Really good points. As you stated, a lot of it is speculation, and who knows what the actual mechanic here is. Who knows if the gun abilities only add more fun to the game and an added amount of complexity as opposed to something designed to keep you grinding until you can beat the next super strong baddy.

Your thoughts on combat are a problem I've had with MMOs for a very long time. I feel you're spot on. But this shared world experience could mean more. Does it all come down to battles? One of the questions I asked a while back (and it may be a while more before we ever find out) was whether or not guilds/clans are designed for combat. What about just going on quests and exploring? Are we going to be attacked and in combat constantly? What about the mystery of where we are and where we're going and what we might find? How intellectual will the game be?

This E3 reveal definitely looked more like a basic mechanics/combat demo to try and show action, fun, environments, and the way some things might work. I'm excited to see what comes next, particularly what comes next that doesn't revolve around combat.

"Ask yourself, if the players you see on the screen were replaced with perfect bots who could play like your friends, and maybe even voice chat like them"
I'd like to talk about how I disagree with you, but I'm busy imagining how we'd have essentially robot people who live to play games.
"AI will never be good enough."
Awwwwwwww.

Anyway, I play Dungeons & Dragons and there are numbers to go up in that. If you are insulting stats, then you are being so dumb I can't talk to you. Insulting stats in a certain game: Fine. Disliking stats in general: Fine. Saying they are objectively bad in most cases, that they are inherently bad, I just can't accept that. Look, Cody, you don't like stats. The end. There isn't anything more here if you are going to extend that to them being bad. I'm sorry I'm so confrontational, but you just made a VERY stupid blanket statement, and I stayed up too late. Okay, I'm calm again, so I'm just gonna step out for my own good, especially since you seem to be against one particular type of stat but masking it with hatred of stats in general.

The idea of having a shared world, AND the player becoming a legend is incompatible. Bungie describes Destiny as a shared world shooter, and also tells us our mission as a guardian is important and we can become legend.

So let's say the world is shared. You go through the wall, and find someone else has already take out all the enemies and gotten the loot. Drat, nothing to do! In fact, while you weren't playing someone went and did it all, and now they are the hero. And so in games like this, most people inevitably do NOT play a hero. They play the peon. Look at EVE or the old star wars galaxies. Most people in EVE just mine shit and work for a corporation; very few people get to be big players (heroes). Same in Star Wars galaxies. Most people made livings doing boring things, and becoming a jedi was outrageously hard that few people managed.

I think Destiny will work in a manner similar to SWTOR, in the sense that the game will be divided into the "public canon" and the "player canon." Certain events (like the public event we saw at E3) will be shared experiences that happen to all Destiny players. Other events, probably the main story events, will be more akin to traditional campaign missions and each player will experience these missions separately within their own personal canons. Hopefully there will be some choice involved a la Mass Effect so that players have a direct impact on the direction of the story. Either way, because each player will be able to complete the main story events separately in their own separate private canons, each player will in fact be a hero... just of their particular canon.

The standard for these sorts of shared worlds are MMOs like WOW, but isn't it Ironic that WoW has a reputation for breeding anti social dweebs who live in their parent's basement? Why is it that this is the conception of hardcore wow players? If the game were so social, wouldn't the hardcore players be suave, charismatic, organized, well versed in reading humans, etc? Of course not, because WoW is not a social game.

Isn't it ironic that you see fit to comment on a game that you don't play, and base your analysis of the people that do on an intentionally trolling caricature from a comedy program made nearly 7 years ago. Your actual knowledge and understanding of the social scene surrounding WoW and its communities is clearly nil. Not that I think that's an excuse for what you wrote, which is bigotry, plain and simple.

I don't know if they plan to do this, but I don't see how they couldn't [...]

...and that is why you fail.

Yes, WoW was anti-social most of the time, except the occasional meetups. And yes, I also see couch multiplayer as the social gaming :P That's why that's almost the only gaming I do nowadays, and it happens very seldom.

Oh, and yes, that is how RPGs work. To keep you from jumping the content wall, you get to grind. Nothing new there, and nothing unexpected. Even the original Zelda worked like this, get more hearts if it is too hard, find more gear to get to new places.

I'm pretty sure it is sensible to have the access to the world progressing this way, it will make it feel like just that, like you are making progress. Perhaps not in player skill, but that is not RPG that is real world physical skills, but your avatar progresses by gaining levels and gear. Pretty much how RPGs have always worked, no?

So basically you're annoyed it's no longer only a skill-based twitch-shooter but an RPG? I'm not sure if this is news :D And sorry if I'm talking out of my ass, I fell asleep before the gameplay reveal and I'm waiting for the video to come online, heh! :x

Leaving aside some of your more . . . Cody-like comments . . .

The idea of having a shared world, AND the player becoming a legend is incompatible. Bungie describes Destiny as a shared world shooter, and also tells us our mission as a guardian is important and we can become legend.

I think this is an interesting point, and one that got to me when we were watching the trailer and the Guardian met the pale-faced-man in the Wilds.

Is this guy just sitting in his bunker waiting for every player to come past? What happens if two people come past at once? This reminds me of when my sis and I would play co-op in Halo and run to trigger the cutscene so it would be 'our' Chief who was getting the canon plot points. Sure, it was just a silly little minigame we made up, but it comes from exactly this issue. Who is moving the story forward?

We have so precious few ways of moving our own stories forward in life that I think it's an important component of gaming fantasy.

Ehhh, I'll trust what I saw over your idle speculation and confirmation bias.

What I saw was a skill based shooter, with lots of movement options, some special powers, and some cool guns. I saw one single upgrade system, in which you invested resources into a single gun.

While that system looked like a linear power gain, the idea of upgrading a single weapon presents interesting opportunities. Do I stay with the gun I've invested, or do I jump to something more powerful? How limited are talent points, weapon upgrade kits and glimmer? Upgrade systems are great, as long as they incorporate choice and consequence, and a per weapon upgrade system can easily accomplish both of those, even if each weapon has a linear progression. FWIW, we also saw some player levels, but we don't know how that stuff works yet.

Nothing in the content jumped out as grind gated to me; the arenas were designed so you could manuever, you had slides, and double jumps to avoid fire, only a few attacks were hitscan. As long as you can avoid damage, and deal damage player skill can trump stats. I'm looking forward to seeing the exact balance of these things, as hopefully it hews closer to something like Dark Souls, where Soul Level 1 video series are a thing.

As for the social stuff, it's too early to see. I mean, people can be part of things and feel awesome about that, even if you can't all be the Scarab Lord. We also know Destiny has some kind of factional warfare, so we'll see how that works too.

It's just a game.

... I really don't care. :)

You're criticizing Destiny's solution to problems that you don't even know it has in the first place.

I just don't see the fun in wasting all the time till a game's release wanting to dislike it and picking it apart with a negative microscope. With such an approach, when the game does come out it doesn't just have to be good, it has to work extra hard to fight back all these month of jaded-ly waiting for it to be bad! It's just a spiral of cynicism.

Do you think that Bungie will make it impossible to progress without upgrades. Literally impossible as opposed to extremely difficult. Do you think that they would have an if statement that looks at your upgradedness and won't let you prevail no matter what you did?

If not then not upgrading would be like SLASO on steroids.

I'm not getting into the mechanics of game types and so on, but here's a few general thoughts.

I've been the peon in the great majority of the multiplayer games I've played, and I've still had fun. Occasionally, I've done something cool that saved the day, and that's been memorable (maybe even legendary)--maybe more so than if it weren't so surprising.

I'm already a legend according to Bungie. I've beaten their games on legendary. Regarding becoming a legend, I think you're reading rhetoric as if it's a spec.

I want to mention the fun part again, because it's important. Some would say the most important. Some like me.

What you describe does not sound like fun, yet if there's one thing I trust Bungie to do, it's to create a game that is fun. That's why, to me, your criticisms seem a little premature.

That's not to say that I don't have questions about how the sharing will be handled in a way that allows everyone to have a degree of fun. I do. We shall see.

The idea of having a shared world, AND the player becoming a legend is incompatible. Bungie describes Destiny as a shared world shooter, and also tells us our mission as a guardian is important and we can become legend.

This is obviously a big design challenge. Most games solve it by sacrificing the context to the play. Raid content respawns on schedule, and people get to be the legend over and over again. Everybody in Azeroth gets a chance to kill the big bad bosses as many time as they want.

So let's say the world is shared. You go through the wall, and find someone else has already take out all the enemies and gotten the loot. Drat, nothing to do! In fact, while you weren't playing someone went and did it all, and now they are the hero.

Did you watch the interviews Staten did over the demo? It doesn't look like this can happen. From what he said and what I've seen, what's going on when players enter a public area is that some matchmaking logic spawns an instance, and when the event starts, available players that get matched get thrown into the instance. Everyone who plays that event will be in it at the start; that's the drop-in point. I don't think they'll let people walk in on the end of someone else's public event instance.

I think when Bungie says "public space" w/r/t events they are talking about "a space in which you may meet anyone" not "a space in which you will meet everyone". The former is "shared world", the latter is "massively multiplayer" which Bungie has disavowed at nearly every turn.

If you think about it, what's really going on here is that traditional party coop play through private spaces is substituting for things like the matchmaking lobby, and a public event is like a firefight matchmaking session.

And so in games like this, most people inevitably do NOT play a hero. They play the peon. Look at EVE or the old star wars galaxies. Most people in EVE just mine shit and work for a corporation; very few people get to be big players (heroes). Same in Star Wars galaxies. Most people made livings doing boring things, and becoming a jedi was outrageously hard that few people managed.

Those are all MMOs that either have a single server or shards where thousands of players are co-present in many if not all spaces (excepting raid instances). Public events I think are going to be instanced.

But who the fuck wants to play the peon? We want to be heroes! Okay, so the world isn't completely shared. It looks like Destiny will feature instances, as well as 'public events' (having this appear on screen breaks the immersion pretty hard by the way Bungie). So, everybody can do the event / quests / whatever. But if that's the case, and everyone can be the hero, then really nobody is a hero. Legend implies someone exceptional, but if everybody else is doing the same stuff you are, then nobody is really legendary is it? Oh you killed that huge monster? Congrats, so did everybody else.

Doesn't seem to affect WoW much, if at all, although I have the same problem with the concept. In Eve it works better, because the player is a capsuleer. Your ships have ordinary crew, and the universe is populated with plenty of ordinary people you never see. All the players are exceptional within the game's universe, not within the game. Just as the Master Chief is exceptional among human forces because he's a Spartan, just as the players in Destiny are exceptional among the human race by virtue of being Guardians chosen by the Traveler.

So you either have the shared world, and make people play peons, or you let everybody do the content, in which case nobody's really legendary. Sounds like someone thought this through well!

Stats are another thing that bug me. You can increase your Stats in destiny, level up your guns, and your numbers. I'm sure your luck stat increases your chance of a critical hit - nevermind that critical hits are stupid in a game based on your skill at shooting. Anyway, RPGs made numbers go up for two reasons. The first, is that back in the day that's all games could really do. They certainly couldn't replace the DM. They still can't - AI will never be good enough. But numbers computers could simulate. So, RPGs became about numbers.

CRPGS came from tabletop RPGs and were always about numbers.

But god dammit Bungie, the first person shooter isn't a shitty genre like JRPGs.

You not liking an entire genre doesn't make it shitty. Also, JRPGs are turn-based, not realtime. Was Mass Effect shitty?

You can't master the FPS in 30 minutes! The demands on the player are much more varied, and much more deep. YOU DON'T NEED NUMBERS. Leveling up weapons can be done right (vanquish), but that's because it's a stretegic decision with no right or wrong answer, and because the upgrades are fixed, and because the single player progression is linear. None of that is true for destiny.

You don't know that, actually. You don't know for a fact either of the sides of the speculation you're making. I'm not even sure Bungie yet has decided on quite a few things-- Staten was mum about what the numbers actually represent.

You seem to be dead set against most RPGs in general, so I'm not sure how many you've actually played.

In some of them, it isn't as simple as just 'grinding past' a given set of enemies since the enemies can universally scale with you. The leveling mechanics are a way to pace out extra abilities and customisation for a range of reasons. In fact Joe Staten pretty much says this is what they're doing. Aiming down range comes first: leveling second.

Absolutely though, the interaction over a game though the box over the internet is less social than sitting on the same couch or the same room.

However, I think Bungie is approaching it from the opposite direction: rather than assuming the default to be a golden age of LAN parties and split-screen, they're accepting the current default and trying to bring more socialisation to it.

So they've done away with the split between 'campaign' and 'multiplayer.' A player doesn't have to make the choice to try to find players through a menu option or through switching game mode. It just happens, whether they want it or not. Just an automatic presence of other people in the world around you. You can ignore them or you can tag along and experience something together.

The player is a Guardian - and they're all special in the world of Destiny to the AI population whether they're amazing ones or lame ones because they do the things the AI characters generally don't do. It's a fantasy. The players aren't the entire population of the universe: they are just the Jedi order.

Gonna run out of content? Purely original areas and quests, sure. But it isn't just about consuming the content and then tossing it aside. If they nail the combat, killin' aliens in an only slightly variated way will still be fun any day of the week. Obviously, like Halo they don't even EXPECT everyone to stick around after the 'main quest' or whatever is done.

And there is always PvP.