The importance of failure and blame. *vid* (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Sunday, November 08, 2015, 17:59 (3398 days ago) @ slycrel

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.

Treyarch put out a great Vidoc about Zombies (it all started because of a single animation), and one of the things that stuck out to me is when they say that while they know that failure is inevitable, the important thing is what players put the blame on for their failures. Successful design means that a player blames himself and his own choices for his failure rather than the game.

And punishing a player is important as well, because you learn better about what works and what doesn't.

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.

Sammy and I are playing Black Ops 3 on Realistic difficulty, and what surprises me is how much more fun we've been having than when we played on Hardened. Getting downed is frustrating, but more often than not, it's a result of a bad choice that we've made. We're given all of the tools that we need to succeed, and it's on us to use them well. Because we click well on strategy, it's been easier than I had thought it would be, even if we're a good ways away from the finish line. I'd love to see how players react to a similar challenge, and the existing examples are interesting:

When given a tough roadblock like defending the SABRE Warsat, players are happy going under the map to save time.

When given a tough mission, like the Black Spindle challenge, players will bash their heads against the wall for hours.

Is the reward the difference, or is it the challenge itself? I know many folks who have the Spindle already, but are willing to help others tackle the challenge for hours, so it can't just be the carrot.

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.

Yeah, we're in an awkward phase where endgame content narrowed significantly, but let's give it some time... Bungie's still learning.

Also, I'm sad that there are not Trials equivalents in other games. BO3 has an Arena, but that's too large scale for me. Something small, tight, and rewarding like Trials is pretty unique right now...