...and Beyond. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Tuesday, March 26, 2019, 12:06 (2073 days ago) @ Ragashingo

My Previous Post

Ok, so that’s where I feel Destiny is right now, but where should it go?

We MUST fight the Darkness.

But, it can’t just be yet another enemy type. The Darkness should be a threat so large and all consuming that it threatens the entire solar system, including the planets themselves. Ok… but how do do that without just killing all players in the opening minutes of Destiny 3? Well… I would do a few radical things to add new challenge and meaning to the world of Destiny:

• Planets themselves need to become far more hostile: Only the biggest, scariest, enemies will be able to survive on the surface of a planet when the Darkness is everywhere and distorting everything. As a practical result, Patrol should no longer be the mode you drop into so you can have an easy drive towards the next quest marker. Instead, imagine if all the Patrol Zones were amped up to something near midpoint of one of the Enemies Are Moving Against Each Other events. That point where sure, you can still hold you ground with a fireteam, but where trying to stand in the open solo is going to be very tough. While we’re at it, lets flip things around. Instead of having Nightfalls or Flash Points that make things harder, let’s have Shafts of Daylight that cycle from Destination to Destination and make things easier temporarily. But have the Daylight move day to day.
  
  
• Restrict Guardian travel: Right now, we’re basically free to go where we want when we want. But with the Darkness drowning the entire solar system, that should no longer be the case. Instead, players at the Daylight planet can go to any other planet, but after that you are partially stuck. To travel anywhere, you’ll need to generate “Charges of Light” yourself by filling the “level up meter” (whatever we call that thing that gives us Eververse engrams…). Each destination will offer one easy bounty each day that gives you a Charge of Light. Get 100 kills. Generate 50 Orbs of Light. That kind of thing. But you can only do one of those bounties each day. After that, you are on your own. This might seem harsh, but Fireteams can piggyback on each other’s jumps, so with a little planning travel won’t be too difficult, but going in solo might find you fighting on a Nightfall planet’s patrol zone to get that Charge of Light you need to continue a quest.
  
  
• Change things based on a multi-month story: The Dreaming City, and in a lesser example Xûr’s Invitations, are showing us that stretching content into a predictable rhythm instead of letting us binge on it all in one sitting actually works pretty well. So, do that for the whole game. Make this a drawn-out protracted war, not a Ghaul/Oryx style over before it started beatdown. With some good planning and regular storytelling, we could have the Darkness encroaching ever closer as the Traveler expends the last of its energy giving us the chance to find the real solution… or whatever. From week to week there should be new missions, Strikes, adventures, quests, etc. But they should be leading somewhere. And from time to time big things should happen. Imagine if in week two we successfully raid a Clovis Bray facility on Titan… only to have the entire moon consumed by the Darkness the next week making it a permanent Nightfall Destination.
  
  And yes, this is going to make Destiny’s universe advance without some players, so changes will need to be made. Destiny 3’s main story flow needs to be based on each character’s start date instead of a global progress common to all players. Things like special Crucible weeks and festivals can still take place even as one player is on Week 4 and another has completed the initial campaign. For fireteams playing together, you simply take on the progress of the fireteam leader. At the end of the main storyline will be a common ground where all players eventually end up so Destiny 3 can introduce new content and DLC without having to worry too much about which week players are on.
  
  
• Give us a branching storyline. If Bungie is already keeping track of character level progress week to week, might as well keep track of three or four important choices spread throughout the campaign. Maybe the end result is always both the Darkness and the Traveler leave our system or are destroyed, but the how and the why and the implications for the distant future (a universe again filled with Light and life vs one that succumbs fully to death and Darkness, for example) while our Guardians in the present day work to improve the prospects of our solar system no matter the larger outcome.
  
  
• Take Gambit-style invasions and add them to patrol: Imagine if at certain times, say during Public Events that have at least three Guardians participating, a single Guardian who has chosen some sort of path of Darkness can “invade” the patrol space and try and make things tougher for the good guys. I think we’ve all long since realized that Destiny is more than capable of combining PvP and PvE seamlessly, and now with Gambit we’ve seen Bungie finally fulfill that vision to some small extent. Yeah, they’d need good story-based reasons to let Guardians occasionally attack other Guardians, but once they figure out the lore, I’d love for Patrol to be just that much more dangerous!

Beyond that?

Just play the various plot threads (Mara Sov, Rasputin, the Exo Stranger, Variks & the Kell of Kells, Savathûn, The Dreaming City Curse) out to their edge-of-your-seat-mind-blowing conclusions in combination of the overwhelming threat of the Darkness. Easy-peasy!

...on and reaffirm that Maya Sunderesh is the Exo Stranger. Not her sister that was mentioned exactly once before Warmind. Thanks.

How about you? Where do you want Destiny to go next?