Thoughts From Someone Who Wasn't That Excited (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Sunday, July 27, 2014, 15:15 (3570 days ago) @ Jillybean

Well first I have to say I am a terrible multiplayer . . . player. It's just not for me.

I find the Crucible to be very dependent on knowledge of the maps - its unforgiving. When player comes across player, the player who sees their opponent first will win. This is great when you see someone first, because one shot and a punch and they're down, but people continually knew the maps better than I did - like the sniper who knew exactly where to stand on Shores of Time to cover two control spots. His team figured out what he was doing and defended his position as much as the remaining control spot. Deeply, deeply frustrating.

The playstyle I cultivated (glass cannon) on the campaign did not transfer well to MP - this again is probably as much my problem as a bad player as the game's, but I couldn't get close enough to people to damage them, and I couldn't withstand their attacks long enough to escape.

Overall, I felt like Crucible was not designed for the casual player at all - I won't say it was designed to frustrate the casual player, but I'm not welcome there.

I find myself nodding along to this, and I certainly used to think I wasn't a terrible FPS player, although maybe I am in the grand scheme of modern console FPS games.

When it comes to map knowledge I think there's something that comes about from a map having sufficiently high complexity (and this comes in a few flavours). The topology of how each area is interconnected and knowledge thereof is crucial, and it seems that in most maps they are very very complex, so understanding them is key. The problem is you can't ever walk around them slowly to learn them, you can only learn them on-the-job. If you're dying a lot then this is going to be very tricky. Therefore (as ever) the people who invest the most time have the biggest advantage, but also those who invest early will have even more advantage.

Having maps with such complexity also increases the number of variables a player hoping to perform well has to keep in their head at once. If you're in a corridor then you only have to worry about being attacked from in front and behind, but if you have doors to both sides it's four possible attack vectors. When a given room is connected to another room that is connected in multiple ways, the number of routes an enemy can take to approach you rapidly balloons, making it less easy (without experience) to pre-empt where the danger will come from. Once you start factoring in how an enemy might attack you (whether they'd need a close-range weapon, or a super/heavy to take you out quickly) there are even more variables to juggle in your head. In the end instinct and experience will take over, but until then you can be paralysed by second-guessing.

The other problem (which scales with the above) is how quickly weapons can kill. It seems that even what ought to be the most pea-shootery gun of all, the AR, does such high damage that a couple of bursts to the head will kill. That makes combat very fast paced, and again makes it harder for less-skilled players to learn and grow. Dying repeatedly isn't necessarily a good learning experience; you need to survive long enough to understand your mistakes and improve on them.

It shouldn't matter what any individual player's skill level is in a multiplayer game like Destiny: there ought to be a satisfying experience for their ability, through matchmaking and (hidden) skill rankings. But when the game makes PvP so obnoxiously unapproachable for the less skilled, it could lead to a vicious cycle where the pool of players are all of such high skill it puts off all newcomers. I'd say Bungie need to consider this as much as their intended game design, which was clearly of a fast-paced FPS, since in the long term having a healthy ecosystem of players is far more important.