Hypothetical Games: "Destiny" Killer

Not too long ago, I came across this video discussing why Destiny always seemed to be dying out as far as active players.  It made several good points and got me thinking about how one might go about actually crafting a Destiny-killer, a game that has roughly similar mechanics but is done in a more effective fashion.  I know some folks will point to Warframe and Tom Clancy's The Division as already extant games which do this, but I'm not entirely convinced of that (both games had problems enough on their own).  Keep in mind that this is going to be more of a mechanical discussion than one about setting and lore.  As it happens, I enjoy the story elements behind Destiny for the most part.  My beefs with the game are some of the questionable design choices Bungie has made.

Lore Disconnect

While I enjoy the story, the setting, and the lore elements of Destiny, there are two particular design choices related to those elements that strike me as wrong.  The first is breaking out the Grimoire into a mobile app.  If I access the Grimoire from inside the game, that would be just fine and dandy, particularly getting a chance to examine weapon and ship models more closely and being able to manipulate the models instead of constantly being locked at that one angle.  One might argue that the Grimoire is mainly just a box of crunchy lore flakes, but having it outside the game is nonsensical, particularly since there's so much data in there about your performance that getting an idea of how you did without having to consult a mobile device would be beneficial to players.

My second problem is deeper and more fundamental, particularly with regards to gear.  For a moment, consider the implications of being a character in Destiny.  The game's lore suggests that the observed relationship between matter and energy has been exploited in such a way as to allow perfect deconstruction and reconstruction of objects and organisms.  In other words, teleportation is not a fancy way of committing suicide through quantum mechanics anymore.  The existence of engrams suggests that there are ways to make such patterns of energy-to-matter tangible and semi-permanent.  Given that, it should follow that rather than actual items, there should be mechanisms in place to hold a library of engrams of various types.  Instead, we've got item banks of limited space for gear, while our collections of ships, Sparrows, and shaders (all of which are effectively cosmetic) can be pulled out again and again much like the library I just described.  Gear may have its own distinct properties, but to have that library mechanism for vehicles and not have it for weapons and armor strikes me as just ridiculous.  It's particularly obnoxious when you realize they have a similar mechanism in place for exotic weapons and armor, but anything less than that is apparently "too hard."

Recommended Actions

• Allow lore to be accessed in-game as well as through companion app
• Allow gear to be stored in a "library" consistently across vehicles, weapons, and armor

Grit In The Gear

If there is one complaint that stands head and shoulders above all others in Destiny, it is the utter capriciousness of the game's Random Number Generator.  Yes, you've heard all the jokes about the "RNGesus" and how 99.9% of the time it behaves like a guy kicking money changers out of the temple instead of feeding the masses loaves and fishes.  You've heard about the guys who've ground raids endlessly, trying to get the "perfect" roll for an Imago Loop hand cannon or some other piece of gear, and how their efforts seem to be doomed to frustration when Bungie implements a change to the sandbox that devalues and obsoletes the item they spent so much time trying to get.  I understand there's a degree of grinding on any kind of MMO, but there are times where it goes too far.  And the grind on Destiny is just atrocious.  What makes it worse is the micro-transaction Eververse Store.  "Pay real money to get a holiday box and take your chances, just like you were without paying the money!" No thanks.  It's bad enough that you have to drop money for the expansions to begin with to be screwed over.  Paying extra money to be screwed over by the RNG even further is just completely ridiculous.  To be fair, having an RNG is not necessarily the kiss of death.  But having it be as bolloxed up as Destiny's version is just atrocious.  RNGs should be like haiku.  Small and with very strict limits they have to adhere to.

Another point with regards to gear ties back to my earlier complaint about its disconnection from the lore of the game.  Weapons and armor in Destiny are essentially sealed packages.  During the House of Wolves expansion, the Gunsmith was able to modify weapons, provided you paid an appropriate cost, and let you basically re-roll the weapon.  It was a promising mechanic which Bungie completely killed off for no good reason.  True, it relied very heavily on the RNG, but at least you had hope that you could get a good roll.  A variation of that mechanic is available for exotic items but you have to be getting exotic shards and pay to have them turned into a consumable item from itinerant peddler Xur, and there's no guarantee the roll will be any better.  Having a system closer to Call of Duty where you gradually unlock different upgrades by persistent playing is a different grind, and not a bad idea.  The problem there is that everybody will eventually have all the same upgrades.  The mechanism could work if there was a second system in place to allow players to swap out weapon perks more or less at will.  Consider this scenario: as players progress, they slowly learn how to build certain weapon perks (say for example the Firefly perk, which lets fatal head shots cause the target to explode).  It's entirely possible that they could unlock all possible perks over the course of the game, but once those perks were unlocked, a player could then go to a workbench and swap out one perk for another.  The RNG might have certain perks come up more than others, but in theory, a dedicated player could unlock them all.  Taking it one step further, if we treat the base weapon as essentially a framework and the perks as specialized or customized weapon parts (much like how AR-15s are modded in the real world), it would open things up to different play styles.  Players would learn how to build their own rolls which might be hot in PvP as well as developing counters for them.  As an aside, that same learning mechanic could also be used to unlock the skins for weapons, and extend that mechanic to armor as well.

A final complaint lays in the lack of imagination that seems to infuse Destiny's weapons.  There is a deadly sense of ho-hum sameness to all of the weapons when you strip away the names and the skins.  The emphasis that was ostensibly placed on different manufacturers from "The Taken King" forward is completely hollow.  Seriously, the only point of difference between any of the manufacturers from a mechanical standpoint is that Hakke pulse rifles fire four rounds instead of three.  There's a mention that Hakke sidearms have a higher muzzle velocity, but the actual effects of that perk don't seem to really have much impact in mechanical terms.  It's such a completely wasted opportunity to give players something meaningful.  And why was it four rounds?  Most burst fire weapons in the real world go with either three or five.  Was there some magical significance to the number four?  Or was it developer laziness?  Or worse, developer timidity?  Compounding that seems to be the slow roll that melee weapons received, and which remains ridiculously limited even today.  They teased swords in the base game's original release.  They make them a mechanic in the Crota raid.  They finally get brought out full time in Taken King.  And then we're back to being teased with greataxes.  It would have been interesting to have melee weapons filling primary and special slots, not just the heavy weapons.  Batons, short swords, hand axes, longswords, rapiers, battleaxes, maces, flails, combined with the right elements of Destiny lore, all of that was possible.  Speaking of heavy weapons, sure we got machine guns and rocket launchers out of the gate.  But what about indirect weapon systems, such as grenade launchers or mortars?  Or even truly exotic weapons such as railguns and "plasma cannon?"  You can't tell me that Sleeper Simulant wasn't a weapon that was heading in that general direction. Such weapons might make for a much more interesting PvE and PvP experience.

Recommended Actions

• Separate RNG from micro-transactions
• Make weapons and armor genuinely moddable, not simply stuck with perks determined by RNG
• Allow players to learn how to make perks, an extension of the gear library idea
• If multiple manufacturers are present as part of game lore, build weapons distinctive to those manufacturers and make those distinctions meaningful
• If adding melee weapons, don't arbitrarily restrict their presence or their implementation
• Consider all aspects of weapons systems, particularly heavy weapons; know the difference between direct and indirect fire

Pimp My Ride

I'm going to put this out there: the bad guys in Destiny have cooler vehicles than the players.  To some extent, this is to be expected.  But much like swords during initial release, the game has teased us with other vehicles, which any self-respecting perpetually reincarnating guerrilla would have stolen and figured out a way to reliably reproduce for his comrades.  I get that Sparrows are a means of transportation built for speed, but when we use Fallen Pikes in certain missions and strikes, you can't tell me that somebody back in the City hasn't thought, "I wonder if I can mount a couple of guns on here."  Or built the post-Collapse version of a technical, which can carry multiple people and a heavy weapons system.  This is particularly irritating from Bungie of all people, who gave us plenty of vehicles in Halo which could be used by multiple players and which were fairly well armed for their weight.  Personal vehicles are fine, but give us more options, particularly something that actually lets players experience the idea of combined arms outside of the Crucible play mode of the same name.

Additionally, I'm going to take exception to the same deadly dull uniformity of Sparrows.  There are a few legendary Sparrows which have kind of an interesting twist (the XV0 Timebreaker from the Vault of Glass raid is one example) but other than that, there's so little to distinguish them from each other mechanically, you almost don't give a damn about them.  They're there to move you from one side of the large map to the other without all that tedious mucking about on foot and shooting everything that moves.  Much like the lack of variety in weapons, the mechanical variety in Sparrows is unconscionably trivial.  Give us crotch rockets and cruisers, trials bikes and "Honda-bagos."  Give the option to put in better handling, or higher top speed, or stronger boosts, or heavier armor.  All the neat paint jobs in the world won't save you from the fact that 99.999% of the time spent in Destiny will not involve Sparrows which we have no great attachment to.

In a related vein, spacecraft are a complete goddamned waste of art assets, and they didn't need to be.  There has been an entire area of potential game play that has been completely ignored by simply making your particular spaceship nothing more than a cosmetic item between loading screens.  Sure, the ship you're currently using appears on the cinematic sequences for the few missions when you first reach a new world, but that only makes it worse in a way.  You get a vague idea about how cool these ships would move in a dogfight or on a high speed ground attack pass.  Virtually all of these ships are studded with weapons of some sort, all of which are frustratingly impotent.  I want to be able to get into a furball with Fallen pirates in my Ceres Galliot out in the Asteroid Belt.  I want to be running "wild weasel" strikes against Cabal SAM and AAA emplacements on Mars with Little Light.  I want to see which is the better ground attack craft, Smokehouse Six or Agonarch Karve.  And if they're not great as is, give me the option to make them better.  The lore may say that jumpships are rare, but damned if I don't have an entire fleet of the things.  I have enough to outfit an full fledged squadron of pilots, and all of them completely useless.  I wouldn't mind having something like a mini-game similar to The Old Republic where you followed a set path and made firing passes until you had completed your objectives, but I'd be thrilled if I could have full control and go blasting through the skies and between the stars.  Instead, I have poorly disguised loading screens.

Recommended Actions

• More variety of vehicles, including ones which can hold multiple passengers
• More variety of vehicle performance levels and attributes
• Functional arms and armaments for all vehicles, owned or "borrowed"
• Upgradeable/modifiable vehicles and vehicle components (engines, armor, controls, etc.)

Conclusion

For all of the good things about Destiny as a game, and for all the success it has enjoyed, it's very hard not to look at this as a failure on a number of levels.  After almost three years, the relative lack of progress that has been made on this title is deeply disturbing.  Given the resources that were made available to Bungie, it can be argued (successfully, I would say) that a lot of good money was thrown after bad on this game, and that's never a good thing.  I have no indication that its sequel will be any different.  If somebody were planning to make a solid and legitimate contender to take on Destiny, the points enumerated above would certainly be a good list of features to differentiate it from being another "also-ran."