gamedevelopment: What Destiny's Failures Can Teach Us About Game Design

[osed125]

UltimateUnknown said:

osed125 said:

People's complain with Destiny was that even though you preformed wayyyy better than your teammates, they could get wayyyy better loot than you. Say you got 20 kills and the other guy only 2, yet the latter got a legendary weapon and you got nothing. 

I never played Wow for more than an hour, but from what I understand when raiding, people have to work together and 1 person's mistake can cost everyone the battle (that might be an exaggeration, but correct be if I'm wrong on this). That is not really the case on Destiny because of the FPS nature. In Wow every player focuses on a single enemy, in Destiny there are hordes of enemies (as well as a boss) and in the end, the game gives you a score, when you see that your score is higher than the other players and yet you didn't get anything, is natural to get pissed off. This doesn't mean that Destiny doesn't have teamwork like Wow does, but actually knowing by numbers that you did better than the other players and got nothing, imo, is a flawed game design. People probably wouldn't have complain if the score tab was removed altogether.

As far as I know, your score means absolutely nothing on Destiny's loot system.

The raids in Destiny are the exact same thing. They require absolute cooperation amongst 6 people to complete, bar none. Heck you can't even open up the door to the raid area without 6 people co-operating and standing on different plates, let alone fighting bosses or figuring out the puzzles inside. In fact, Destiny's best gear, which are raid gear and exotics come from completing various parts of the raid. Since everyone is contributing significantly to complete the raid (or else you couldn't even progress within it), loot drops are well earned overall. Plus the drops are more generous there, especially with the new raid. I have not seen anyone really complain about the raids. They are mad fun. It's just the boring SP missions that suck.

Also Destiny does have a surefire way of getting the best gear, i.e. exotics. It is through the vendor Xur who comes every weekend. Sure what he sells is random and you may not get exactly what you want every week, but he will sell guaranteed exotic gear and guns every week. He has sold almost every exotic gun in the game in the past three months of visits, so if you visited him every Friday you would have almost every exotic gun in the game apart from the PS exclusives, which aren't sold by him for some reason.

Fridays and Saturdays, which are days he is available have famously become known as Xursdays amongst Destiny fans. These days are filled with nothing but anticipation and fun.

I mentioned later that Destiny does require teamwork, never implied that it didn't. The problem (like I mentioned in post) is the scoreboard at the end of a mission, the problem comes with this.

It's been a while since I played Destiny, I don't own the game but I played it very extensively over a friend's house when it launched, so I don't know if some of the initial complains have been fixed.