Insane. (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, September 03, 2015, 23:15 (3466 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I completely stand by my interpretation of your statements:

I don't think you are getting what I am saying. Otherwise, you would not have enjoyed pretty much any game ever. You liked Halo. Every level in Halo operated the way I am describing. No progression, just the experience of the challenge. It worked, and it didn't lock anybody out, because the game had multiple difficulty levels. If you simply didn't have a lot of skill at the game, you played on easy.

Sigh.

Because EVERY level in Halo operated that way. Halo was not an RPG. It had no RPG elements whatsoever. It has no advancement whatsoever.

Destiny DOES have RPG elements. Loot drops and XP are part of its central mechanics, part of the essential experience of playing it, and that experience is accessed in part by the exercise of skill (as in the pure action game, Halo) but partly just through participation, which is easily shown in how you can have two players in Destiny at the same level but with wildly varying levels of skill at different activities.

[snip the bit where you preemptively stipulate to what I just wrote, recognizing that what you wrote was redundant and beside the point]

Unless you can make an argument as to why grinding, replaying the same stuff over and over is enjoyable of course.

RNG in RPGs functions the way time does in the universe-- it prevents everything from happening at once. Grind is basically just the negative way of describing the sensation of not getting everything you want at the precise moment you want it.

Part of Destiny's experience in growing and building your character is having your character be different from others. Network effects make this exceedingly difficult. Over and over modern games get solved by brute force, exploited, and min-maxed to within an inch of their lives. People figure out what the best way of doing something is (or, as is just as likely, what they mistakenly THINK is the best way of doing something-- remember the loot cave?-- and the game becomes a mad rush for every player to do that thing to the exclusion of all else, and then complain about how that game is only that one single repetitive thing and is no fun.

Most of the gates, RNG included, are there to preserve that variance. I didn't have a gyllenhaal, for instance, until Xur sold it the second time. In a lot of activities I had to admit I didn't have one, and find a substitute. At first I heard about how great the gun was, then how overpowered it was, and then how it made things boring because they were too easy. The repetition itself may not bring enjoyability to the game, but it preserves one of the qualities that makes the game experience enjoyable by keeping every player and their gear from collapsing to an identical set. (One is, of course, free to avoid the repetition mostly by giving up the goal of collecting every damn thing in the game in an attempt to make every player's inventory identical to every other player's. This is why I'm not a fan of Bungie caving in to demands for more Vault space, and the blueprint system seems even worse. No exotic is special now, nothing can be lost, it's just a collection of bobbleheads.)

What if there had been a single skill-gated way to force it to drop? What if that method had then been exploited, as it surely would have been? How much louder would the complaints have been if the entire past year had been like the last couple of weeks-- burning things with G-horn and finishing in five minutes things that used to take half an hour?

The replaying the same stuff over argument is BS and always has been. Halo offered nothing else. The difference between Halo and Destiny is that because of the advancement, the investment, and yes, the RNG loot, there IS an incentive to keep playing the same things over if you want. Halo offered no incentive for replay at that kind of frequency. You played the game up to its highest difficulty, searched for some collectibles, and then you were done. If you kept playing you were essentially grinding without incentive-- "replaying the same stuff over and over" as you said.

You can stop playing. The game won't mind. We won't mind. You keep whining and crying and threatening and reconciling and it's like an unfunny parody of a battered spouse in bad taste. Destiny is not heroin. You can stop if you want to. I can stop if I want to. I don't want to. You are constantly threatening to quit if the game doesn't do what you consider to be obvious, and the game keeps on not doing what you want. At this point, you replaying the same stuff over and over again isn't the definition of boredom, its the definition of insanity-- you keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different result.

You know what kind of skill-enforced gate I'd like to see in Destiny?

A random chance for player death (or perhaps team wipe in certain activities) to result in loss of gear. Give those sunsingers a bit of pause before rushing on ahead without thinking.