Patrol Missions - Ideas for new Ones (Destiny)

by petetheduck, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 18:00 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Let's be honest, the patrol missions are boring and repetitive. Go to point X. Go to point X and scan the object there. Go to point X and kill target T there. Kill Y enemies. Kill Y enemies in order to collect Q of (item type) from their bodies. And that, my friends, is 100% of the missions you'll encounter in patrol mode. It's even more sad because there are only 5 basic types of missions, and the bounty is to complete 6 missions total, so you're guaranteed to see repeat types in any bounty effort.

Bungie, you could spice this up in oh-so-many-ways. Let's brainstorm:

- Recover a lost ghost. This is a "go to area X" type mission, but there's a ghost *somewhere* in that area and you have to actually do some looking around to find it.

- Rescue a fallen guardian. Again, go to area X, but then there are a bunch of enemies you wouldn't normally encounter in that area and you have to kill them in order to rescue a guardian that fell there.

- Race! Go to area X in a certain amount of time. This mission can be failed, and which point you can just pick up another mission.

- Absolute carnage. Kill X enemies in a certain amount of time.

- Extinction order. Kill X of a specific type of enemy. Kill 20 Dregs, kill 20 vandals, kill 2 Wizards, for example.

- Support mission. Help other guardians in your area earn X kills.

- Supply run. Take the item given to you at the start of this mission to point X, and which point you complete the mission and it drops ammo of all types for the guardians nearby.

- Survive. This mission starts the "enemies are mobilizing against each other" mini-war event in the area. You must stay in that area and survive until the mini-war ends.

- Treasure Hunt. You must find and open 5 chests.

- Resource farm. You must find and collect 5 resource nodes.

- Orbital bombardment. Changes the player's grenade into a beacon that calls down lasers from space (the warsats, I assume). Kill X enemies with LASERS FROM SPACE!

- Cut off the head. Kill 3 Ultras or Majors.

- Cut off the head, literally. Kill X enemies with melee to the face!

Post your other ideas here! I don't think most of these would be very difficult to add.

I think the concept behind 'recover a lost ghost' is a great idea, but I dislike the other suggestions.

Video game objectives, in general, have little variation. Masking that with arbitrary redundancy doesn't really enhance the experience. I don't think 30 subtly different patrol mission variations will provide any better experience than 5 distinct ones.

I do think there is a lot of room for improvement to the patrol experience, and patrol missions specifically. I.E., removing beacons and merging patrol missions and public events. As in, on some kind of random interval (3-5 minutes or something) you'll get a transmission from the tower with a random mission, but you have to manually accept it.

Some missions could even be invitations to upcoming public events. It would give you the sense of the City monitoring Old Russia -- "We've detected a Fallen Ketch headed for the Mothyards. Guardians, move to intercept!"

I think the unique scenarios public events present are much more enjoyable than patrol missions. A more diverse patrol schedule could be quite awesome. Having more unique enemy events naturally happening throughout these planets.