Found an article that quotes Jason Jones talking about netcode and hit detection and mentions briefly how they will be implementing it in Destiny.

FPS Developers Admit Online Multiplayer is 80% Random with Hit Calculations

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!"

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.

How will this play out in a competitive multiplayer setting? That needs answered, I think. The idea that you could be fired upon by somebody who happens to have a high luck statistic and they hit you even without a good aim is deeply disconcerting to me.

The idea that you could be fired upon by somebody who happens to have a high luck statistic and they hit you even without a good aim is deeply disconcerting to me.

I swear that this was implemented in Halo 4 MP for everyone but me! Now I have an excuse to suck.

I swear that this was implemented in Halo 4 MP for everyone but me! Now I have an excuse to suck.

DANG IT YOU BEAT ME TO A VALID EXCUSE!

Another reason I dislike this in a competitive multiplayer environment is because of the positive feedback loop effect. You can see exactly the same thing in (for example) PvP in World of Warcraft: better players are rewarded with gear that makes them stronger in competitive multiplayer, which gives them even more of a competitive advantage than before. One thing that games like the Halo series does well (well, up until 4 at least) is it gives everyone access to the exact same toolset.

I await further clarification I guess…

How will this play out in a competitive multiplayer setting? That needs answered, I think. The idea that you could be fired upon by somebody who happens to have a high luck statistic and they hit you even without a good aim is deeply disconcerting to me.

I would hope that the "luck" idea would only apply for campaign. They even have separate places where you go to play "Faction Warfare" so it seems possible, if not likely, that they will have separate balancing for versus compared to co-op.

DANG IT YOU BEAT ME TO A VALID EXCUSE!

YOU MEAN I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE?!?

I hope Luck determines intensity and not polarity of luck.

I like the idea of being lucky and finding the rarest weapon in the game only moments later to get hit by a passing bus.

I hope Luck determines intensity and not polarity of luck.

I like the idea of being lucky and finding the rarest weapon in the game only moments later to get hit by a passing bus.

The more lucky you are the more careful you have to be. I imagine a Guardian sitting at home afraid to leave because he doesn't know if he's going to win The City's Luck of the Traveler Lottery or get run over by a spider tank.

While I think that a "luck" statistic (or variable, or whatever it is depending on how it's implemented) is fine for PvE, I don't think it's fine for the competitive multiplayer portion of the game. Let's just hope it's not a part of competitive multiplayer.

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.

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

I'm not so sure I trust this site anymore.

Nah it all looks legit. What would be delicious is if Xenos knew just how (not) legit the site was before he made the front page. As it is I think this might be the first case of DBO getting trolled. :)

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

I'm not so sure I trust this site anymore.

Nah it all looks legit. What would be delicious is if Xenos knew just how (not) legit the site was before he made the front page. As it is I think this might be the first case of DBO getting trolled. :)

Can I pretend that's what I was doing? Haha. Next time I will be checking the rest of the site before sharing :)

Can I pretend that's what I was doing? Haha.

Well, I already deleted the post I made speculating on it, hoping that Bungie would clarify it . . . so YES! Pretend away!

Hey, at least you get a fun historical footnote attached to your name :)

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.

I don't know, it's not unheard-of for various things, including websites, to have actual news and, well, not-actual news. The second piece looks like satire to me and the first one could be satire or just straight-up humor. That said the article that started this seems to have a similar hyperbole to it to these two (anyone notice how he casually mentions revolutionizing the genre?).

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