I remember that post... (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Thursday, September 25, 2014, 22:55 (3507 days ago) @ katancik

... and at the time I just thought you were just way over-stepping your dislike of Reach's fairly limited investment system and making wild assessments.

I remember it too. It wasn't any kind of revelation, and it still isn't, but it was the start of something. That post is Patient Zero, as it were, for Cody's ongoing rhetoric about investment systems (which is not to say it's a disease, there are valid points to be made, on both sides).

But I was wrong. You absolutely nailed it. Destiny isn't a game about the player going out and having fun with friends (with the exception of the raid.) Destiny's sole purpose seems to be to get you and a group of friends hooked and competing, then rewarding you with just enough meaningless loot to keep you coming back. At level 26, I really want to finish off the raid, but it take so, so much repeating of old content to get there. After going to farm spirit blooms for a few times already, and completing a few bounties to up my vanguard rep I'm just not so sure I want to keep going. I certainly have no interest in starting a new character. I'm not having the fun I was having with literally no reward like in Halo 2 and 3.

So are you playing for the rewards then, or to get to that content? If it's the rewards, I think that's your problem. If you treat it like something to do to grind and work for more of something, of course it won't be as enjoyable. If it's the content, I can't really argue with that.

Then there's the ever looming hope that Bungie will add "new content." With the Queen's wrath event, I've lost hope that we'll be getting anything "new" in the next few months. I was excited prior to the event with all of the hype about a new story and missions, etc.

Who said there would be new missions or (especially) new story?

What did we get? Some bounties that are the same as the ones that we were already doing and some missions we've already done. No new cutscenes, no new landscapes, not even new enemies to fight.

I don't have first-hand knowledge here, but someone that's very far along in the game told me that doing one of the queen's bounties or missions brought up a cutscene that wasn't shown in the final game, although it was in the beta. Also, there are "not even new enemies"? That's the hardest, least feasible thing to create from scratch and fit into a released game (they need models, they need textures, they need audio, they need animations, they need AI, they need to fit into the level design...).

If this is what the "constantly updated" world of Destiny is going to be it simply isn't good enough. My only hope is that the DLC's bring something huge to this game.

I know people keep saying this, but it hasn't been that long. Since we're riding the "I told you so" train, I said before Reach came out that it would take a month for them to straighten out the multiplayer, and sure enough, they made significant changes to which maps and gametypes were available, and in which playlists, and which ones were available together, and they tweaked gametypes, and they did this at least a good six weeks before the changes tapered off. I'm not the least bit surprised Destiny is having the same thing happen (in fact I may have called it, I don't care to run searches to find out), even though they had a beta and a public alpha, because it's a bigger, more involved game and they're branching out in genre and mechanics.
I will say this view is probably being influenced by the developer notes they put out. They address a lot of shortcomings and talk about plans and possibilities of fixing them (albeit nothing about the story or the fact of having an investment system) and they just became available today; if you haven't read them, you should.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is the reason Halo 2 and 3 are looked back on so fondly. The game wasn't engineered to keep you hooked and playing. It was engineered for stupid fun that didn't get old. It's hard to believe that the grueling unfun grind of Destiny and the nonsense 10 minutes of fun that you never wanted to quit of Halo 2-3 came from the same developer.

Let's be real here, people have been going on about the traits of video games that pull people in make them be or feel "hooked" for forty years, and most of that preceded investment systems. In Halo, you were supposed to be hooked on fun. In Destiny, they're clearly still aiming for fun, but they have other stuff to pull you in too. Jason Jones basically said this, two years ago now I think, and I remembered it the other day and even before that it was looking like that was the angle, make it fun, but also put in this "I like bigger numbers" element. Of course, you can say those don't go together, and that's fine, but I absolutely don't accept that they can't go together. You can also not like the combat, and that's totally valid too.