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The game forces you into a collection. The screen says "collection." You fill holes in the screen. The game is designed as a checklist, and I don't like that some stuff may never be acquired by people when the game makes it a collection.

Bungie made several mistakes here:

1. They have a kiosk for things that show you the number of items in the collection that you don't have. This includes exotics, shaders, etc.
2. They publish via the armory an exhaustive list of weapons and items.

The worst thing you can do to your game is to load it with secrets, then place a counter or a percentage indicator which tracks secrets found. Especially if you tie achievements to them, you've now forced a checklist, and ruined the mystery and majesty of secrets. Everything in the game should be a mystery, including secrets quests, and exotic weapons. So telling players which exotics / shaders / etc exist and then letting them know exactly which ones they don't have is bad.

Destiny 2 needs to:

1. For kiosks, they should only display items you have acquired. They should give no indication of what type or how many you have not yet acquired.
2. Not publish weapon lists or data regarding drops and rewards. If players wish to compile their own because they like checklists, then that is on them.
3. Do not release a strategy guide.

Now you've eliminated the checklist. Everything in the game should be a mystery.

GodDAMN I'm glad you're not in charge. I don't want to play your game.

That's why I am where I am in the games industry man.

I'd rather get the cool toys quickly, and then spend all my time having fun with them rather than spend all my time trying to earn the cool toys and be burned out by the time I get them.

I would rather get cool toys in cool ways, then have to use those cool toys to do other cool things.

You ask why content in Destiny feels one note, and the real answer is that it has to be because of the randomness. In other games, the challenges can branch out and diversify, because the designers know that players have acquired a certain set of items and skills, which they can then force players to master in order to tackle unusual challenges by using those items and skills in skillful or unorthodox ways.

In Destiny, because nearly every single piece of gear is acquired by chance, you do not know what players will have. So everything has to be conservatively designed.

What if a boss can only be damaged by supers, yet he drains your meter completely at the start of the fight and prevents regen. Cool huh? Now you have to use skills, items, and weapons which make orbs to charge your super in order to damage him. Except you can't do anything like that, because it's possible nobody in your group would have items that can make orbs. If items had fixed perks and were acquired in specific ways, then you could know that your players have such items at their disposal.

Most good games take the mechanics, then push them as far as possible with the tools players have in order to create awesome challenges. Destiny just cannot do this, because there is no known progression to the experience.

I do think there is room for the designers to have their cake and eat it too in terms of creating scenarios that are demanding in unique ways while also allowing for a wide range of gear possibilities. The Crota raid is actually a great example of this. Some of my favorite Destiny memories are the early days of that raid, when we were figuring out the process of chaining supers through the abyss. We were constantly making adjustments based on the subclasses in our particular group at that time, but the general strategy of chaining supers remained. Same with the bridge section; do we send over a bladedancer first so he can cloak and hide from the knight? Or a sunsinger who can self-res? And there was always room to react if something went wrong. I remember one run where we got the bridge activated, and we needed to change our order at the last moment for some reason. So Speedracer grabbed the sword and began sprinting across the bridge with no particular way to nutralize the knight, so I turned and chucked a flashbang grenade across the gap and blinded the knight just in time for Speedracer to take him down.

The key to this kind of flexibility is that it requires larger groups of players (6 guardians are more likely to cover all bases than 1-3 guardians), as well as communication.

Somewhere out there, there's an alternate universe with its own version of Destiny that was designed from the ground up as a purely 6 player experience. And that version of Destiny is way less approachable to the general public, far less popular, and a much better game ;)

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Another thing that I believe would make life in Destiny more pleasant is if drop rates were just higher across the board. I know some people enjoy the purely random element of RNG-based loot rewards. And I do see the fun side of it. It was a thrilling moment when I got my first Mythoclast. The sour side was getting my 7th, 8th, and 9th Mythoclasts with Speedracer in the same party, watching him get progressively more frustrated because he wanted one more than anything else in the game and it just. wouldn't. drop. for. him. Any joy or excitement I experienced from random loot drops over the past 2 years has been overshadowed by my own frustration, or the frustration of the people I play with.

What if the rewards were tied to your actions in game? If you want to guarantee a drop perform a certain task/role. So, for example the Mythoclast would be granted to people who wielded the relic against Aethon.

I think this would be a vast improvement. It'd encourage people to take on different roles and you'd get rid of that stupid RNG.

The actions/goals would need to be carefully designed, of course. But I think that would be a great way to eliminate the RNG frustrations while also encouraging all players to take different roles during the raid.

Jason Jones talked ages ago about the idea of having players replay stuff over and over, like many of us did with Halo, except we'd be getting cool little rewards along the way.

Either the rewards will be something you care about, or they will not be.

If players don't care about the rewards, then it won't change their behavior, and the time implementing them is wasted.

However, if they do care, then you've made your game worse, as explained here.

The proper thing to do is to roll the rewards right into the game. Do not treat them as a separate thing with investment systems.

When you say "roll the rewards right into the game", I believe you're referring to things like the Gjallarhorn quest in RoI, and the Black Spindle mission in TTK? If so, I completely agree.

I don't know if this is apropos of nothing, but here goes.

I absolutely adore the National Park mechanic in Civ 6. In previous games you were rewarded for covering every tile on the map with something. Now, in Civ 6, you can hang on to a small four tile grouping (with certain features) and in the late game use a Naturalist unit to zone it off as a natural park.

There's something immensely satisfying about preserving a relatively small piece of land over hundreds of turns and creating something beautiful and unique. Hell, I'm getting emotional just thinking about it (probably has to do with how amazing the sound track gets after the Industrial Era hits). Beyond the map generation at the start of a game, there is nothing random to the act of creating National Parks. In fact, it might be one of the hardest decisions in the entire game.

Rewards right into the game, indeed.

There is something deeply rewarding about making the conscious decision to work towards something, put in the effort, succeed, and reap the reward. The Gjallarhorn quest in RoI was a bit of a "freebee", but it still had weight to it. I'm a huge fan of the Black Spindle quest because it had the charm of a "secret" mission, plus it was an intense challenge that was inherently satisfying to complete, and then you got this awesome weapon as a reward. I've talked about this before, but I like the inclusion of a task that is very difficult and not everyone will be able to pull it off. There are people out there who can say "I never did manage to get that Black Spindle"... and I find that a compelling part of the communal experience of Destiny. But the RNG equivalent doesn't hit the same chord. I never got a "God roll" Doctrine of Passing... not because I failed to complete the required challenge, but because 50 weeks of playing Trials every single weekend just wasn't enough to get the RNG to swing in my favor. THAT is a crappy feeling.

The Outbreak Prime quest was perhaps a tad too far down the rabbit hole of insanity (in terms of how long and complex it is), but I'll take that over "just play the raid over and over and over and hopefully you'll get the gun you want some day".

I like that mechanic in principle, but hate it in practice. Although maybe that's just because of how I engage with a Civ game. By the time I can set up a park, I'm already bored and contemplating starting a new game. Late game Civ still sucks and ends up with me clicking "Next Turn" without actually doing anything for twenty five turns while my Science accumulates enough for me to get those last few techs. I rarely get that far anymore.