The funny thing is, Borderlands (especially 2) almost did this. All Legendary gear can (theoretically) be obtained from any loot source, but with a very low drop rate. However, most Legendary items have a specific character or location where the drop rate is higher. So for example, if I want a Hellfire SMG in BL2, I could just run around the whole game killing everything and hoping one drops. But statistically, I'm better off fighting a boss called Scorch, who tends to drop it more.

While this is ALMOST the same as your idea, BL2 sort of ruins it in that the drops aren't guaranteed. So you end up doing the same thing over and over again. And not just a couple of times. We could be talking tens or hundreds of attempts for some items. If Scorch ALWAYS dropped the Hellfire, it would have been a better game, at least to me. Adjustments would have to be made to account for it, of course. Either make the drops much harder to obtain by making the bosses more difficult or putting things in hard-to-reach locations, or make enemies tougher in general to account for the fact that everyone has a bunch of legendary items.

Yeah there's really no reason for it to have been like this, especially when duplicating the item anyway for your friends is so damn easy.

But maybe they wanted to support a teamwork kind of thing - everyone kill Scorch together then spread the wealth.

While this is ALMOST the same as your idea, BL2 sort of ruins it in that the drops aren't guaranteed. So you end up doing the same thing over and over again. And not just a couple of times. We could be talking tens or hundreds of attempts for some items. If Scorch ALWAYS dropped the Hellfire, it would have been a better game, at least to me. Adjustments would have to be made to account for it, of course. Either make the drops much harder to obtain by making the bosses more difficult or putting things in hard-to-reach locations, or make enemies tougher in general to account for the fact that everyone has a bunch of legendary items.

I really don't care for the logic you use sometimes, though I do understand your point.

But trying to find a way to reconcile your hatred of investment systems with what we've seen of the design choices for Destiny so far doesn't give me a good feeling about listening to you moan about it for the next ten years.

What would you prefer, then, to a higher-difficulty area guarded by enemies that drastically outclass you? The goal would be to have to come play that particular area later, once you've accquired either powers you don't have, or grown your character in a way so that you can tackle them.

Since, by the logic you used, this would be inherently bad by design; what would you rather? 50 enemies at your level that you'd have to take on all at once? A puzzle of some sort that allows you to bypass all the time you would have spent (in your eyes) uselessly grinding?

~m

Maybe an enemy with a really challenging set of abilities, that by observing the enemy and knowing the right way to approach it you can begin to practice shooting it just right, timing your dodges just right. And after improving your actual skills, not points on your character, you are able to defeat it, feeling super satisfied, and when you wield that weapon that it specifically dropped and seeing anyone carrying it, will know what amazing feat they've accomplished, beyond playing a slot machine after playing long enough to begin pulling the lever.

Have you played Titanfall? I keep wondering what you'd think of the wallrunning in that. It's pretty damn exhilarating.

Not huge into multiplayer gaming, but I played it at a LAN and it was mega fun. The speed was great. The wall running and navigation was great.

Cool, yeah, in my decades of gaming I've never felt such excitement.

I'm hoping mirror's edge is 60fps on consoles this time around or I will have to get it on PC.

Indeed.

Have you played Titanfall? I keep wondering what you'd think of the wallrunning in that. It's pretty damn exhilarating.

Not huge into multiplayer gaming, but I played it at a LAN and it was mega fun. The speed was great. The wall running and navigation was great.

I'm hoping mirror's edge is 60fps on consoles this time around or I will have to get it on PC.

I sense that games are getting to a point where this kind of stuff is actually possible technically (like just running into another player who can give that info about the shore), but we're going to need to do some unlearning from the rule systems we've gotten used to.

Sorry, that will be the first and last time I mention that game on this forum *shudder*.

Novaguard? You mean the kill stealing, weak vs. lag class? Hehe. I'll do it on host but never anywhere else. I'd rather take the Turian Sentinel. Strong vs everything, weak vs nothing. *Detonates Tech Armor* :)

I sure do. And yeah host or GTFO. :P

Try running Novguard with Justicar, Human Adept, and Asari Adept all with vary mixes of ammo that detonate. Woooo nelly. Never seen a triple combo explosion before (biotic, cryo, and fire).

Won't argue here. The departure from Nylund's text completely disconnected me from my investment in any Halo storyline since. I wasn't wholly dissatisfied with what we got, by my investment was shot at that point.

Some wonder if that was on purpose /conspiratorial tone. I liked the departure, actually, and I thought the biggest problem with Reach was the team did not quite overcome the challenge of fleshing out and making us care (enough) about an unknown cast of characters when we pretty much knew from the start that they are goners. (I'm charitable about it, though, because in a sense I think they inadvertently set themselves up for failure.) All that said, the tone and sense of place in the game were as well handled as in any game they've made. I liked the darker, more mature, more ambiguous world of Reach. (More gray area, Malagate.)

Gameplay-wise I still call it Halo's greatest hits. It's my deserted island Halo, the sampler pack, the culmination of a decade of fun.

Investment aspects? I wanted a black visor. I worked for it, but I could have not done so. I don't see it as a zero sum situation where if Reach had not had that sort of thing, that development work would've been applied toward making it a better game in other aspects.

The problem I see there, though, is that high-level loot that actually affects gameplay is likely to become a foothold for players at that level to get by. So while some may see it as 'hey, neat. finally got X weapon', that becomes a matter of life and death for the folks who are running raids all the time and really pushing hard to the endgame content.

Bingo. If the loot doesn't impact the game significantly, then why is it there? But if it DOES, then it's going to be a requirement.

P.S. I suggest boots named Miller's Edge that let you run 10% faster.

Have you played Titanfall? I keep wondering what you'd think of the wallrunning in that. It's pretty damn exhilarating.

Granularity of difficulty. Easy might be too easy while Medium too hard. What do? Grind a bit on Medium.

True, but I would call that the failure of the developers to properly balance difficulty then. Ideally, they would make medium easier, or add something in between.

Also you have it backwards: bad investment systems that allow you to power up your character are anti-difficulty ramping. Your character powers up, such that the enemies are no harder than before. If your character gets more powerful, then the challenges have to get more powerful IN COMPARISON, which is essentially a traditional progressive design anyway!

I definitely didn't say the only way is through levelling the enemies. This is more of a chicken-and-egg argument. Are you becoming more powerful to tackle the harder enemies, or are the enemies becoming harder so you don't burn through the rest of the game with your newfound power?

There are certainly different ways of tackling these considerations, but it's clear the direction Destiny will be taking, and I can't say it looks like they're fixing to ruin my experience.

Lol did you even play the alpha? Spinmetal leaves ARE placed. They don't drop. You have to hold square to harvest them :-p

No, I didn't actually. I don't own a PS4. But I would put in my two cents here and say that placing widgets to collect is a cheap carrot-on-a-stick to get the player to explore the level. And if they aren't creatively placed once that decision is made, then double shame. They should just drop in that area, or somehow appear due to the outcome of gameplay rather than "STAND HERE. OK, NOW STAND HERE."

~m

Wait, whaaaaaat? How did the "investment system", if you want to call it that, detract from your enjoyment of the game? Reach is easily my favorite Halo experience, maybe tied with ODST (though for very different reasons). Really curious as to what turned you off about it.

I wanted to get that black visor so I did stuff I didn't really want to do to get the points to get the visor. As soon as I got it I stopped playing and have rarely put the disk back into the machine.

I enjoyed Destiny because of the strike but the Alpha gave us a shit ton of uncommon gear really quickly; I doubt that the full game will be so generous.

I asked this in another thread today, but how do you propose, then, some areas being closed off until you're "ready"? Are you proposing free access anywhere from the word go? If the enemies never get harder, you'd have a lot to do to keep everything else fresh and exciting. This line of thought becomes anti-Ramping Difficulty very quickly. I want things to stay challenging the longer I play.

Have missions and strikes open up other missions and strikes, which have a designed difficulty curve. Not that hard to design spaces so that the challenge is harder through level design and enemy placement. You think the only way to make the game harder is to level up the enemies? Then have a final difficulty level (mythic or whatever) where every level is ridiculously hard. This eliminates the "ghost town" problem where nobody is in low level areas.

Also you have it backwards: bad investment systems that allow you to power up your character are anti-difficulty ramping. Your character powers up, such that the enemies are no harder than before. If your character gets more powerful, then the challenges have to get more powerful IN COMPARISON, which is essentially a traditional progressive design anyway!

You have to stop being a cat, mentally. Just because there's an open box sitting in front of you doesn't mean you actually have to cram yourself into said box. Let the box sit. Play the game. Forget the box. The box will fill with Spinmetal on its own, provided its something that enemies will drop, and not something specifically placed by the developer.

Lol did you even play the alpha? Spinmetal leaves ARE placed. They don't drop. You have to hold square to harvest them :-p

Also IF they just filled up as you play and it weren't a problem, why would they even be there? The point of picking up resources is that they are scarce and you will never have enough.

The fact is I might never get to play as a Krogan Vanguard or with an N7 weapon. In Destiny, at least there's a story or goal to getting sweet loot, not just random drops across the board.

I played Mass Effect 3's multiplayer missions hundreds of times earning credits to buy random card packs in the hope of unlocking a new, rare character class. "Not fun!" some might shout... except it was. The core gameplay was fun. Each 15 minute or so playing was fun. Not getting the character? Ok, not so fun, but the devs gave me a reason to keep playing. I accepted that reason as good enough. And I had fun each round?

Cody would call this grinding and would say that technically I had no fun at all.

I say that I had a ton of fun, and because I had not reached the artificial goal, actually had more fun that I would have had if I'd been handed the class I wanted from the beginning.

Part of it for me was that some of the starting classes were so good (still rock Novaguard to this day).

Novaguard? You mean the kill stealing, weak vs. lag class? Hehe. I'll do it on host but never anywhere else. I'd rather take the Turian Sentinel. Strong vs everything, weak vs nothing. *Detonates Tech Armor* :)

Here is how to fix Destiny to do it right:

1. If you play all the story missions and strikes, you should reach max level or near max level by the time you finish.

Recipe for reaching the End of Investment for a player really quick.

2. Eliminate random loot, and have weapons be in predefined locations or acquired from specific enemies.

I don't want there to be a clear-cut solution for everything. Rare weapons won't have a way of being rare, then. Will they? If there is a pool of weapons worth roughly the same amount and I get a random one for defeating a boss, fine. But I don't want that boss to drop the same weapon every time. Then the only way to make things rare is to make the challenge for them incredibly hard, no?

I'm reminded of a thread a while ago about the ghost ship in Windwaker. Unique Public Events or certain missions that only occur on rare occasions might be a solution here. But I don't think eliminating randomness is the way.

3. The missions in Explore mode should essentially just be story missions; they should be well designed, unique, and novel.

But that's requiring a lot of extra work to crank out. If they're implemented and rolled out post-launch on a continual basis, that would be great. But I don't think you're going to have the same fidelity as story missions. Though, if you were truly able to pull it off, it would eliminate the feeling of a central track of Story missions, which I think would go a long way to making each Guardian's story feel unique. It would certainly be something to stretch for, but given what we've seen from the Alpha, I'm not going to expect it.

As it stands, we're all going to have at least a baseline of similar experience to compare, all having played the Story missions at some point.

4. Hide tons and tons of missions, side stories, and secrets in explore mode.

Basically, you should never have to grind for level or gear ever, and boring MMO fetch / kill quests should be eliminated. Most of my beef stems from the fact that explore mode seemed to be the primary way to gain levels (in the alpha anyway), and the part that's fun (exploring) you don't get exp for, and the part that sucks (the missions) you do.

I think this is addressed pretty easily by tying a significant exp gain to picking up whatever goodies you discover while exploring, or by executing sick jumps off of specific remote locations.

I asked this in another thread today, but how do you propose, then, some areas being closed off until you're "ready"? Are you proposing free access anywhere from the word go? If the enemies never get harder, you'd have a lot to do to keep everything else fresh and exciting. This line of thought becomes anti-Ramping Difficulty very quickly. I want things to stay challenging the longer I play.

I'm willing to keep an open mind though, and consider that explore mode was a bigger deal in the Alpha due to lack of content. Maybe the full game will have enough to do that 's fun so that I won't have to pick up spinmetal leaves.

You have to stop being a cat, mentally. Just because there's an open box sitting in front of you doesn't mean you actually have to cram yourself into said box. Let the box sit. Play the game. Forget the box. The box will fill with Spinmetal on its own, provided its something that enemies will drop, and not something specifically placed by the developer. Because that's just a weak excuse to explore, like the gun part quests in Borderlands.

~m

The problem I see there, though, is that high-level loot that actually affects gameplay is likely to become a foothold for players at that level to get by. So while some may see it as 'hey, neat. finally got X weapon', that becomes a matter of life and death for the folks who are running raids all the time and really pushing hard to the endgame content.

Bingo. If the loot doesn't impact the game significantly, then why is it there? But if it DOES, then it's going to be a requirement.

P.S. I suggest boots named Miller's Edge that let you run 10% faster.