How much endgame content was there in Halo? (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Tuesday, July 29, 2014, 16:57 (3768 days ago) @ Cody Miller

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?

I don't disagree with everything you've written above, but I feel like there's a key misunderstanding or important consideration you've missed here, which is true of Destiny and all other MMO games. At their core, they're social experiences, and the gameplay is a sandbox for that.

That's not to say that Halo was an anti-social game, but the social side of it was far more ad-hoc; that's why communities like HBO came about. The social side is far more implicit than explicit, and the gameplay is definitely intended to support a single player experience, with no mandatory requirement that the player groups up.

Contrast that with other MMO titles and you'll see that reverses: the player can play the game as if it was a solo experience, but they're not getting the most from it. There's an argument to be made that all Blizzard's games follow this format; create a social sandbox and then build mechanics to support it. But in order for a game which provides a social sandbox to provide an enjoyable experience, it needs an active player base. The timeframe over which the audience is engaged with the game is therefore crucial. If most players treated Destiny the way they treated a Halo title, they'd be done with it very quickly and stop engaging. That undermines the social sandbox, and so a cycle of drip-fed engagement is necessary to ensure that players remain invested over a longer period of time.

Inevitably players will drift away from games at times, and the player base will always be evolving. For that reason too, the game has to keep a healthy pool of players around, or the newcomers will find the game deserted. You only need talk to players on underpopulated realms in WoW to understand what effect this has on the enjoyability of the game.

What is important (at least to me) is that whenever the game artificially drags something out, it does so in a way that remains fun. I spent a fair amount of time in the beta levelling up weapons so as to compare them. I did this by hanging around in one area of Old Russia, sweeping the zone in a rotation and picking off fallen as they spawned. Every once in a while the Devil Walker public event would start up and I'd join in with that. Never did it really get boring, because the combat itself remains fun. If anything it was the lack of variety in missions that dragged it down, but that's something Bungie can fix, the most important thing to get right was combat itself.

So, I'm not worried about the grind, although time will tell if they've tuned it too aggressively (or not). We'll know they've dialled it in wrong if the player base shrinks too soon after launch, but I'm betting it won't.