition and level / upgrade gating) you skip directly to a position of no compromises ever. Would I prefer for Bungie to make me 10 years worth of engaging, unique, creative content? Yes. Is such a thing possible? No.

Worse, you write off progression systems as entirely non-fun when some people, like me, enjoy them. Your fix to the development-time vs. play-time problem is flawed from the beginning because you won't admit that some people find fun where you don't.

And to be clear, I reject your puzzle example as far too limited if not downright unrealistic. In Destiny I may have to replay a mission in patrol mode to level up, but unlike your puzzle, the AI will react differently, I will have different skills and weapons, and I'll be playing with an always varying combination of friends on my friends list and strangers who I've never met before. Simply playing a repetitive experience with others, even with bad gameplay, can be tons of fun. And Destiny looks to have great gameplay!

Simply put, you don't win argument points by conjuring up deeply flawed, unimaginative theories and examples. And that's all you've done here.