Good MMOs do this. (Destiny)

by slycrel , Sunday, November 08, 2015, 03:22 (3399 days ago) @ Cody Miller

It's a fine line for me.

If a game is too easy, I may enjoy it until I get bored and never finish. It's like using a wall hack in a shooter -- people used to do that all the time on the PC shooters back in the day. They would do that because it was about winning to them, about the prestige of being on the winning team. The "my tribe is better than your tribe" thing. it's the guys who teabag you when they triple team you while you were afk, as though they did something meaningful somehow.

I'm not into that. I don't want to win to win... I want to enjoy the journey. I want to struggle, to work at it. Yes, even to fail. But I want to know that it's possible.

On the flipside, if it's too hard then I'll give up in frustration and chalk it up to abusive mechanics. We've all played games where you knew exactly what you had to do, and after an hour or two, you give up until another day. A day that may or may not come. Because you know what to do, it's a matter of being perfect with the controls. But sometimes, taking hours to get a 5-15 minute sequence down to perfection just isn't worth the time and effort. I've got better things to do.

Most of the time destiny walks this line for me pretty well. King's fall going in blind was a great example of this. Yeah it was brutally hard at first, but we knew it was possible. So we stuck with it and learned the raid on our own terms. I think we would have gotten oryx down without looking anything up if we had stopped and come back fresh another day. That's a great challenge, and one I'm willing to do given I'm ready for the expenditure of energy that it takes to do that. It's amazing, not only for the game, but for the social experience of it. Stuff like that keeps me coming back for more.

I can play easy mode with strikes or mess around in patrol. Or I can do things like the nightfall, raid or trials, which at times push me to my limits. Destiny has something for everyone. For the most part it walks this line well.

Trials... well, trials is Bungie's hardcore PvP mode. I don't begrudge them this. I think it fills a fantastic niche and I think it's fine for a tournament style event. When it is the only event, other than the hard-mode raid, which can drop 310-320 items, I get a little grumbly. It's more than just a tournament. It's one of two things in the game that gives out high level items. It's trying to fill a couple different purposes, but because of that it creates divides between the playerbase, and the social side of "fun" suffers.