Does Destiny need a "campaign"? (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Friday, October 20, 2017, 12:45 (2590 days ago) @ Cody Miller

In a lot of ways, Destiny 2’s campaign pretty much is “just” a short series of adventures set one after the other. I guess I’m a bit confused as what would really change. Already, some of the story mission like the one with the tank had us travel through the open world to launch. More of that? Or more elaborate events in the open world that bring us from plot point to plot point?

(emphasis mine)

Yeah, more stuff like that is what I had in mind. Destiny has all these different systems in place (strikes, patrols, adventures, public events) and some of the most exciting and unpredictable moments happen when those systems crash into each other and overlap. I think having more instances of that, and more different combinations, is a good direction for Destiny to lean, as it is really the thing that makes Destiny unique. And a good way to achieve that is to keep as many players engaged with public instances as possible, including the "story" focused missions.

But now you have to put back in the grind in order to keep people playing and the spaces filled. It doesn't work dude. You have to stretch things out and make a grind for people to spend the time required in the world for this to work. It's one of those things that sounds good, but isn't practical. it has to be a grind, because you can't make content as fast as people play it. It's the biggest reason why MMOs do not work as games and have low fun per second.

Some of that could be solved with dynamic difficulty scaling. Think of the way Destiny 1 Warsat public events wouldn't drop off new enemies until the previous batch was cleared and how later waves of enemies were way more powerful than the early waves. It was a pretty neat way to have those encounters automatically scale to the number of Guardians participating.

Putting friendly AI back in the mix could help as well. They don't have to be anywhere near as effective as the player as long as they segment the enemy groups enough that the single or few players don't all get smothered by enemy gunfire.

With any luck, a few changes could make levels and encounters fun whether other human players were around or not, and things could crank up in difficulty and craziness when the next event or expansion bring a flood of players returning for a week or two.

At the end of the day, maybe games like Destiny just need to make sure they are fun to play with and without randoms. Because every game will suffer from reduced player counts eventually. Even better if they could weave in some plot points as to why there are fewer players around during off times.