Luke Smith Tweeted our Buddy CruelLEGACEY (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, November 11, 2015, 20:44 (3395 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I'm a little confused. The common foe in Destiny has always felt cheap to me. Aetheon just decides not to teleport anyone... Crota's sword disappears... Most of the bosses in the game aren't super clever fights, they're just giant bullet sponges with hordes of minions. Oryx is, admittedly, the least buggy end boss we've met, but his fight is also an order of magnitude more challenging and complicated than anything else in that raid, which is - in and of itself - a little cheap.

On the PvP side of things, the game is quite literally cheap, since lag-switching is so prevalent and advantageous of the switchers' team.

Minor bugs and design flaws have always been present, but I'd say those are anomalies within the Destiny experience as a whole. When my raid group slams into a new encounter, we are able to pick it apart, learn it, understand it, and eventually master it. 99% of the time, the "walls" or "failures" that slow the player down can be understood and conquered through better teamwork and/or different tactics.

This is very different from the way some other games play out. For example, each fight against the Warden in Halo 5 can turn dramatically based on when the game decides to slap you with a checkpoint. In fact, while playing on legendary, I often found myself playing the "checkpoint" game more than anything else. I'm sure any Halo player knows what I'm talking about: you avoid risky positions or maneuvers specifically because you're afraid the game will save a checkpoint at a bad moment and trap you in a loop of perpetual disaster. This reduces many of the more challenging encounters into mindless battles of attrition. You sit back, peck away at the enemies from a safe distance, wait for another checkpoint before you risk moving forward to grab ammo. I don't feel like I mastered any of the Halo 5 encounters on legendary. I just played like a chicken until I got through.

Not to re-open this can of worms, but a lot of my complaints about Prison of Elders stem from this same issue. Unlike the rest of Destiny, I never felt PoE was something that could really be learned and mastered. You basically handle every single fight the same way: hide in the corner until you can't, then run around in circles until the corner is safe again.

That's really the point I was driving at: "failure" in Destiny usually comes with the feeling of "ooooh, now I see what we could have done differently. Let's try again", while in some other games failure can feel like a random combination of events (such as a bad checkpoint) that never exactly repeats, so you can't learn from it or master it.