I should go with you. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 03:55 (3523 days ago) @ Korny

I honestly don't get the objection about the repetition. As a mostly campaign-only player, all there ever was, was repetition. Any variations you had to add yourself-- change difficulty level, change approach. The skulls gave more precise control but didn't actually add content.

Investment system blinders aside, I think I can see the complaints about repetition:

Halo=

[snip breakdown of levels of Halo]

This is all accurate, but I'm not so much talking about the repetition of activity from level to level or mission to mission as I am over the lifetime of a title.

Regardless of how much levels vary in their activities over a title, once you've played each level at every difficulty setting available, you've seen most of what there is to see. The rest is repetition and slight variation (your actions, skulls, random happenstance).

Either way, I am having fun.

======

Halo had variety, whereas Destiny has a huge chunk of its missions being "infiltration mission, holdout against enemy waves, repeat", or "infiltration mission, stationary boss fight, repeat" as their main objectives. Not all missions are like this, though. Charging the eye of the gate lord was different, and provided a variety of objectives and scenarios, and that was the Daily story yesterday. Had it had more modifiers, that mission alone would be fun to replay over and over. Same goes for many other missions in Destiny. Can Bungie fix this by changing Boss behaviors or objectives? Definitely.

While Halo levels do vary in their approaches for set pieces, there are a lot of encounters around the edges of those that are the same, not just within the levels, but across all the levels. (Find a group of Grunts/Elites/Jackals, shoot them, rinse, and repeat.)

What I do see is that the factional distinctions are making encounters less varied within themselves than they were in Halo. I was gratified to see the Cabal Phalanx units that bring back the shield mechanics we're used to from Jackals... but these ONLY appear on Mars and against Cabal groups, so that mechanic is never mixed with some of the others that you only see from Fallen or Hive.

I'm not sure that's a big deal, but I did notice it.

By the time you've hit the level cap, done each story mission and strike with the available modifiers, you've probably spent about the same amount of time as you would have exhausting the campaign content of the average Halo title, and you're down to the same thing: what can you do different to maintain interest? Destiny I think has a much bigger potential upside here than Halo did, but I'm wondering if they possible changes are set (like the story) to a very slow drip feed, or whether we have, indeed, seen it all.

What if a modifier allowed the Nexus to slowly move his shield to cover its weak spot, and your team had to either split up or move to a new spot to get a momentary advantage?

I don't know what that is, but I suppose I will soon...

What if someone on your team had to manually pry a door open instead of letting Ghost scan a keypad, and the other teammate(s) had to protect that person? Titans could be able to pry the door open faster, so it would add value to their class, but maybe a Blade Dancer could use their Arc Blade to power a security system, shutting some doors to reduce the number of enemies while taking longer than the other classes to get the door open...

Possibly for strike/raid but I think Bungie still wants story missions to be doable in solo, which means any class should be able to do any required action without penalty.

What if you did a mission where enemies were immune to all but specific elements, yet dropped only special/heavy ammo?

Perhaps the real question here is-- instead of the traditional custom game mode, what if the community was able to submit and then Bungie was able to approve, new bounties that altered the game's behavior in this way?

We know drops can be altered by inventory items, and rewards can be altered by bounties, and bounties are given by factions-- what if they could also be given by clans, for instance?

I really don't see it as a question of requiring people to grind before giving them something they think they deserve.

I see it more as rewarding some people with a little extra for the repetition they were going to do anyway.

The problem is entitlement. People want the best gear/weapons as soon as possible, rather than being content with what they have. It's an inherent problem in any loot game, where stats and perks ultimately mean more than individuality or playstyle.

The faster anyone is able to get the best gear, the sooner everyone will have them and everyone looks the same. So we're back to the Master Chief in mjolnir armor, it just takes you the whole game to get there.

I guess I don't get it. You can get a very similar effect-- if what you're after is power fantasy fulfillment-- by not adding modifiers and just running roughshod over low-leveled enemies. Oh well.