Destiny, Social Gaming, Shared World, and Numbers

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 23:44 (3974 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by narcogen, Tuesday, June 11, 2013, 23:51

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.