This "endgame" content is part of an MMO model. I don't know how people know that that is the model that Destiny will follow. I would have loved additional Reach story, but I got nowhere near the level cap in Reach, and this model seems to be for leveled up players only.

Based on the beta, it seems pretty hard for me to not think of Destiny as an MMO. I suspect the same will be true of anyone who has played one much in the past. So many hallmarks of an MMO were present that it definitely feels closer to one than (say) Diablo III or a Borderlands game. For those who've avoided them entirely (or mostly) I can understand the confusion, but I think Bungie shares the blame there by insisting that it wasn't an MMO, when really they were just trying to keep their core audience (some of whom are pretty anti-MMO) from being disinterested.

Yeah, well, I probably fall into the latter camp. I've avoided MMOs for some of the same reasons that I avoid crack cocaine. If Bungie is making an MMO, then I'll play one, but what I've observed over the years is a studio that borrows from genres to make something different in important ways than the norm. I'm not heavily into strategy or fighting games, but I thoroughly enjoyed Myth and Oni.

This "endgame" content is part of an MMO model. I don't know how people know that that is the model that Destiny will follow. I would have loved additional Reach story, but I got nowhere near the level cap in Reach, and this model seems to be for leveled up players only.

Based on the beta, it seems pretty hard for me to not think of Destiny as an MMO. I suspect the same will be true of anyone who has played one much in the past. So many hallmarks of an MMO were present that it definitely feels closer to one than (say) Diablo III or a Borderlands game. For those who've avoided them entirely (or mostly) I can understand the confusion, but I think Bungie shares the blame there by insisting that it wasn't an MMO, when really they were just trying to keep their core audience (some of whom are pretty anti-MMO) from being disinterested.

This "endgame" content is part of an MMO model.

Nah, most games with a meaningful levelling system provide some kind of endgame content. JRPGs especially usually have bonus dungeons and secret bosses, or even a remixed, more challenging New Game+. It's not present in the same format, but even RPGs like Fallout or Skyrim take measures to stop you getting too powerful to enjoy playing by levelling the enemies alingside you.

I don't know how people know that that is the model that Destiny will follow. I would have loved additional Reach story, but I got nowhere near the level cap in Reach, and this model seems to be for leveled up players only.

There was no meaningful level cap in Reach. You didn't earn skills or abilities as you went along (IIRC? That's right though I think?), it was just a number representing a cosmetic reward system. So there didn't need to be additional content for overpowered, maxed out players.

The biggest reason to believe that there's some kind of endgame is that they hsve a "Raid" (or raids) that requires you to be at the level cap. By using terminology lifted directly from MMOs they set a certain expectation.

This "endgame" content is part of an MMO model. I don't know how people know that that is the model that Destiny will follow. I would have loved additional Reach story, but I got nowhere near the level cap in Reach, and this model seems to be for leveled up players only.

Maybe Destiny is not a true MMO. Maybe it's Journey with guns.

Funny you mention it, I said something similar just a bit earlier in a different thread :)

Maybe Destiny is not a true MMO. Maybe it's Journey with guns.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, but I still don't know how we know the content of the expansions or that they will be for maxed out players. Couldn't the expansions be something like what ODST was supposed to be originally?

How was ODST supposed to work originally? I'm not familiar with that (although I have heard people refer to it as an ‘expansion’ for Halo 3).

More story, new characters, new settings. Obviously, your character would remain active in a Destiny expansion, but I still don't think I'm imagining what you're imagining. Throughout this thread it seems that you're speaking from a place of certainty that Destiny is an MMO. I'm not convinced that it is.

It really seems to me pretty much everyone who knows about this except Bungie and people who are very particular about meanings have accepted this is an MMO, and the definition sticklers are just caught up on instancing and party sizes and relatively minor details like those. I would say, having read about it and played the beta, Destiny is a massively multiplayer on-line first-person shooter, with third-person sections and role-playing elements, and if it's not that then I don't know what it is (which would mean either I did an awful job comprehending what I was seeing or Bungie is throwing a curveball like I've never seen before).
Whether you agree about what it is or not, the fact remains that in the game you'll level up, but you can't level up forever. People are referring to a section of the game as the endgame and saying it is the section of the game you have access to once you have finished leveling up. Apparently it overlaps with other parts of the game, but it's well-defined in that anything you do before you have leveled up all the way is not the endgame. Is that a clear enough definition? Does anyone have a problem with that, am I not saying it right?
Do you agree all of those things will be present in Destiny? (I could probably give proof if I kept up with news better, I can only assume Bungie has mentioned different things you can do once you've leveled up to the highest level, because otherwise, well kapowaz explained why it's bad to not have anything else left to do.) As a more interesting question, and somewhat getting back to the discussion, taking that into account, what do you think of what's been said? What would you like the endgame to be?

Thanks for the detailed explanation, but I still don't know how we know the content of the expansions or that they will be for maxed out players. Couldn't the expansions be something like what ODST was supposed to be originally?

How was ODST supposed to work originally? I'm not familiar with that (although I have heard people refer to it as an ‘expansion’ for Halo 3).

More story, new characters, new settings. Obviously, your character would remain active in a Destiny expansion, but I still don't think I'm imagining what you're imagining. Throughout this thread it seems that you're speaking from a place of certainty that Destiny is an MMO. I'm not convinced that it is.

So; the routes to adding somebody as a friend are:

1. You see me playing and want to add me to your friends list; you add me by character name
2. You already know my platform tag (or I'm a friend of a friend) and so you add me by platform tag

Something to remember about the "friends list" in the Blizzard games you refer to later is that it is actually two logical lists managed via the same in-game interface. When I come across someone in World of Warcraft, I can add that character as a friend, in which case we only see each other when we're online on those two specific characters, or I can add someone as a Battle.net friend in which case I can see them whatever character they're playing (or indeed if they're playing Starcraft 2 instead).

So in your first example, I added you by character name. Hang on a second, I didn't want you to see me logging on to my other character to play with my other friends or watching My Little Pony on Netflix, I only added you on that character! So do we begin maintaining per-character friends lists in addition to the platform-wide one? I'd imagine this to be a pretty large chunk of engineer time, not to mention all the extra UI/testing/certification involved.

So let's say we just ignore that expectation of friends added by character name being per-character, maybe it's not even an expectation at all for many people (I've no idea). When I added your character "Dave the Warlock", "kapowaz" shows up in my friends list. Hang on, who the hell is "kapowaz" again? I recognise you as "Dave the Warlock". Perhaps I was notified when I added Dave that kapowaz was the gamertag behind him, and perhaps we add character name into console rich presence - e.g. "kapowaz playing Destiny as Dave the Warlock (level 15)". Though of course this doesn't work when you're playing another character (or heaven forbid, not playing Destiny at all). And what shows up on the in-game friends list? I recognise some people by their character name and some people by their platform-wide name (or even their real name). Perhaps again we display "kapowaz - Dave the Warlock"? But remember that presumably, all that displays in-game is "Dave the Warlock" above your head? Either we display the connection between Dave and kapowaz somewhere readily accessible or I have to keep that connection in my head, easy for someone I just added but less so for someone I met in a strike 3 months ago and never saw again. And none of that helps when you log in to "Barry the Titan" and I can't see "Dave the Warlock" anywhere on my in-game list at all, online or offline.

And all this is without exploring other implementation details, like whether character names are unique worldwide or not? Because if not, when I add "Dave"... which Dave do I add? How do I tell who's who? And even if they are unique, would you lock names even after they're deleted? Because if you delete Dave and someone else grabs the name, I'll actually be adding someone other than who I thought.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done. It's definitely arguable a few of the problems I outlined above are even problems at all. I'm just suggesting that the analogy of the Blizzard friends list doesn't fit perfectly (Diablo 3 on consoles would be a slightly closer analogy - what does that do? I've no idea myself) and that some of the sacrifices you'd be prepared to make at the expense of simplicity may not be ones the devs agreed with :)

Disclaimers:
1. This is all off the top of my head. I have no more knowledge of this specific subject than you do.
2. You may or may not have named your Warlock "Dave" and your Titan "Barry".

Right here

Looks like voice chat in the beta is pretty much what we will get for launch, but they are discussions about the feedback provided

Dang it... why should we not be able to hear our team in multiplayer? Where's the sense?

I like hearing my teammates, but the problem I have is that 99% of the players I get matched with are just spouting crap all the time. So much so that I turned off all voice in Halo: Reach. It's too much work to turn off all of your teammates when a match starts based on whether they are going to provide useful conversation.

You know there was an option to not hear people, right? Why not bring that back? Just an option in the audio preferences to choose between hearing just your party (because I don't think games can turn that off), your party and your fireteam, or everyone. I'd really prefer for the default to be hearing people but I'd be fine with the default having that option off and letting people turn on the option to hear people, in competitive and hopefully cooperative modes. Individual muting would be good to have too, though, so you could hear people and then decide you don't like what one of them has to say and then with a selection and one or two button presses not hear them any more. Halo has had that since Halo 3, and in Reach they even made it so if someone gets muted all the time they're muted for everyone that doesn't specifically unmute them. Why leave these features by the wayside?

The issue is quality vs quantity. You always want to give players the most concentrated game experience possible, with everything they are asked to do being as fun as possible. Padding it it with things that aren't so fun is not how you create the best experience… I'm not saying it has to be combat at Mach 10 100% of the time, but the spaces have to be utilized to create some kind of flow to the experience.

That actually is really close to what I thought you've been saying for a year and a half now, so could you explain what you actually do mean?

As far as the endgame goes, in most of the games that I've played that have an 'endgame', that's typically where the most fun is. So the question is, why not eliminate the beginning, and just have everybody start at the 'endgame'? Having an 'endgame' just ensures that your players aren't getting all the fun immediately. There shouldn't be divisions - you should just have 'the game'. You shouldn't have rewards for the missions, the missions should be the rewards. The experience should be valuable in and of itself.

but people like rewards

I don't disagree with everything you've written above, but I feel like there's a key misunderstanding or important consideration you've missed here, which is true of Destiny and all other MMO games. At their core, they're social experiences, and the gameplay is a sandbox for that.

To me, Destiny seems to be a co-op experience. Not a social experience. Big difference.

Drawing things out is probably going to be the biggest pitfall of Destiny. The timeframe does not, and should not be drawn out. As a game designer, you want your players to have fun immediately, and throughout, with as little boredom as possible. Players working through your content too quickly absolutely should never be a concern.

Burnout and boredom isn't a problem if you have fun content to begin with. Did anybody complain about getting bored or burned out with Halo? I don't think anybody did. Some folks worked through Halo in a day. Was that too quickly? Then how did it become the phenomenon it is?

I don't disagree with everything you've written above, but I feel like there's a key misunderstanding or important consideration you've missed here, which is true of Destiny and all other MMO games. At their core, they're social experiences, and the gameplay is a sandbox for that.

That's not to say that Halo was an anti-social game, but the social side of it was far more ad-hoc; that's why communities like HBO came about. The social side is far more implicit than explicit, and the gameplay is definitely intended to support a single player experience, with no mandatory requirement that the player groups up.

Contrast that with other MMO titles and you'll see that reverses: the player can play the game as if it was a solo experience, but they're not getting the most from it. There's an argument to be made that all Blizzard's games follow this format; create a social sandbox and then build mechanics to support it. But in order for a game which provides a social sandbox to provide an enjoyable experience, it needs an active player base. The timeframe over which the audience is engaged with the game is therefore crucial. If most players treated Destiny the way they treated a Halo title, they'd be done with it very quickly and stop engaging. That undermines the social sandbox, and so a cycle of drip-fed engagement is necessary to ensure that players remain invested over a longer period of time.

Inevitably players will drift away from games at times, and the player base will always be evolving. For that reason too, the game has to keep a healthy pool of players around, or the newcomers will find the game deserted. You only need talk to players on underpopulated realms in WoW to understand what effect this has on the enjoyability of the game.

What is important (at least to me) is that whenever the game artificially drags something out, it does so in a way that remains fun. I spent a fair amount of time in the beta levelling up weapons so as to compare them. I did this by hanging around in one area of Old Russia, sweeping the zone in a rotation and picking off fallen as they spawned. Every once in a while the Devil Walker public event would start up and I'd join in with that. Never did it really get boring, because the combat itself remains fun. If anything it was the lack of variety in missions that dragged it down, but that's something Bungie can fix, the most important thing to get right was combat itself.

So, I'm not worried about the grind, although time will tell if they've tuned it too aggressively (or not). We'll know they've dialled it in wrong if the player base shrinks too soon after launch, but I'm betting it won't.

But it's a careful juggling act: you can't make this content too easy to work through quickly, or that burnout/boredom will happen sooner. This is part of why I think Cody (and some others) may be misjudging the steepness of the grinding process (particularly when we only reached level 8, and there are bound to be plentiful rewards for missions between then and the level cap). You need the goals to be attainable, but the timeframe has to be drawn out to an extent.

I'm dropping back in to reply to this:

Drawing things out is probably going to be the biggest pitfall of Destiny. The timeframe does not, and should not be drawn out. As a game designer, you want your players to have fun immediately, and throughout, with as little boredom as possible. Players working through your content too quickly absolutely should never be a concern.

Burnout and boredom isn't a problem if you have fun content to begin with. Did anybody complain about getting bored or burned out with Halo? I don't think anybody did. Some folks worked through Halo in a day. Was that too quickly? Then how did it become the phenomenon it is? Judging a game by playtime is hugely toxic, and designing your game around a certain playtime is even more toxic.

The reason it is toxic, is because if you really only have 6 hours (for sake of argument) of fun things to do in the game, but you stretch that out by delaying or artificially lengthening content, then the experience suffers. Did you hover over the display for crucible marks? You are limited to 100 per week. Why? The only reason is to string out your playtime.

Folks are concerned with the amount of content. Bungie is probably right, and Destiny probably is the biggest game they have made. In terms of geometry and space, Old Russia is pretty huge. But it doesn't FEEL as huge as some smaller games. If you look at the mothyards, there's tons of geometry there, but all you really do is zip by on your sparrow… you're not engaging in it in a meaningful way. Remember the beach battle from Silent Cartographer? Why are there not tons of those, as you make your way across the mothyard, utilizing the hills, and aircraft fuselages as you fight your way across in a story mission? Can you imagine if all of Old Russia were as dense as a Halo story mission in terms of designed encounters and story? You'd have an entire FPS game right there! But you don't…

Destiny is cool to explore, but not as fun as other games. In Destiny, you can look and shoot. In something like Deus Ex, exploration is more meaningful since you have tons of options for interaction: you can open doors, hack, listen to people talk, talk to people, read email, pick locks, find secret items and weapons, etc. Even though the world is physically smaller, there's more to do so it feels bigger. There's nothing wrong with Destiny not having these types of interactions, but this just means that the level spaces need to be utilized in terms of shooting. And they unfortunately aren't that well from what we have seen so far. This is why there is disappointment at one area per planet - because you don't get a lot of bang for your buck with these spaces, thus requiring more for the same level of engagement that FPS games of smaller scope had.

The issue is quality vs quantity. You always want to give players the most concentrated game experience possible, with everything they are asked to do being as fun as possible. Padding it it with things that aren't so fun is not how you create the best experience… I'm not saying it has to be combat at Mach 10 100% of the time, but the spaces have to be utilized to create some kind of flow to the experience.

Again, I don't know why Bungie is worried people will finish the game in 10 or 15 hours or however long it would take. If you can give them a BETTER experience in 10 versus a padded 100, why not go with 10? Who cares?

As far as the endgame goes, in most of the games that I've played that have an 'endgame', that's typically where the most fun is. So the question is, why not eliminate the beginning, and just have everybody start at the 'endgame'? Having an 'endgame' just ensures that your players aren't getting all the fun immediately. There shouldn't be divisions - you should just have 'the game'. You shouldn't have rewards for the missions, the missions should be the rewards. The experience should be valuable in and of itself.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, but I still don't know how we know the content of the expansions or that they will be for maxed out players. Couldn't the expansions be something like what ODST was supposed to be originally?

How was ODST supposed to work originally? I'm not familiar with that (although I have heard people refer to it as an ‘expansion’ for Halo 3).

Its the levelling thing. Once you add a constant progression to a character, you limit the player's ability to be "engaged" by the same content over and over like they might with a vanilla FPS.

Its not just MMOs though, most RPGs have endgame content, either built in (bonus dungeons, secret bosses, Ultimate Weapons in most JRPGs) or through expansions (Mass Effect, Fallout).