Time to THRILL (Destiny)

by Schooly D, TSD Gaming Condo, TX, Wednesday, June 11, 2014, 10:51 (3827 days ago) @ Malagate

I have to admit I'm not super excited about lots of short lives in PvP.

I guess my real problem here is that I'm not hearing why this design philosophy itself is bad.

It's bad because it's not fun. For someone like myself who takes pride and enjoyment in performing and performing well, it gets in the way of that.

All else being equal (important caveat) a shorter time-to-kill requires less technical skill than a longer time-to-kill. The reasoning is simple: with a longer TTK, you need to land more of your shots over a longer period of time.

The counterpoint is: a shorter TTK requires less technical skill, but places more importance on things like positioning and map control. An example of this would be Counter-Strike. If you run out into the open on de_dust, you're going to get killed before you can see who's shooting you.

The reason this counterpoint doesn't apply in Destiny and similar games is that Counter-Strike is a much more controlled environment: everyone starts in one particular place that is known to everyone else. When you die, you don't respawn until the next round starts. The limited set of possibilities makes it feasible to account for them in your gameplay.

Destiny, Halo, and their ilk on the other hand are frenzied. People can die and respawn whenever and wherever. Trying to account for every possibility of enemy positioning/armament/etc becomes impossible. Eventually you're going to have a couple of enemies randomly run into your back and kill you.

In games with shorter TTK, this emphasizes the randomness. In Halo or Quake, you could conceivably get surprised by someone worse than you, end up winning the fight by landing more of your shots. In Destiny and COD this is more difficult -- by the time you know you're being shot, you're 3/4 dead.

This is a double-edged sword for people who suck. The upshot: if you suck, as long as you run around the map, you're eventually going to catch SOMEONE off guard and land enough shots to kill them. They won't have much of a chance to fight back. The downside: if luck isn't on your side, you could have a very very bad, very very un-fun game. Half the time you'd get ambushed, and the other half you'd get headshotted by the TTL guys on the other end.

Guaranteed-kill(s) supers (and, to a lesser extent, spawning with rockets/snipers) are Bungie's buffer against the downsides of a shorter TTK. Essentially what they're saying is "hopefully you, as an unskilled norb, will randomly run into enough peoples' backs to get enough kills to keep you happy. However, if the fates conspire against you, we've got these supers you can use to get some kills no matter what."

It's a noble philosophy. But it can go terribly, hair-pullingly wrong for someone like me who's heavily invested in playing and being given a fair shake.

If I'm on a team that's donging on the bad guys, and one of them manages to surprise me with a super before we win 16000-7000, whatever. No big deal. That's the ideal scenario.

If it's a close game and I'm guarding a critical objective, have correctly predicted the enemy's movement and expected point of entry, and am waiting to reap the fruits of my labor, it sucks hard to be killed because the guy coming around the corner managed to activate the super (or rocket -- they're plentiful) I didn't/couldn't know he had, killed me, took the objective, and won the game, that sucks. It sucks sucks sucks in the worst way.

The moon level in particular has an issue with teams dominating in the worst ways. When you've gotten donged on by snipers on the outside, rockets on the inside, and two Interceptors patrolling the level, you will know pain. This is somewhat the inverse of the above complaints (good players donging vs. bad players getting free kills), but it's related to the sheer amount of power available to players and I felt like mentioning it.