Furthermore… (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Thursday, August 21, 2014, 06:40 (3756 days ago) @ kapowaz

The other issue is you need to be friends for raids. There's no matchmaking.

Jonty Barnes: We intentionally did that.

Some people are concerned they won't have enough friends to do a raid, and therefore miss out on the content.

Jonty Barnes: We're going to see people self-organise. We're seeing people in the Tower already gathering saying, who's going to commit for a raid?

It is about that commitment part. If you just casually matchmake... you can see people jump out of competitive multiplayer games in matchmaking. In Strikes you can continue with two if somebody jumps out. You can still have that experience and not feel robbed. A raid requires six. If you've got five players in the raid, you're not going to win. You're not going to get through. I can tell you now, it's really tough, and it's intentionally meant to be that way. We've all got roles to play. So it requires a commitment of six people. That was very intentional.

Here's the thing that I think is the problem with this: they're putting a barrier in place that not everyone will get over, and they're happy that this decision is a good one. I don't think it is.

I think they're looking at it backwards: they've decided to choose a gameplay mechanism that will arbitrarily shut out some players, in order to be able to use that gameplay mechanism, rather than choosing an inclusive gameplay mechanism from the outset and then trying to see how they could still reach the more interesting/difficult co-operative gameplay mechanics from that position.

So… *deep breath*… here's an analogy from World of Warcraft:

In the beginning, all dungeons and raids were entirely ad-hoc. If you wanted to join one, you were in charge of finding and organising a group of players to run the encounter with, and the only tools Blizzard gave you to help with this were the chat channels, and the (largely ignored) Meeting Stones. Essentially the best way to run any of these events was to join a guild, then schedule an event with guild members, using external tools. This wasn't particularly great, as it meant you all had to be available at the same time, and if anyone had to drop out for any reason it often meant the end of the event (not to mention, the role of guild leader often also encompassed running a website, setting up forum software etc.). Once guild rosters got bigger and focus switched to raids (which were, initially, 40 (!!!) players) things got more and more serious; players dropping out would face penalties, and so it became less fun and more of a job.

One of the other problems with the raid system was that it became increasingly discriminatory; in order to succeed in raids, you had to take on the serious attitude of a raider encapsulated above, and then in order to succeed at the next tier of raids you had to have already succeeded at the previous tier of raiding. This resulted in the undesirable consequence that by the end of the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, only a tiny percentage of players got to experience the final raid, in which the expansion's overarching story was concluded. Blizzard naturally viewed this as a design failure, which they sought to address in the next expansion.

In the third WoW expansion, Blizzard introduced the Dungeon Finder tool, which we would refer to as matchmaking: you sign up for either specific dungeons, or any random dungeon, declared which role you wanted to do, and it found you a group as quickly as it could. It was, to say the least, a revolution: it's become one of the most popular ways of playing the game for many people, as it changed dungeons from something you either had to schedule with friends, or spend ages hawking in town looking for random people to join you (which naturally resulted in some pretty obnoxious snobbery about who people chose to take, based on their gear; matchmaking sidestepped this to a degree).

By the end of the fourth expansion, Blizzard expanded the Dungeon Finder to also allow players to look for raids to join. This was a much more difficult problem to solve as, as with Destiny, the intention was for players to need a greater degree of coordination, and for the encounters to be require a particular strategy. But in spite of this, it was still an overwhelming success: Blizzard's solution was to tune the difficulty down for the LFR (Looking For Raid) encounters, but also to give concomitantly reduced-quality rewards.

This was still fine for most players, as it allowed them to upgrade from gear they'd picked up previously, but most importantly it meant that they weren't shut out of the story experience: the final raid concerned the demise of the expansion's main villain, the dragon Deathwing (a villain so significant he was literally sat right there on the login screen), and so letting all players who were capable of gearing up to participate in LFR finish him off was a great approach from Blizzard. By this time I had personally stopped regularly raiding, and so missed out on almost all of the raids of that expansion, but I was still able to see this final battle thanks to LFR.

Since then, LFR and LFG have become a core component of how a very large majority of WoW players experience content in the game. For the forthcoming Warlords of Draenor expansion these are being retuned further, to the extent that the LFR difficulty is now considered the ‘normal’ difficulty, with higher difficulties of ‘heroic’ and ‘mythic’ above this for the more organised groups. In general the way the difficulty levels work is they will involve bigger health pools, more additional monsters in events, and sometimes specific mechanics which are left out on lower difficulty levels (or are less frequently used), but the bosses and the storylines that accompany them remain the same.

How does this all relate to Destiny? Well, right now it's hard to say for certain because we don't know what raids will be like, exactly. But I'm convinced of one thing: it needn't be possible to put a brick wall in front of all players who can't organise into clans to do scheduled events (and experience has taught me: this is the majority of players) just to support the design goal of having a higher level of difficulty experience. It ought to be possible to present a matchmaking experience for the masses, and then a more difficult (and better-rewarded) experience for those who can organise into groups.

Perhaps that's something that'll happen later, but I'm (guardedly) concerned that out of the box, Destiny is designed to feature experiences that only a minority will get to enjoy.