WoW gets lots of things wrong (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, December 12, 2014, 11:23 (3871 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

Like the expansions invalidating past progress, or totally revamping your skills, etc... It's the belief that the Endgame is The Game combined with a belief that the only way to draw in new players is to get them to the Endgame as quickly as possible. Somewhere along the way they forgot that the leveling up portion of WoW is REALLY FUN and GOOD and has GOOD STORY and CHARACTERS. The exploration is FUN and GOOD and has INTERESTING AREAS TO VISIT.

Destiny bought this Blizzard bullshit hook, line, and sinker, and contains (basically) 100% endgame content. Some of this is innovative and well planned (how low level monsters interact with high level characters), but lots of it is Blizzard Bullshit. Light levels on gear gets you to the endgame more quickly, which is both clever and bullshit, and lots of the stuff I love from Bungie games of the past is gone, which is super bullshit. Where's CTF? Oddball? Vehicles with more than one seat? Plant the bomb in the enemy base? Storm the beach / defend the base (was that called Assault?)? Flying vehicles? I have space ships but no space combat. I have "all" of Earth, but really it's just Old Russia.

The whole game is geared towards forcing you to run the same strikes and raids over and over and over to get better gear, but the strikes aren't really fun (more of a chore), and the difficulty balance and punishment for failure are so skewed that they favor even less fun play like cheesing boss fights instead of beating them the way they were designed. Instead of difficulty giving enemies better AI, they just have more HP, or shields, or yellow health bars, or all of those things.

It's really MMO design in a FPS shell, but they threw out the FPS design stuff that makes FPSes fun like smart enemies and effective use of cover and OMG a decent story.

So using WoW as the gold standard for comparison is only validated by the amount of money WoW has brought in, not by any of the design decisions that were made in WoW. There is, somewhere in there, a good game, but it's not the game emphasized by the company at all and is certainly not the game Destiny is trying to be.

I feel like Destiny is fun despite itself, and not because it was intended to be fun.