When death is of little consequence (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Sunday, August 10, 2014, 10:14 (3567 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I think overall I would have liked to see each fireteam have a pool of lives they could use to respawn with. When the darkness encroaches and you run out of lives, then you can;t be revived and if everyone dies you wipe the encounter completely, rather than go back a checkpoint.

This sounds like a horrible idea to me.

So, you struggle your way through to near completion but narrowly fail: the consequence of which is you have to start again from the beginning? Imagine how that will make most players feel: pretty pissed off. When you nurture such feelings in your players you will inevitably encourage toxic behaviour between players; witness how League of Legends (and the MOBA genre in general) is so hostile to new players since nobody wants to fail because of somebody else's relative lack of experience.

Almost like an arcade game and a game over.

Arcade games are designed to maximise revenue by imposing arbitrary difficulty levels that encourage repeatedly inserting coins. That is not a good gameplay mechanic for a game you've already paid for.

Now, I think having challenging difficulty levels for gameplay should exist, but I disagree with RC's fundamental assumption that success is inevitable. I've seen firsthand what happens if a team can't progress well enough in encounters in WoW: eventually players drop out for one reason or another (either they've run out of time, or they feel they'd have a better shot at success if they queued for a new team). Having 'infinite lives' doesn't necessarily matter, because there is always one finite resource: time.

There are lots of other things you can do to make encounters more challenging for the highest-skilled players. Bonus rewards that are tied to defeating the whole strike within a time limit is one, more difficult encounters for the same player level is another. I'm sure we'll see both of these and more in the final game.