Huh. I wonder how that will be implemented.

Many RPG fans will know that luck is a common statistic found in those types of games. While not an MMORPG, Destiny has included ‘luck’ in the game to give players a sense of advancement in the open world. The higher your luck is, the larger your leeway is when making a shot.

Well fuck.

Bungie, developers of Halo, has also talked about their experience with randomizing hit detection in the original Halo games. Founder Jason Jones says, “It is one of the breakthroughs of the first Halo trilogy. We discovered that the thrill of killing people is what turns people on to first-person shooters. Giving people more opportunities to kill other players only made Halo better.”

Jones says that they will be incorporating this mechanic in Destiny saying, “Many RPG fans will know that luck is a common statistic found in those types of games. While not an MMORPG, Destiny has included ‘luck’ in the game to give players a sense of advancement in the open world. The higher your luck is, the larger your leeway is when making a shot. This innovation in first-person shooters will revolutionize the genre just like we did with Halo.”

I'm reticent to jump to any conclusions since this is so ambiguous, but what do you think Jason is talking about? From that tiny quote it sounds to me like he's saying lower level players will have a messier bullet spread or less forgiving auto-aim.

I'm a huge fan of RPGs but traditional pen & paper style combat systems based heavily on random dice-rolls and statistics always seem out of place in video games to me unless the underlying mechanics are way, way out of view.

As much as I love the modern RPG revival with KoTOR and all its progeny, the combat in those games has always felt clunky. If my character fires a blaster straight up in someone's face, the hit ought to connect whether the game rolls all 20s, a critical failure, or anything in between. You have much more immediate and direct control over your character in a video game than in a tabletop setting where everything passes through the dungeon master. They're totally different settings and should be treated as such.

Fishy as hell article. What does "networking randomness" mean exactly, why does only 1 developer cited in the article actually mention anything about randomness (Jason Jones' whole section reads like it's actually about bullet magnetism, while the Counter Strike stuff could just as easily be cast as an argument that dedis are awesome), and is the "80% random" thing actually something a developer said or was that just a misuse of the clan motto of some CoD player?

Certainly, if we take this to mean that hit detection itself is randomized, Halo doesn't seem to have any intentionally-implemented such randomness unless you really want to argue that shot spread falls into that category. What networking-related gunplay inconsistancies exist in, say, Reach feel extremely host-dependant and I would be very surprised if they were remotely intentional to level a playing field.

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Anyway, speaking of Jason Jones talking about magnetism:

Jones says that they will be incorporating this mechanic in Destiny saying, “Many RPG fans will know that luck is a common statistic found in those types of games. While not an MMORPG, Destiny has included ‘luck’ in the game to give players a sense of advancement in the open world. The higher your luck is, the larger your leeway is when making a shot. This innovation in first-person shooters will revolutionize the genre just like we did with Halo.”

...that's what this reads like. Could be more than spatial magnetism, of course; "leeway" could involve a time component as well, i.e. more lenient hitting-targets-dodging-behind-walls timing, though that would be absolutely bizarre.

In any case, I don't see why the term "leeway" would be used if it was a dice roll adjustment. Nor would making the networking intentionally less responsive for new players make much sense at all.

The quote does concern me, though. Regardless of interpretation, it's saying that the game is in at least some respect going to vary in responsiveness according to a progression system. That a new player who makes the exact same shot as an experienced player is, due to intentional internal systems, going to miss in situations where the experienced guy would have registered a hit. If that's intentional shot-dropping, that strikes me as somewhat terrible (but it also seems unlikely), and if it's magnetism adjustments, it means the game's gunplay could easily become less awesome as you progress. I don't want to totally write the idea off, but it's going to take a lot to convince me. My knee-jerk reaction is in the realm of "you go from CE pistol gunplay to Halo 4 DMR gunplay as you progress? Weak!"

http://www.p4rgaming.com/?p=1519

I'm not so sure I trust this site.

http://www.p4rgaming.com/?p=1607
. . . egg and our collective face.