It's no different than World of Warcraft. Back when I played WoW I had like 8 characters with all different names and it wasn't difficult at all to manage. I actually liked being able to individually name each one. It gave them their own identities.

Yeah, this is the aspect of it that I'm most disappointed about. I liked the idea that I'd be able to give each character a distinct appearance and personality, then they'd have a name to go along with it. Instead each one of them is called kapowaz, which feels less somehow.

The way I've often had it described is that the main game levels you up and dripfeeds you abilities and techniques for you to learn and master. Almost a tutorial. Then the endgame is where you get to put those learned skills and abilities to use to do the really interesting, difficult stuff.

Im told by my MMO friends that its often the most rewarding part of the game, and constant updates (via patches in an MMO or DLC in Destiny's case) are what keep players coming back (and therefore, keep them paying).

An MMO-like model without the stigma of a subscription fee, but with DLC at a premium price is actually very crafty on Activision's part.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, but I still don't know how we know the content of the expansions or that they will be for maxed out players. Couldn't the expansions be something like what ODST was supposed to be originally?

There seems to be a certainty that this will work like an MMO.

But it's a careful juggling act: you can't make this content too easy to work through quickly, or that burnout/boredom will happen sooner. This is part of why I think Cody (and some others) may be misjudging the steepness of the grinding process (particularly when we only reached level 8, and there are bound to be plentiful rewards for missions between then and the level cap). You need the goals to be attainable, but the timeframe has to be drawn out to an extent.

I'm dropping back in to reply to this:

Drawing things out is probably going to be the biggest pitfall of Destiny. The timeframe does not, and should not be drawn out. As a game designer, you want your players to have fun immediately, and throughout, with as little boredom as possible. Players working through your content too quickly absolutely should never be a concern.

Burnout and boredom isn't a problem if you have fun content to begin with. Did anybody complain about getting bored or burned out with Halo? I don't think anybody did. Some folks worked through Halo in a day. Was that too quickly? Then how did it become the phenomenon it is? Judging a game by playtime is hugely toxic, and designing your game around a certain playtime is even more toxic.

The reason it is toxic, is because if you really only have 6 hours (for sake of argument) of fun things to do in the game, but you stretch that out by delaying or artificially lengthening content, then the experience suffers. Did you hover over the display for crucible marks? You are limited to 100 per week. Why? The only reason is to string out your playtime.

Folks are concerned with the amount of content. Bungie is probably right, and Destiny probably is the biggest game they have made. In terms of geometry and space, Old Russia is pretty huge. But it doesn't FEEL as huge as some smaller games. If you look at the mothyards, there's tons of geometry there, but all you really do is zip by on your sparrow… you're not engaging in it in a meaningful way. Remember the beach battle from Silent Cartographer? Why are there not tons of those, as you make your way across the mothyard, utilizing the hills, and aircraft fuselages as you fight your way across in a story mission? Can you imagine if all of Old Russia were as dense as a Halo story mission in terms of designed encounters and story? You'd have an entire FPS game right there! But you don't…

Destiny is cool to explore, but not as fun as other games. In Destiny, you can look and shoot. In something like Deus Ex, exploration is more meaningful since you have tons of options for interaction: you can open doors, hack, listen to people talk, talk to people, read email, pick locks, find secret items and weapons, etc. Even though the world is physically smaller, there's more to do so it feels bigger. There's nothing wrong with Destiny not having these types of interactions, but this just means that the level spaces need to be utilized in terms of shooting. And they unfortunately aren't that well from what we have seen so far. This is why there is disappointment at one area per planet - because you don't get a lot of bang for your buck with these spaces, thus requiring more for the same level of engagement that FPS games of smaller scope had.

The issue is quality vs quantity. You always want to give players the most concentrated game experience possible, with everything they are asked to do being as fun as possible. Padding it it with things that aren't so fun is not how you create the best experience… I'm not saying it has to be combat at Mach 10 100% of the time, but the spaces have to be utilized to create some kind of flow to the experience.

Again, I don't know why Bungie is worried people will finish the game in 10 or 15 hours or however long it would take. If you can give them a BETTER experience in 10 versus a padded 100, why not go with 10? Who cares?

As far as the endgame goes, in most of the games that I've played that have an 'endgame', that's typically where the most fun is. So the question is, why not eliminate the beginning, and just have everybody start at the 'endgame'? Having an 'endgame' just ensures that your players aren't getting all the fun immediately. There shouldn't be divisions - you should just have 'the game'. You shouldn't have rewards for the missions, the missions should be the rewards. The experience should be valuable in and of itself.

It's worse on XBone due to everyone having Kinect (well, most everyone, as the Kinect-less SKU is still pretty new) combined with the fact that it's turned on by default for voice chat in most games. Almost every Forza 5 lobby I get into has someone drowning the room in noise because their kid's screaming, or they're apparently having a party, or someone's vacuuming. At least muting them is quick, but it's still irritating.

It still blows my mind someone at Microsoft thought this was a good idea, and everyone else agreed and rolled with it.

That sounds like hell. I'm so glad there's a Kinect-less model available for whenever I look into getting the Halo anniversary collection.

It still blows my mind someone at Microsoft thought this was a good idea, and everyone else agreed and rolled with it.

Yeah. I'm ok with the Kinect itself, but having its voice chat turned on by default is just idiotic. I think it would have been best to leave it off by default and just have a quick voice command (it could still be listening for commands, just not broadcasting your voice all the time) to turn chat on once you're in a game lobby.

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