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This is especially problematic when the same set of bounties are given to everyone at the same time[/size]

...giving people bounties customised to their own play history.

There is the tiniest amount of this already there: in that when you pick up new snipers and shotguns as you're leveling up, sometimes you are given extra bounties for that weapon type.

Multiplayer achievements (and Destiny bounties) can help a game by motivating the player to explore and master mechanics they might have been otherwise ignoring. Unfortunately, they can influence player behavior away from what would be the optimal strategy for that particular match/moment (e.g. you're more likely to make bad melee attempts if you're trying to get a melee attack achievement/bounty). This is especially problematic when the same set of bounties are given to everyone at the same time -- when the queen bounties first appeared, crucible instantly became overcrowded with people exclusively using hand cannons and scout rifles trying to get headshots for their bounties.

Yeah, this is a problem for me, because I just got a special bounty to survive five strike missions in a row. If I actually try to do that, it's going to be a burden on the rest of the team, as I hang back and play it extra safe. If I'm on the fifth one, am I really going to take a risk to try and raise a downed teammate across the battlefield? I doubt it.

Perhaps Crucible bounties should be limited to those that fit within goals of the game type as they already exist.

All of these decisions pull Destiny's end game away from what Jason Jones described in the 2013 interview.

The thing that strikes me as clueless about that quote is that he assumes that replaying a game in and of itself is something desirable. It's not. What good is someone replaying your game if they aren't really having that much fun, or are bearing a grind to get to what IS fun?

Have you ever heard anybody say, "oh, I paid ten bucks to see this film, but I only got 90 minutes of moviewatch. This other film gave me 180 minutes of moviewatch, so it's better." That's how silly you sound when you talk about how many hours of gameplay you got, as if that means the game is good because of it.

This idea of hours spent on a game being desirable in and of itself, of being an indicator of quality, is the kind of toxic mindset I thought we moved away from as JRPGs started to wane in popularity in the early 2000s.

There is no point in wanting players to replay your game if it's not fun; it's got to be something they do on their own. Halo did this well by offering a wide variety of playstyles, as well as complex and interesting encounters with many ways to approach them. So players would try what suited them if they wished. You could pick what you wanted, so you were pretty much guaranteed to get an interesting experience because you sought it out due to your own interest.

Destiny forces replaying, by holding back progression. I replayed 'A Stranger's Call' this morning in the hopes of getting 2 ascendant energies (I got 2 ascendant shards instead, when I already have a zilion of them). It wasn't really that interesting, and I spent longer wishing I could skip the cutscene than I did playing the mission.

Your goal as a game designer should be, in simple terms, to make each second someone spends with your game as interesting as possible. That typically means not frustrating people with systems designed to lock progression without forced replayability. If your player masters whatever challenge you have thrown at him, he should be able to move on to the next one, immediately, with nothing being put in his way.

You have to offer incentives to people for things they don't want to do. So if you feel like you have to create incentives to play your game again, think about what that actually means.

This is where bounties, materials, and collectables come in to play. As others have pointed out, bounties (or achievements) come with a cost. They can add variety, sure.

The thing is though, bounties aren't interesting challenges in their own right. If a bounty was a mini story, that spawned monsters on an interesting part of the map in interesting encounters for example, that might be one thing. As it is now, there is nothing interesting about completing them. The tasks themselves are simple, and you just have to do a lot of them.

Add to that, there's the fact that there are very few bounties. I think the same story mission bounty to do the Garden's Spire and Archive mission came up 2 days in a row. I see the same "Kill 2 enemies at a time with a fusion rifle" bounty. Destiny's world needed to be more open and more interactive, to offer more types or, and more interesting types of bounties.

Any side mission in Deus Ex is an example of what a bounty should be.