Resolving the Solo vs. Co-op difficulty disparity (Destiny)

by RC , UK, Thursday, November 27, 2014, 14:56 (3447 days ago)
edited by RC, Thursday, November 27, 2014, 15:04

Bungie changed the damage scaling in Strikes to make it so having more people is always a help rather than a hindrance. Fair enough.

But more than having multiple times the firepower, co-op is always orders of magnitude easier because the revive and respawn mechanics mean you can die many times in the same encounter, come back, and keep your progress. A very similar thing applies to Halo, BTW.

This disparity is perhaps most evident at the Nightfall Weekly Strikes. Where solo runs are super-hardcore no-death affairs, whereas co-op can be kinda leisurely. Plenty of mistakes can happen, but as long as one person is cautious and can camo/bubble-revive, self-revive or slowly work through enemies it'll always get done.

So to fix this:

Standard Strikes

• Lift all Darkness Zones (effectively)
  
• Respawn in 10 seconds (even for solo players)

Nightfall Strikes

• Have checkpoints
  
• No revives in Darkness Zones
  
• No respawns in Darkness Zones
  
• Dead players auto-revive at checkpoints/exit from Darkness Zones (like Hard Mode Raid)
  
• Join-in-Progress players are dead until next checkpoint
  
• *Introduce additional reward for zero team deaths / generalised performance bonus mechanic

The advantages are that co-op and solo difficulty are brought much closer together, Solo Players feel less screwed and it maintains the idea that extra people are always a help.

Some disadvantages are that it'd be necessary to totally redefine the Nightfall Skull, the revive feature is not used as much and co-op nightfall might be harder than it is now.

Co-opers would get checkpoints in exchange though, and maybe they could reduce the damage a little so it's easier. Solo Players would especially appreciate that as there have been quite a few complaints over the last couple of weeks.

Personally, I can't conceive of a way to really keep the revive feature as-is that doesn't unduly screw over people who don't have a teammate or two. If it was like the above, extra people would pretty much always be a help except if you were going for a no-deaths reward. Then you'd want to pick your teammates carefully. That would probably be OK because that's how it works with the Flawless Raider achievement already.

Changing the revive mechanic so solo-ers can have some use out of it goes down a whole new rabbit hole that I haven't put enough thought into exploring yet. Maybe some other time.

More Challenge?
With checkpoints re-introduced to Nightfall, and revives eliminated, it'd be conceptually simple to increase the challenge again (if desirable) by reducing the frequency of checkpoints. At the extreme end, you could eliminate checkpoints entirely again. But this time, if a co-op teammate died, they'd stay dead for the rest of the strike. You'd have to think carefully whether to continue with fewer players or start over.

A good way to have this ability might be to split nightfall into a few skulls (like the Heroic/Epic duality). How about so:

• Nightfall: No revives or respawns in Darkness Zones. Auto-revives at checkpoints.
  
• Endure: Checkpoints occur 1/3 as often.
  
• Survive: No Checkpoints. Good luck.

Thus, Destiny is made a better game.

That's my armchair game design done for the day. ;)