Guns as reward, not tools (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Thursday, December 04, 2014, 10:51 (3742 days ago) @ CyberKN

Honestly, ALL the exotic perks should work like how Ice Breaker's Regenerating ammo is available from the get-go. Some of them are an absolute chore to use until you get those perks.

I think the problem lies with how Bungie views the guns: as reward and not as tools.

In a game you have a bunch of challenges, and so you give the player tools to tackle those challenges. Ways to attack, ways to move, etc. So it's up to the player to take what they have and use it to overcome the challenge. Weapons are a pretty huge part of that.

So rather than hiding weapons away and treating them like a reward, they should be instead rolled in to the larger design of the game. You wouldn't play chess without access to a knight or a bishop for example; the game is built around the players having all of those pieces, and the fun comes from using them in combination.

So, Destiny could be built around the idea that as players progress their arsenal will expand in a predicable way, and thus the challenges could better integrate all the tools. If you know by the time the player hit the raid, or hits level 30 that his arsenal will be xyz, then your challenges could be set to require creative use of those guns, in interesting combinations. Combinations not just meaning between your primary, special, and heavy slot, but with the other players of your fireteam.

I feel like because the acquisition of gear is not predictable, it's holding back the content from requiring a lot of cool creativity to complete. I remember when I first heard about the orb mechanic, I thought for sure the raid was going to be really hard unless you co-ordinate with your fireteam to keep each other's supers charged. This is not in the game. The closest I've come to that is SpeedRacer and myself generating orbs for each other during the legions phase in the raid, allowing us to perpetually alternate golden guns and dispatch the harpies. Still, that is hardly required, and we can do just fine without that.

I figured exotics would be more… exotic and allow for crazy combinations that would be required simply in order to survive on the harder stuff. Basically an extension of the idea that you have crazy challenges, and the guns are the tools to overcome it. When you hide them away and make them hard to get, you lose that element.