Legacy Characters in a 10 Year Franchise

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, February 26, 2013, 11:13 (4075 days ago) @ Kitekiller

It's certainly an intersting question. I'm a bit surprised how often Mass Effect is coming up in Destiny conversations, but its a good starting point, so why not? My thought is that it's hard enough to do progression in a single game, like Skyrim, really hard to do it across single player games, like Mass Effect, so it must be really dang hard to do it across presistent world online games.

One place to look is EVE Online. A world with lots of complex "abilities" and stats and so on. It's been running for a long time now and from my few months with the game it seemed that they had something of a handle on things. They seemed to be doing balancing all the time, mostly in large waves. With this update they'd introduce a group of new ships that were mostly balanced to the existing universe. The next they might rebalance an entire class of ships (small fighter like Frigates for example). One thing they did though was plan long term but implement in the shorter term. They would state that they were doing this, and this, and this in order to reposition this group of ships and abilities even if it took four updates over a year and a bit (but not a whole lot) of things going slightly out of balane in the mean time.

One other thing EVE Online did was hold chances for players to give feedback on proposed changes, and they held large scale tests to let users try out the new ships and systems and try to find any flaw that was overlooked. I'm not sure how much that really affected things, (I just played the game :p) but it seemed like a good idea. Maybe Bungie will be doing something similar? Constant balance updates with bigger features and storylines being added over time. Not sure how they'll handle Destiny 2 though as that seems to be a somewhat different issue than "simply" maintaining and updating an ongoing universe. EVE also has pratically no story, where I expect Destiny will have a much more involved one... maybe.

Anyway, it'll be something to watch. :)