I should go with you. (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 05:27 (3523 days ago) @ narcogen

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.

Which I was also trying to point out, but probably not very clearly.

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).

Yeah, but think about what variety still remained in each level, which had features to make it distinct:

Assault on the Control Room:

Approach with AR, pistol, Plasma Pistol, or Needler?
Will you take the Warthog, Tank, Ghost, or go on Foot?
Will you try to sneak the Banshee early on?
Will you go for the Rockets, Sniper, both, or none? If co-op, who gets what?
If playing Co-op, who will drive the tank? Who will gun on the Warthog? Who will fly the Banshee?
Fight the Wraiths, or avoid them?
Go through the bottom of the bridge, or through the enemies?
Steal the Banshee, ghost, or continue on foot?
Sneak the Banshee into the cutscene?

In Destiny, it's much more limited, because the levels don't have that variety of options with how to appoach situations, not do they have a variety of different situations to approach.

Sepiks Prime:

Hide on top, in the back, or by the entrance? (Applies to most objectives)
Use Full-auto, burst, single shot, or sidearm? Does it matter? (Applies to most encounters.)
No tough choice regarding special weapon, because you likely have one of each.
Boss battle. Hide in right side, left side, or back while you slowly whittle down enemy health? (applies to most boss battles)

The problem with games these days is that the more stuff they have, and the more they get polished, the more devs make us play the way THEY want us to play. Freedom is lost. I was having a conversation with someone regarding this issue. The more we get, the less choice we have, because now situations have to accommodate what we might have, rather than us developing a strategy for what is to come, or being able to think with all of the tools at our disposal (which includes exploits and outside-the-box thinking, such as stealing the Banshee early in AotCR...

One game that brought player freedom back was Wolfenstein: The New Order, oddly enough. You could approach the same scenario a number of ways, with two timelines adding further variety to some encounters. Odd that a game born of mindless shooting evolved to have more depth than most modern shooters.

Either way, I am having fun.

As am I. I see Destiny through the eyes of someone who saw what Warframe was, and what it has become, so I know how much the same scenarios can evolve and change to produce a game with longevity.

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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.)

Yeah, and that's where the age-old "30 Seconds of Fun" was born. It's the scame scenario being presented over and over, but with enough variety that it still feels fun and fresh every time (hopefully). Attacking an Elite with a plasma rifle is different from attacking him with a Needler, or a Pistol, or a Tank, or a Banshee, etc. It's still the same Elite, but there is variety within the same Elite. What if the Elite is also on a platform above you? What if he has a vehicle? What if he is facing away from you, unaware of you?

Now in Destiny, think of a Fallen captain. Because the odds of a player having every element in their arsenal are high, enemies can now have shields that are extemely resistant to all but one specific element. In this instance, it's arc damage. The player has been given the illusion of preparedness, because he just so happens to have some arc weapons on him. The shield is now pooped, so what's the best tool to finish the Captain? It doesn't matter, they're all pretty much the same, and you have a whole slew of them.

What if the captain is in a vehicle? ... Except, at what point in the story do you ever encounter enemies using vehicles? One single encounter on the Moon is all that I can recall, and like the Patrol Pikes, they were piloted by weak Dregs. Interceptors never get used, so the inclusion of vehicles seems to be an afterthought. There is no "tank level", it's mostly just using vehicles as a travel tool.

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.

I noticed that too, as that's another thing that Warframe addressed in-universe with the Void missions, where you fight a mix of all three factions across a number of objectives in a unique setting.

Destiny could actually do this at some point. What if the Cabal ally themselves with the Fallen? The Cabal are essentially half of the Covenant (Jackals, Brutes, Skirmishers, and Hunters), with the Fallen being the other half (Grunts and Elites). Fallen have no heavy hitters, nor do they have any aerial troops (something noticeably missing from the entire game).

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.

Like I said. Early on, Warframe reeked of wasted Potential. It was a Mass Effect 3 MP clone that showed promise, but little else, and I fully expected it to die a quiet death. But every single update had patch notes longer than the credits to an Assassin's Creed game, and now it's a completely different game. Just today, update 14.5 has released for consoles, and it completely reworks one of the worlds (the moon Eris), while adding a ton of new content and changes. I'd argue that it's the best games out there, and Bungie should definitely look to it for inspiration, but I doubt that Destiny itself will stagnate. Ten years worth of planned content shows ambition, and if Warframe's one-year transformation is anything to go by... I'm very optimistic.

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.

I meant strictly for co-op. Would add a nice twist. It could even be a modifier skull.

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?

Brilliant.

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?

Clans would need a resource pool. Players could donate resources/glimmer to a clan, which the Treasurers could use to enter challenges and such. There's a whole ecosystem out there waiting to appeal to people who like a different approach.

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.

Which is exactly the reason that I like the slower rate of loot drops, although the stream of Exotics and Legendaries that I've gotten make it pretty pointless to keep armors and weapons with inferior stats. If only Bungie had learned from Monster Hunter about applying stats to gear instead of having gear with stats... I'd be happy with a stat pack that we could apply to an armor we like, destroying the second armor pack in the process. That way, people could buy armors that they liked (The PS4 exclusive helmet looks awesome, and I'd wear it if I could apply my Legendary helmet's stats to it), and there wouldn't be ten thousand hunters with the generic-looking Lucky Raspberry running about.

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.

It's the desire to be better than others, not just your enemies. Gear envy, and all that, as Cody said. If you couldn't tell how good a person's gear was at a glance, maybe people wouldn't be so quick race for better gear, and maybe they wouldn't dump their level 1 helmet if they knew that eventually they could make it as good as a Legendary... Heck the Queen's Legendary helmet is visually identical to the level 1 helmets in all but paint, so that's already a thing in-game..