Arbitrary Restriction != Fun

by kapowaz, Thursday, March 07, 2013, 10:04 (4282 days ago) @ uberfoop

I'm off work sick at the moment, so I took the opportunity to finish Modern Warfare 3 today, which for some reason I'd abandoned around the 40% mark. I finished playing through Halo 3 yesterday, so it didn't take long for me to see why I'd left it unfinished. Forcing players in an FPS to choose between accurate shooting and moving around (particularly when combined with the CoD series’ obnoxious mechanic of requiring the player to keep moving forwards in order to make progress, not to kill the hostiles) just isn't anywhere near as much fun. There may be a variety of ways to approach a given encounter, but by reducing the scope of the player's toolbox (which is what use iron sights or you won't hit anything does), the number of viable strategies shrinks dramatically.

What made the Halo series at its best most fun was the variety in enemy AI and weapons wielded, combined with your own varied weapons and the landscape of a given encounter. These things together made for a very large number of viable strategies, of which any number could be enormous fun.

I'm hoping that by using iron sights in Destiny, Bungie is simply expanding the toolbox further — and this may well be necessary to support class-based play. Imagine that the Hunter class specialises in the use of scoped weapons, and other classes simply can't use them — it would therefore be necessary to somehow balance out such a class, say reducing their mobility whilst shooting, in order for them not to be as powerful on the move as the more general-purpose Titan class. I could be miles off-target with that speculation, but that's just one way they might incorporate iron sights without restricting the overall toolbox available to players.