You assume... (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Sunday, June 21, 2015, 18:30 (3682 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Korny, Sunday, June 21, 2015, 18:35

It should be tough, it should be frustrating, and it should take a long time to get through. Checkpoints negate that, because they turn a great challenge into bite sized baby steps that you can do throughout the week.

You have clearly missed the point of what made arcade games so good. Most arcade games take less than 45 minutes to beat. Most are around 35. Why is that? Because when you can't save, and have to start over from the beginning, asking the player to play at a high level, perfectly, without mistakes for more than a half hour is unreasonable. This is why nearly all games that don;t save your progress are short.

You miss out that in order to finish the arcade games in such a short time, you have to play very well, or pay money to continue. If you get 90% done, but don't have enough money, you end up back at the beginning of the entire game with nothing to show for it. My older sister and I would play House of the Dead 2 for hours and hours, never reaching the end, until almost a year after we first played it, and yet up to and including that point, we never had checkpoints or anything to show for it. Your mistakes cost money. In the Skolas fight, your mistakes cost time. Are you suggesting that Bungie should add microtransactions that let you prevent a team wipe? They totally could (Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare lets you do this). But the Skolas fight lets you skip the first hour or so simply by restarting you at his fight.

As for challenging experiences being short, Dead Space 2's "Hard Core" difficulty is one of my favorite gaming experiences ever. In it, you have to beat the entire game with only three checkpoints at your disposal. What that means is that if you want to make progress, you have to play flawlessly, and nonstop for at least four hours at a time. Unreasonable for even dedicated gamers, much less the casuals that love checkpoints, but it is seriously one of the best gaming experiences one could ask for; every enemy is terrifying, every bit of ammo precious, and every step forward is a chance to lose all progress... I didn't beat it at that difficulty until the anniversary of the day that I bought the game; it was that tough, and I had to prepare mentally for it... I highly recommend it.

A different example; The Last of Us's "Grounded" difficulty is extremely unforgiving, and death sends you back two checkpoints. And yet, the game doesn't get any shorter or hold your hand if you wasted ammo before you really needed it. In fact, I spent hours repeatedly playing a segment over and over just to get it right. Similarly, the Skolas fight is difficult in that you have to start it over sometimes just because of one mistake (such as when the infected Guardian is the last man standing, or when you simply don't make it to the mines in time). Of course you start from the beginning with nothing to show for it (Cyber, Destroyo, and I got Skolas down to 10% health at one point, but after dismantling the second mines, Cyber and Destroyo died, leaving me with the Infection and nobody to hand it to).

There is a sweet spot to challenges. At some point it becomes endurance and not really a challenge in the fun sense. There is nothing inherently more challenging with having to do Skolas in one go. You already get infinite continues. A Checkpoint changes none of that.

But here's the thing with the Skolas fight. If you do everything flawlessly, the entire thing is around an hour, maybe less. The only reason it's longer is because of lack of skill, communication, or the occasional disconnect (which I've never encountered, but you can rejoin). The disconnect is an issue that has been acknowledged and addressed already, so if you are still running the PoE, you should be ready for this apparent eventuality. It's not by design, so checkpoints wouldn't change the fact that you'll still get kicked out mid-game, especially since you can already rejoin (although that too might not be by design).