Concrete paths. (Destiny)

by RaichuKFM , Northeastern Ohio, Saturday, September 05, 2015, 16:30 (3464 days ago) @ narcogen

This is the same drum Cody's been banging,

Well, it was kind of supposed to be.

and I really hope Bungie does not cave to this because it's pretty antithetical to what I think they want for the Destiny experience.

Fair. I'm not sure it's antithetical to what they want; it'd just mean that all the Crucible/Vanguard weapons/armor would be at the Vendors, like they used to be, and all Exotics would have bounties or be available from Xur in a reliable manner. Like, perhaps, turning in Strange Coins with him for the week's selection, but a token that comes from [Insert whatever here] can be redeemed for any Exotic. These might not be trivial, and could be in addition to random drops (which is how I'd prefer). Really just an expansion of how the Vendors work to include everything. And, hell, you can do away with the provision against endgame content; I'm angling at what I figured Cody was advocating and ways to achieve it to try and offer context to the discussion, mostly for myself. It's different from the game's philosophy at present, and might not really hit what they want, but I don't think it's antithetical to it. My point here is not that this would be better. I would be the first to say that quality of a game is all subjective, and the closest thing to an objective measure is a consensus judgement, which is still subjective. I was tossing some stuff out to gauge how well I was reading Cody. I'm certainly not seriously expecting Bungie to listen to me, or even humorously doing so.

The problem is that balancing weapons and gear is exceedingly difficult, and even more difficult than that is creating a perception of balance. Player bases tend to get polarized; the idea that this weapon or that helmet is something that everybody needs to have spreads like wildfire. When all the gear has a concrete path, things get reductionist. Everybody needs to have this gun and the others are crap; people do the thing to get that gun. Everybody has that gun. The gun everybody wanted is now passe because everybody has it. It's so good it makes the game boring, but everything else is worse and not worth playing for.

Look at the loot cave. The loot cave was actually NOT a better way of getting loot than just about any activity in the game. A lot of the glorious screenshots of loot on the ground consisted mostly of ammo drops-- drops you needed to collect in order to keep shooting the loot cave. Bungie's problem was not so much that it had inadvertently created a mechanic that allowed players to shortcircuit the game's reward system as much as it created a situation that allowed players to believe that they had shortcircuited it-- and that was enough.

I like Saharas, and use them, even though they're basically the opposite of what everyone thinks are great. I am sure under the situation where everyone could have a Gjallarhorn, than everyone would have a Gjallarhorn; if it really was overpowered, it would be nerfed, because everyone would have one, I'd imagine. If it just felt like it was, then people would be bored because the best gun isn't really fun, but I don't see why they just wouldn't be bored anyways. Ideally, they'd try a less boring gun and have fun with it. People who can't put efficacy aside in the name of fun when it's actively in their best interest to do so, are not people whose philosophy I quite understand. There'd have to be some manner of addressing that problem, which I'm sure could be done, because plenty of games just leave all the guns available all the time, or reasonably attainable; I'm certain the system could be hammered into something very workable, but it would gradually depart from what Destiny is as one does so, which is why I wanted to know how Cody intended for his ideal vision to be arrived at smoothly from now, because, you know, you're right, there is a problem in what I postulated that needs fixing, even just from the simple description given, even if it's just an exaggerated version of one that already exists. Nice perspective, that.

I mean, I'm not a game designer; all I can say is that I, personally, would prefer the hypothetical scenarios I was imagining in bullet point one, and bullet point two, even though I'm pretty sure the second would be worse for the game overall than what we have now, and the first is hardly flawless, and neither are the kind of change that's going to happen, at least not soon. (Which is why I was not really advocating anything, I guess.)