Destiny, Social Gaming, Shared World, and Numbers

by electricpirate , Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 07:29 (4193 days ago) @ Cody Miller

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.