Raids (Destiny)

by Leisandir , Virginia, USA, Thursday, May 09, 2013, 09:17 (4007 days ago) @ Cold

I hope to God it isn't "loot oriented." There's a difference between including loot drops and having that be the focus of the game.

Bungie writes interesting worlds. I want to explore those worlds, and then move on to new ones; come back to the old ones to look around again, see what's changed. I most certainly do not want to do repeat "playthroughs" or whatever equivalent there is for Destiny.

The problem with your suggestion is that, based on existing games which utilize progressively improved gear, making the game unbeatable or at least extremely difficult to beat on the hardest difficulty without top-tier equipment requires artificial difficulty and not challenge. The issue comes from the fact that tiered equipment is rarely functionally different; the numbers go up, but what it does remains the same. Your Level 99 Sword of Truth still hits things, just like the garden hoe you started with, it just makes bigger chunks of health go away with each swing - but since encounters tend to scale numerically with level, you're not really any more effective than you were at the start. A really interesting difficulty curve involves making enemies function more intelligently, creating new encounters which throw more and various enemies at you in different environments, that sort of thing. Crysis (the first one!) did this really well; the enemy aimbot didn't improve on hard-mode, but they spoke Korean instead of English, you didn't have an aim-point without ironsights, no grenade indicator, and when driving a vehicle, you could either drive or operate the gun, but not both at once.

Bungie, of course, could totally knock this out of the park if they made higher-tier items functionally different. Or maybe even do away with tiers of items, and just have item types; no Mark IX Battle Rifle with Extended Magazine and Anti-Tank Augments versus Hunting Rifle, but rather mid-range anti-personnel rifle versus shotgun, or heavy-but-slow armor versus fragile-but-agile light armor.

Uhhh, I'm rambling, back to the point. There are players, myself included, who tackle a game on hard-mode right off (well, never could do that on Halo, but most other shooters). We've been playing first-person shooters since we could walk, we know what we're doing, and we don't want developers trying to slow us down by forcing us to wade through a swamp of grinding to get a nice new gun or whatever; we want to jump right in and have our shooting-and-strafing skills be challenged.