You seem to be dead set against most RPGs in general, so I'm not sure how many you've actually played.

A lot, and RPGs are great. I'm talking about JRPGs, ARPGs and the like not being very complex. Obviously if Destiny is going to be like Deus Ex, then it would be so sick.

In some of them, it isn't as simple as just 'grinding past' a given set of enemies since the enemies can universally scale with you. The leveling mechanics are a way to pace out extra abilities and customisation for a range of reasons. In fact Joe Staten pretty much says this is what they're doing. Aiming down range comes first: leveling second.

Absolutely though, the interaction over a game though the box over the internet is less social than sitting on the same couch or the same room.

However, I think Bungie is approaching it from the opposite direction: rather than assuming the default to be a golden age of LAN parties and split-screen, they're accepting the current default and trying to bring more socialisation to it.

So they've done away with the split between 'campaign' and 'multiplayer.' A player doesn't have to make the choice to try to find players through a menu option or through switching game mode. It just happens, whether they want it or not. Just an automatic presence of other people in the world around you. You can ignore them or you can tag along and experience something together.

The player is a Guardian - and they're all special in the world of Destiny to the AI population whether they're amazing ones or lame ones because they do the things the AI characters generally don't do. It's a fantasy. The players aren't the entire population of the universe: they are just the Jedi order.

Gonna run out of content? Purely original areas and quests, sure. But it isn't just about consuming the content and then tossing it aside. If they nail the combat, killin' aliens in an only slightly variated way will still be fun any day of the week. Obviously, like Halo they don't even EXPECT everyone to stick around after the 'main quest' or whatever is done.

And there is always PvP.

I want to know what you recommend. I loved Mass Effect, but I had similar issues as Cory, especially in the first game. They got better.

In the first game, it's just rough. I would go Adept, take Assault Rifle training as your bonus, move the difficulty down from normal if you want, and then bring Wrex and Liara everywhere. Let squadmates use their powers on their own. At least then, you get the hilarity from the overpowered biotics, along with Wrex's absurd tanking and shotgun blasts.

The second game is a massive improvement. Vanguard is my all-time favorite, because of the skill you need to really pull of biotic charge (Cody, reload and melee cancels, and best for speed running). Soldier is fun, because bullet time. Adept is also fun, because you can use combos with warp. Never really played the other classes much, but everyone likes them in different ways. Look around, and you can find a lot of people that adore them (even Engineer!). The guns also get a lot more varied, and you get some real winners like the Widow sniper rifle (great on a Soldier or Infiltrator).

Mass Effect 3 is hands down the best of the bunch. Of course, Vanguard for me, because it went from super-awesome to God Of Death and Sorrow. Biotic charge plus Nova is tough but rewarding, as you really have to go balls to the wall skillful if you want to make a super-aggressive playstyle work. The rest of the classes are fun too, because Bioware basically improved on what they did in ME2 as far as movement (dodging, unlimited sprint, grabbing dudes over cover) and fighting options (melee, more guns, mods, grenades for everyone but Vanguard). There's lots more guns to choose from, and they feel pretty good and offer a variety of strategies. The amount of guns you carry affects your power cooldown too, so you gotta make some choices.

tl;dr - Remember how old ME1 is, and enjoy watching the game evolve.

EDIT: Kerm, you probably know a lot of this, but I tried to write it as KISS as possible for others who might be wondering about the other games.

CRPGS came from tabletop RPGs and were always about numbers.

Thank you.

I have been playing Mass Effect recently, and while the role playing is run, it's really frustrating since the combat is so bad. It's doubly frustrating because games like Gears of War and Vanquish have already solved nearly all of Mass Effect's problems, but it doesn't incorporate those simple solutions.

Which one? That makes a huge different in the quality of the combat.

…dude this has nothing to do with whether I like JRPGs or not. It has to do with the genre itself being limiting in the game's possibility space. It's a bad genre, sorry.

Maybe thus far for you, but I know one studio that's pretty good at redefining a genre... ;)

I have been playing Mass Effect recently, and while the role playing is run, it's really frustrating since the combat is so bad. It's doubly frustrating because games like Gears of War and Vanquish have already solved nearly all of Mass Effect's problems, but it doesn't incorporate those simple solutions.

What class are you playing as? I've had some bad luck with Mass Effect games and I think I've picked classes that lead to really simple, boring combat. But I've gone back and been pleasantly surprised by a lot of nuances in other classes at times.

You not liking an entire genre doesn't make it shitty.

…dude this has nothing to do with whether I like JRPGs or not. It has to do with the genre itself being limiting in the game's possibility space. It's a bad genre, sorry.

Also, JRPGs are turn-based, not realtime. Was Mass Effect shitty?

I have been playing Mass Effect recently, and while the role playing is run, it's really frustrating since the combat is so bad. It's doubly frustrating because games like Gears of War and Vanquish have already solved nearly all of Mass Effect's problems, but it doesn't incorporate those simple solutions.

Leaving aside some of your more . . . Cody-like comments . . .

The idea of having a shared world, AND the player becoming a legend is incompatible. Bungie describes Destiny as a shared world shooter, and also tells us our mission as a guardian is important and we can become legend.

I think this is an interesting point, and one that got to me when we were watching the trailer and the Guardian met the pale-faced-man in the Wilds.

Is this guy just sitting in his bunker waiting for every player to come past? What happens if two people come past at once? This reminds me of when my sis and I would play co-op in Halo and run to trigger the cutscene so it would be 'our' Chief who was getting the canon plot points. Sure, it was just a silly little minigame we made up, but it comes from exactly this issue. Who is moving the story forward?

We have so precious few ways of moving our own stories forward in life that I think it's an important component of gaming fantasy.

I'm guessing those portions of the game take place in a private space, so those cutscenes will feature only you and your party, not any randoms who happen to be in the same area.

... I really don't care. :)

You're criticizing Destiny's solution to problems that you don't even know it has in the first place.

I just don't see the fun in wasting all the time till a game's release wanting to dislike it and picking it apart with a negative microscope. With such an approach, when the game does come out it doesn't just have to be good, it has to work extra hard to fight back all these month of jaded-ly waiting for it to be bad! It's just a spiral of cynicism.

I don't think you realize how badly I WANT to like this, given my lifelong Bungie fandom.

I think you want to like it in a certain way; or, rather you would like it to fit neatly into a preconceived notion you have, formed by specific elements of your experiences with previous Bungie games, of something that you would like, and are concerned that Bungie are not making that.

The idea of having a shared world, AND the player becoming a legend is incompatible. Bungie describes Destiny as a shared world shooter, and also tells us our mission as a guardian is important and we can become legend.

This is obviously a big design challenge. Most games solve it by sacrificing the context to the play. Raid content respawns on schedule, and people get to be the legend over and over again. Everybody in Azeroth gets a chance to kill the big bad bosses as many time as they want.

So let's say the world is shared. You go through the wall, and find someone else has already take out all the enemies and gotten the loot. Drat, nothing to do! In fact, while you weren't playing someone went and did it all, and now they are the hero.

Did you watch the interviews Staten did over the demo? It doesn't look like this can happen. From what he said and what I've seen, what's going on when players enter a public area is that some matchmaking logic spawns an instance, and when the event starts, available players that get matched get thrown into the instance. Everyone who plays that event will be in it at the start; that's the drop-in point. I don't think they'll let people walk in on the end of someone else's public event instance.

I think when Bungie says "public space" w/r/t events they are talking about "a space in which you may meet anyone" not "a space in which you will meet everyone". The former is "shared world", the latter is "massively multiplayer" which Bungie has disavowed at nearly every turn.

If you think about it, what's really going on here is that traditional party coop play through private spaces is substituting for things like the matchmaking lobby, and a public event is like a firefight matchmaking session.

And so in games like this, most people inevitably do NOT play a hero. They play the peon. Look at EVE or the old star wars galaxies. Most people in EVE just mine shit and work for a corporation; very few people get to be big players (heroes). Same in Star Wars galaxies. Most people made livings doing boring things, and becoming a jedi was outrageously hard that few people managed.

Those are all MMOs that either have a single server or shards where thousands of players are co-present in many if not all spaces (excepting raid instances). Public events I think are going to be instanced.

But who the fuck wants to play the peon? We want to be heroes! Okay, so the world isn't completely shared. It looks like Destiny will feature instances, as well as 'public events' (having this appear on screen breaks the immersion pretty hard by the way Bungie). So, everybody can do the event / quests / whatever. But if that's the case, and everyone can be the hero, then really nobody is a hero. Legend implies someone exceptional, but if everybody else is doing the same stuff you are, then nobody is really legendary is it? Oh you killed that huge monster? Congrats, so did everybody else.

Doesn't seem to affect WoW much, if at all, although I have the same problem with the concept. In Eve it works better, because the player is a capsuleer. Your ships have ordinary crew, and the universe is populated with plenty of ordinary people you never see. All the players are exceptional within the game's universe, not within the game. Just as the Master Chief is exceptional among human forces because he's a Spartan, just as the players in Destiny are exceptional among the human race by virtue of being Guardians chosen by the Traveler.

So you either have the shared world, and make people play peons, or you let everybody do the content, in which case nobody's really legendary. Sounds like someone thought this through well!

Stats are another thing that bug me. You can increase your Stats in destiny, level up your guns, and your numbers. I'm sure your luck stat increases your chance of a critical hit - nevermind that critical hits are stupid in a game based on your skill at shooting. Anyway, RPGs made numbers go up for two reasons. The first, is that back in the day that's all games could really do. They certainly couldn't replace the DM. They still can't - AI will never be good enough. But numbers computers could simulate. So, RPGs became about numbers.

CRPGS came from tabletop RPGs and were always about numbers.

But god dammit Bungie, the first person shooter isn't a shitty genre like JRPGs.

You not liking an entire genre doesn't make it shitty. Also, JRPGs are turn-based, not realtime. Was Mass Effect shitty?

You can't master the FPS in 30 minutes! The demands on the player are much more varied, and much more deep. YOU DON'T NEED NUMBERS. Leveling up weapons can be done right (vanquish), but that's because it's a stretegic decision with no right or wrong answer, and because the upgrades are fixed, and because the single player progression is linear. None of that is true for destiny.

You don't know that, actually. You don't know for a fact either of the sides of the speculation you're making. I'm not even sure Bungie yet has decided on quite a few things-- Staten was mum about what the numbers actually represent.

I don't think you realize how badly I WANT to like this, given my lifelong Bungie fandom.

I'm in a similar boat. With Halo fading away, I got nothing much left in modern games. So just sit back and smoke a cigar. You can tear the game apart once it hits. :)

There's still good stuff in modern gaming. You just need to search a little. Tell me what genres you like and I can recommend stuff.

'Modern' was probably too big of a term, I guess I just haven't been wowed by anything in the last year and a half or so.

I'm open to any genre that can give me an immersive world or backstory, exploration, and a feeling of real motivation in my blood. For example, I always loved Halo the best when the sandbox design + story + music synced up and gave me the inspiration and freedom to tell my own story in the midst of battle. But I've also found those elements in RTSs and other genres before.

I'd also like a game that doesn't treat me like its the first game I've ever played. I get very turned off in the first 20-30 minutes of so many games I try lately from crappy tutorials. Also not much of a twitch-gamer. I always enjoyed watching my friend play Devil May Cry but I could never play it long (except on easy mode).

I don't think you realize how badly I WANT to like this, given my lifelong Bungie fandom.

I'm in a similar boat. With Halo fading away, I got nothing much left in modern games. So just sit back and smoke a cigar. You can tear the game apart once it hits. :)

There's still good stuff in modern gaming. You just need to search a little. Tell me what genres you like and I can recommend stuff.

I think the truth is, games are social as you want them to be.

This. I think of a lot of games as merely frameworks for play that can be social or not, depending on your inclination. FPS games are like this, as are MMOs and games like Diablo III. It's what you bring that makes them social or otherwise, not the game itself.

You're basically Thane to my Grunt. LOL.

I've been the peon in the great majority of the multiplayer games I've played, and I've still had fun. Occasionally, I've done something cool that saved the day, and that's been memorable (maybe even legendary)--maybe more so than if it weren't so surprising.

I'm already a legend according to Bungie. I've beaten their games on legendary. Regarding becoming a legend, I think you're reading rhetoric as if it's a spec.

I want to mention the fun part again, because it's important. Some would say the most important. Some like me.

What you describe does not sound like fun, yet if there's one thing I trust Bungie to do, it's to create a game that is fun. That's why, to me, your criticisms seem a little premature.

That's not to say that I don't have questions about how the sharing will be handled in a way that allows everyone to have a degree of fun. I do. We shall see.

I don't think you realize how badly I WANT to like this, given my lifelong Bungie fandom.

I'm in a similar boat. With Halo fading away, I got nothing much left in modern games. So just sit back and smoke a cigar. You can tear the game apart once it hits. :)

Isn't there a pretty big debate in the D & D community about roleplaying vs. stats? Or am I remembering something different? Looks like you on Cody are on the opposite sides of the question.

Yes, there is. I'm not arguing stats are better, though:

All of those could probably make for great fun, but so can stat-heavy D&D, even if people don't bother with character personalities. To each their own, Cody.

Nope, stats are fairly important in the games I play in.

That's just my group, and only my perception of it at that.

My point, apparently poorly communicated last time, is that there is a spectrum of ways to play, and that any place on that spectrum is fine. Had I said "stats are more important" or "stats are necessary" I would be making an argument just as dumb as Cody's. This is fun we're talking about; everyone will have a different concept of it. I just really hate when people assert one opinion in a subjective argument is objectively correct or a fact.

... I really don't care. :)

You're criticizing Destiny's solution to problems that you don't even know it has in the first place.

I just don't see the fun in wasting all the time till a game's release wanting to dislike it and picking it apart with a negative microscope. With such an approach, when the game does come out it doesn't just have to be good, it has to work extra hard to fight back all these month of jaded-ly waiting for it to be bad! It's just a spiral of cynicism.

I don't think you realize how badly I WANT to like this, given my lifelong Bungie fandom.

About 6 years ago my mates would tease me in the pub that I was a sad gamer who played that Halo thing. Now they are all, Facebook, flash based game warriors.