Avatar

Patrol Missions - Ideas for new Ones (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 16:58 (3504 days ago)

Let's be honest, the patrol missions are boring and repetitive. Go to point X. Go to point X and scan the object there. Go to point X and kill target T there. Kill Y enemies. Kill Y enemies in order to collect Q of (item type) from their bodies. And that, my friends, is 100% of the missions you'll encounter in patrol mode. It's even more sad because there are only 5 basic types of missions, and the bounty is to complete 6 missions total, so you're guaranteed to see repeat types in any bounty effort.

Bungie, you could spice this up in oh-so-many-ways. Let's brainstorm:

- Recover a lost ghost. This is a "go to area X" type mission, but there's a ghost *somewhere* in that area and you have to actually do some looking around to find it.

- Rescue a fallen guardian. Again, go to area X, but then there are a bunch of enemies you wouldn't normally encounter in that area and you have to kill them in order to rescue a guardian that fell there.

- Race! Go to area X in a certain amount of time. This mission can be failed, and which point you can just pick up another mission.

- Absolute carnage. Kill X enemies in a certain amount of time.

- Extinction order. Kill X of a specific type of enemy. Kill 20 Dregs, kill 20 vandals, kill 2 Wizards, for example.

- Support mission. Help other guardians in your area earn X kills.

- Supply run. Take the item given to you at the start of this mission to point X, and which point you complete the mission and it drops ammo of all types for the guardians nearby.

- Survive. This mission starts the "enemies are mobilizing against each other" mini-war event in the area. You must stay in that area and survive until the mini-war ends.

- Treasure Hunt. You must find and open 5 chests.

- Resource farm. You must find and collect 5 resource nodes.

- Orbital bombardment. Changes the player's grenade into a beacon that calls down lasers from space (the warsats, I assume). Kill X enemies with LASERS FROM SPACE!

- Cut off the head. Kill 3 Ultras or Majors.

- Cut off the head, literally. Kill X enemies with melee to the face!

Post your other ideas here! I don't think most of these would be very difficult to add.

Some multi-stage ones?

by Blue_Blazer_NZ, Wellington, New Zealand, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 17:17 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Cool ideas; a lot of these would be great to add and I wouldn't think they would be too hard to implement (not that I know ANYTHING about dev work).

I would also be interested in completing multi-stage patrol missions; and I don't mean just ferrying around the ghost from place to place again. Maybe a mission to escort an ally or deliver a vehicle in working order. I would also like missions to be faction-specific while wearing a faction's garb. They should also be relevant to what that faction stands for and what they are trying to achieve.

Overall, whatever content does come, I hope it adds some actual meaning to the things we are doing. Missions in general have so far failed to convey to me why our Guardians are important, beyond being glorified taxis for the Ghosts. Yes, I know it's not Halo, but I didn't have that feeling when running around with Cortana in my ear.

Avatar

Good ideas. Patrol missions need more variety.

by ShadowOfTheVoid ⌂, South Carolina, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 17:36 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

- No text -

Avatar

Patrol Missions - Ideas for new Ones

by General Vagueness @, The Vault of Sass, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 17:54 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

5/6 would patrol

Avatar

Patrol Missions - Ideas for new Ones

by General Vagueness @, The Vault of Sass, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 17:57 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

suggestion:
Ridin' Dirty - splatter 3 enemies with your Sparrow (or another vehicle if you can find one)

Patrol Missions - Ideas for new Ones

by petetheduck, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 18:00 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Let's be honest, the patrol missions are boring and repetitive. Go to point X. Go to point X and scan the object there. Go to point X and kill target T there. Kill Y enemies. Kill Y enemies in order to collect Q of (item type) from their bodies. And that, my friends, is 100% of the missions you'll encounter in patrol mode. It's even more sad because there are only 5 basic types of missions, and the bounty is to complete 6 missions total, so you're guaranteed to see repeat types in any bounty effort.

Bungie, you could spice this up in oh-so-many-ways. Let's brainstorm:

- Recover a lost ghost. This is a "go to area X" type mission, but there's a ghost *somewhere* in that area and you have to actually do some looking around to find it.

- Rescue a fallen guardian. Again, go to area X, but then there are a bunch of enemies you wouldn't normally encounter in that area and you have to kill them in order to rescue a guardian that fell there.

- Race! Go to area X in a certain amount of time. This mission can be failed, and which point you can just pick up another mission.

- Absolute carnage. Kill X enemies in a certain amount of time.

- Extinction order. Kill X of a specific type of enemy. Kill 20 Dregs, kill 20 vandals, kill 2 Wizards, for example.

- Support mission. Help other guardians in your area earn X kills.

- Supply run. Take the item given to you at the start of this mission to point X, and which point you complete the mission and it drops ammo of all types for the guardians nearby.

- Survive. This mission starts the "enemies are mobilizing against each other" mini-war event in the area. You must stay in that area and survive until the mini-war ends.

- Treasure Hunt. You must find and open 5 chests.

- Resource farm. You must find and collect 5 resource nodes.

- Orbital bombardment. Changes the player's grenade into a beacon that calls down lasers from space (the warsats, I assume). Kill X enemies with LASERS FROM SPACE!

- Cut off the head. Kill 3 Ultras or Majors.

- Cut off the head, literally. Kill X enemies with melee to the face!

Post your other ideas here! I don't think most of these would be very difficult to add.

I think the concept behind 'recover a lost ghost' is a great idea, but I dislike the other suggestions.

Video game objectives, in general, have little variation. Masking that with arbitrary redundancy doesn't really enhance the experience. I don't think 30 subtly different patrol mission variations will provide any better experience than 5 distinct ones.

I do think there is a lot of room for improvement to the patrol experience, and patrol missions specifically. I.E., removing beacons and merging patrol missions and public events. As in, on some kind of random interval (3-5 minutes or something) you'll get a transmission from the tower with a random mission, but you have to manually accept it.

Some missions could even be invitations to upcoming public events. It would give you the sense of the City monitoring Old Russia -- "We've detected a Fallen Ketch headed for the Mothyards. Guardians, move to intercept!"

I think the unique scenarios public events present are much more enjoyable than patrol missions. A more diverse patrol schedule could be quite awesome. Having more unique enemy events naturally happening throughout these planets.

Avatar

Patrol Missions - Ideas for new Ones

by uberfoop @, Seattle-ish, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 18:03 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

DANCE PARTY

Join two other guardians in a dance party

DANCE BATTLE

Dodge 10 enemy projectiles by dancing

DO A BARREL ROLL

Do a barrel roll

Avatar

Well...

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 18:14 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul
edited by INSANEdrive, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 18:25

...haven't we been a hive of ideas today. Pretty cool.

----

Edit: Somewhere on the map/network there is a group of players who have been ambushed by that en-mass of enemies.

Elsewhere there are some players who are exploring. They find a beacon that blinks red (meaning time sensitive). Guardian Assist - Guardians in <Location> need help! If you can intercept ans assist.

I imagine that this would be a bit technical to create on Bungies end, so I don't expect to see anything like that unless we get a sequel.

Avatar

I love all of these!

by DiscipleN2k @, Edmond, OK, Wednesday, October 01, 2014, 19:04 (3504 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I would probably take anything with any kind of story behind it at this point. It just seems like there was zero effort put into the current patrol missions.

-Disciple

Avatar

I love all of these!

by General Vagueness @, The Vault of Sass, Thursday, October 02, 2014, 10:59 (3504 days ago) @ DiscipleN2k

I would probably take anything with any kind of story behind it at this point. It just seems like there was zero effort put into the current patrol missions.

That's one thing I've been meaning to say that I like about what they did, actually, there is some story to some of them. For example there's a scanning mission that tells you go to an object in Old Russia and scan it because it held fuel in the golden age and someone (I think it was the Future War Cult) wants to know more about how that setup worked. It's in the Refinery so maybe you could've guessed what it was, but it didn't look like a fuel container to me, and regardless it adds at least a little significance to what otherwise would've been a random piece of cover. That last part addresses something that I've wanted to see in games for a long time, giving some more context or meaning to places and objects other than what's vital without going into ancillary fiction. Maybe that's standard for RPGs, I haven't played a lot of them.
Of course most patrol missions don't give you that, and I will say a lot get bland after a while, but I do also like the ones where you have to go clear out a set group of enemies, because they often are different enemies than you would usually find there, which helps the sense of the world being alive and fluid.

Back to the forum index
RSS Feed of thread