Does Destiny need a "campaign"? (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, October 20, 2017, 13:22 (2590 days ago) @ TheOmegaClown

This is why you segregate them. If you can visit the same patrol spaces before and after you finish the campaign… it feels like nothing changed. So, you have the patrol spaces come later, where they reflect the world post campaign. You get to feel like you did something in the main story, and you also get the open world aspect.

phased instancing is something WoW has implemented to a certain degree of success - but I dont think it requires completely segregating the two experiences. I like the idea of communicating that the player's actions have an effect on the world.

The Farm does this, though subtly.

At first, it's just you, Hawthorne, and a handful of other people.
Then Tess, Shaxx, and more refugees show up.
Then the area is heavily populated by refugees (thanks to the comms mission).
Then the Vanguard is there with everyone else.
And once you beat the story, the Farm is practically empty again, except for Tyra and random refugees.

There are plenty of instances in the campaign where you run into a Public area on your own, and where you could have had an effect on the game world (you use the Drake to permanently strand the Cabal ship on the ground, so that's something)...

But yeah, I've always been a fan of seeing the effects of your presence. Hence the stuff about the forklift (a lot of people can look to Megaton in Fallout 3 as an example of this kind of thing done right).

Even public events acknowledge the repetition of their scripted events via the dialogue ("The Fallen are at it AGAIN? Will they ever learn?)

I've spoken to someone about missed opportunities like this, such as the part where Failsafe says "When you kill a Servitor, it stays dead!". A great bit for veteran players would have been for Ghost to reply "Well, not always."

It's little continuity stuff like that that makes all the difference to me.

It would have been nice if more of the main (read: linear) storyline could have been folded into the campaign via strikes and adventures - sort of as a way to tease out the experience a little longer, and because both allow different ways to tell stories. As they exist now, having adventures and strikes layer on new stories or add tangents to existing story arcs is great, but imagine a strike where you and two other random players had to take back certain sectors of the city before you could mount an offensive against Gaul? It would require acknowledging that other Guardians obtained their light too, but I don't think that would kill the story necessarily.

I think Destiny was missing that, but I think they skipped it because of complaints that people had in the first game about how long it took to unlock new planets. Now, it was two story missions per planet, and for the most part, once you left a planet, you never came back to it in the story. I understand why they chose to do it like this, but it was still really disappointing.

I do think that D2 has set up a great way to tell new stories via adventures though. If they wanted to, they could release whole new sets of adventures in a sector or on a planet that really took players through entire side campaigns or flushed out some of the lore they've yet to really address.

Definitely. I really don't think that D2's content releases will be like Destiny 1's, especially not with multiple studios working on the content. The lack of Festival of the Lost is surprising, but considering how much of a downgrade the last one was, I'm happier with them taking their time to develop the content.

But isn't that the pattern with Destiny to begin with? a game with great bones and ultimately unrealized potential? Maybe why the community has filled in the gaps as much as they have.

Yeah. Destiny 2 is a far better Foundation release than Destiny 1 was (and with far more support and focus), and look how that game looked at the end of its life. I'm pretty confident that there'll be good Adventures down the road.