Thoughts on the VoG *rant/spoilers* (Destiny)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Wednesday, October 08, 2014, 10:55 (3941 days ago) @ Postmortem

To backtrack a little bit, I should talk about my gaming habits. I'm the sort of gamer who will always play on the easiest difficulty the first time through, just to get the story. When I'm watching a movie, I don't want to have anything get in the way of my enjoyment of the plot. The same goes for a game. If I'm frustrated because I'm repeating levels or sections over and over again due to difficulty, that's a bad thing to me the first time through. It's the equivalent of having to pause a movie to watch scenes over because someone was talking through the whole thing... over and over again. Challenge is fine, and I'm all for that, but not on my first time experiencing a story.

We differ here. I consider the gameplay ideally to be inseparable from the narrative, and ideally that gameplay puts me into a flow state, which means that I've chosen a difficulty level commensurate with my skill level--for games that have difficulty levels, that is.

The thing about good game design is it should have the same emotional effect on you in spite of the difficulty you're playing on. The final Warthog run in Halo: Combat Evolved is an adrenaline-ruled race against time that feels just as triumphant to complete on easy as it does on Legendary. The music, the level design, the dialogue... all of these are the things that make the experience what it is. The same goes for any other game... Journey is a relatively easy game with an incredibly emotional impact. The Last of Us. Dead Space... all of these games achieve the emotional impact they're going for, regardless of difficulty. The challenge might add a little tension, but mostly what it's going to add is frustration as you have to re-attempt each challenge over and over again.

Emphasis mine. I could not disagree with this statement more. I'll remove Journey from the discussion because I don't think it has difficulty levels, and I haven't played Dead Space (and probably won't). But for the Last of Us, the emotional impact of the game is intimately connected to the tension you feel during gameplay. Your bond with Ellie is strengthened every time she superbly vocalizes exactly what you just felt. I'm sorry, but I just don't see it as being that effective if she says "That was intense!" and what you just played wasn't really intense because you played on Easy.

Going back to Destiny, the Vault of Glass is some of the best level and gameplay design in the game, no doubt. But then you have to stop and realize... most players are not going to have the ability to put together a group to run through the Vault. After that, a lot won't have the skill. And finally, a vast majority just won't have the time in their busy schedules to beat the damn thing before the checkpoints reset.

Sorry, disagree again. Accessibility and challenge do not go hand in hand. Most people won't climb Everest. So what? If everyone could and did, would it mean anything?

The best content in Destiny is intentionally being locked away from the majority of its players.

That's only because the majority of players aren't willing to invest so much. You get what you give.

For clarity, I fully plan on playing every raid in the future. I don't think I'll be going in as a virgin from now on, simply because I don't want to spend as much time on future raids as I spent on the VoG. But I love the problem-solving aspect of it. I love gameplay that switches things up on you like this did. And I want to be able to experience that sort of stuff on my own schedule, and at a difficulty that I choose.

As others have pointed out, this doesn't make sense. If you love problem solving, why do you want to know the solution up-front? We did seek out strategies at a certain point, and I can live with that because we tried to do it blind first. You can have everything just as you like it on your timetable, but I don't think that's what the Raid is really about. The Raid isn't about providing just-in-time fun at your convenience. I think it's about making a commitment with a group of friends to tackle a challenge, preferably without knowing the full parameters of that challenge or exactly how long it will take. (I feel the same way about co-op night. You don't join if you're planning on sitting in a corner of the level and eating your supper. You're there to play with others and focus on the game.) If you want advance intelligence ahead of time and make it more of a paint by numbers exercise, that's fine, but that's not my preference. To me, that greatly diminishes the satisfaction I'll have at the end of the journey.

What I'd like to see in the future is more missions (in any format) that utilizes similar gameplay and level design, but that's tailored for people who aren't interested in the coordination challenge, but just in having a different experience. I know it wouldn't be the same, but if the VoG had the same puzzles, but just half as many Vex shooting at you with half as much health, it would have been the perfect experience in my book. Solving the puzzle should be the primary obstacles, not the hours and hours of repetitively trying to execute something you understood a long time ago.

I agree that the rest of Destiny would benefit from more creativity like we saw exhibited in the raid, but for me, the cooperative experience was what made it really special and, to use your word, perfect.

I know raids wouldn't be the same if they could be run solo, but I think that's kind of the sort of content that I'm hoping to see in the future. Something as long (physically) as the Vault of Glass, with the same sort of interesting challenges, but capable of being tackled more easily. Open up some of these great experiences to the masses, and allow the difficulty modifiers to cater to the more hardcore players. I'm okay with there being more raids along the lines of VoG (and I know that's already what's planned), but I just hope there will be more stuff targeting to middle ground, and catering a bit more to us players who like more casual experiences that also offer lots of variety. Maybe it's just a matter of making future strikes more interesting, I don't know.

As I said above, the rest of the game could benefit from ideas developed in the raid. Otherwise, I disagree that it should be more accessible. I see this time and again in discussions. People want stuff handed to them. If everyone's special, ain't nobody special. In general, it sounds like you want Destiny to be solo game because you like playing solo. That's okay, but I don't think Destiny is, at its core, a solo game and in fact I think it's designed to break players' habits of playing solo and turn them on to the rewards of playing cooperatively.

End rant.