Did a JRPG pore sugar in your gas tank? (Destiny)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Wednesday, June 25, 2014, 10:50 (3807 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Here is how to fix Destiny to do it right:

1. If you play all the story missions and strikes, you should reach max level or near max level by the time you finish.

Recipe for reaching the End of Investment for a player really quick.

2. Eliminate random loot, and have weapons be in predefined locations or acquired from specific enemies.

I don't want there to be a clear-cut solution for everything. Rare weapons won't have a way of being rare, then. Will they? If there is a pool of weapons worth roughly the same amount and I get a random one for defeating a boss, fine. But I don't want that boss to drop the same weapon every time. Then the only way to make things rare is to make the challenge for them incredibly hard, no?

I'm reminded of a thread a while ago about the ghost ship in Windwaker. Unique Public Events or certain missions that only occur on rare occasions might be a solution here. But I don't think eliminating randomness is the way.

3. The missions in Explore mode should essentially just be story missions; they should be well designed, unique, and novel.

But that's requiring a lot of extra work to crank out. If they're implemented and rolled out post-launch on a continual basis, that would be great. But I don't think you're going to have the same fidelity as story missions. Though, if you were truly able to pull it off, it would eliminate the feeling of a central track of Story missions, which I think would go a long way to making each Guardian's story feel unique. It would certainly be something to stretch for, but given what we've seen from the Alpha, I'm not going to expect it.

As it stands, we're all going to have at least a baseline of similar experience to compare, all having played the Story missions at some point.

4. Hide tons and tons of missions, side stories, and secrets in explore mode.

Basically, you should never have to grind for level or gear ever, and boring MMO fetch / kill quests should be eliminated. Most of my beef stems from the fact that explore mode seemed to be the primary way to gain levels (in the alpha anyway), and the part that's fun (exploring) you don't get exp for, and the part that sucks (the missions) you do.

I think this is addressed pretty easily by tying a significant exp gain to picking up whatever goodies you discover while exploring, or by executing sick jumps off of specific remote locations.

I asked this in another thread today, but how do you propose, then, some areas being closed off until you're "ready"? Are you proposing free access anywhere from the word go? If the enemies never get harder, you'd have a lot to do to keep everything else fresh and exciting. This line of thought becomes anti-Ramping Difficulty very quickly. I want things to stay challenging the longer I play.

I'm willing to keep an open mind though, and consider that explore mode was a bigger deal in the Alpha due to lack of content. Maybe the full game will have enough to do that 's fun so that I won't have to pick up spinmetal leaves.

You have to stop being a cat, mentally. Just because there's an open box sitting in front of you doesn't mean you actually have to cram yourself into said box. Let the box sit. Play the game. Forget the box. The box will fill with Spinmetal on its own, provided its something that enemies will drop, and not something specifically placed by the developer. Because that's just a weak excuse to explore, like the gun part quests in Borderlands.

~m