Minimizing the Burden of the Investment System (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Monday, December 15, 2014, 19:07 (3871 days ago) @ Dan de Board
edited by General Vagueness, Monday, December 15, 2014, 19:14

The key to MMORPG design is advancement. Players are constantly in a state of advancing their character, their gear, or through quests. For a fresh release, the initial content is designed to teach the player how to play the game by earning skills and equipment at a rate which corresponds with the increasing difficulty of the game which ends with a penultimate challenge. Eventually, players will beat this penultimate challenge, have the best gear and all the abilities and will want a new challenge to beat.

Actually after the penultimate challenge they would have at least one that's above it-- penultimate means "second to last/second greatest". ;P just FYI

What does that mean for perks and armour stats (Intellect, Discipline and Strength)? Perks would be divided into Weapon perks and Guardian perks and be earned like weapons and armour by earning reputation with a particular manufacturer. Once a Weapon perk is earned, you can apply it to any weapon you have available. Guardian perks would be applied to your Guardian, not your armour like in game. As for armour stats, those would be another two columns in your subclass grid.

Subclasses would function just like they always do, except with the addition of the armour stat columns. Many people may decry that by removing levels from the game, it makes leveling up subclasses less intuitive.

The levels, not really, but for moving perks around I would say so. I feel like I need a chart to understand what you're proposing.

Now that I've messed up the whole game, what does that mean for Exotics? Well, Exotics are a bit of a different breed. The current way of earning many Exotics is generally flawed. Exotic Bounties are a step in the right direction, but what if you weren't explicitly told what to do.

If you weren't told people would look it up on-line-- which they already mostly do, even when the directions aren't that vague. The people who don't feel like doing that would most likely just not do exotic bounties.

Once earned, Exotic Weapons would have its two perks predetermined.

What about the other three or four perks?

Exotic Armour would take up one of the Guardian perk slots available.

Interesting, how would that work exactly?

With Levels, Attack and Defense out of the picture, anyone would be able to get Exotics at any given time, but they would require players of exceptional skill and cunning to earn them.

That, or, again, they'd look it up, and maybe even be miffed the game didn't just tell them. They'd also cheese the skill parts, again like they already do, I got a request just last night to camp in a room with someone (in Rumble no less) to help them farm void damage kills for a bounty. There are things that effectively can't be cheesed, like playing the Moon strike on heroic and waiting for a specific guy to show up and killing him, but those also tend to be the parts complained about the most. I mean, I'm on your side, exploration and trying different things and having some actual challenge sound great to me, but most players aren't like that, and we do have some of that in the current setup.

So, that's the end of my spiel. What do you guys think?

Sort of a side thing, but for perks, I wish some of them stacked instead of being a choice, because there are several in the Hunter subclasses and probably one or two in the first Warlock subclass (I haven't used my Titan much yet or started on the other Warlock subclass) that have marginal usefulness and they feel like wasted slots, only there to give you a minor boost to this or that while you're leveling up to the good stuff. (While I'm asking about perks, I seem to remember one from early demonstrations where the throwing knife would cause things to be struck by lightning. I will have the man-babies of anyone in Bungie that can make that happen for me in the released game.)