Super weapons break the game (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, June 01, 2015, 15:43 (3465 days ago) @ yakaman
edited by Cody Miller, Monday, June 01, 2015, 15:47

And once you've set a bar, there's no going backwards. An epic gun cannot be rolled back or taken back; it can be nerfed but that causes issues of its own. So how can you keep upping the stakes to keep people playing? It makes me wonder if Cody isn't right about RNG loot: bad in principle.

Exactly. I don't see how hard this is to understand. If you design your game with specific guns that are acquired in specific ways, then all the challenges can actually be designed knowing what players will have access to. With RNG loot, challenges can't require a wide variety of gun types or things like that because you might not have it yet. But when the gear acquisition itself is well integrated into your game, then you can balance out all the guns with each other, and with each activity.

This is even demonstrated in the PvE end game activities: they are becoming more and more difficult and bullet spongy. PoE is way worse than Crota's end with bullet sponge enemies, and people complained a lot about them back in TDB! The key is not to make the end game stuff difficult, but to make it challenging. That means having a wide variety of unique unusual scenarios, and giving players access to a variety of different tools by which to solve those scenarios. It doesn't mean making bosses with 2 million hit points.