Originally posted by dadudemon
My son plays this game every day after he gets his homework done. So it is still being played in my house quite often (I have to help him with the harder missions/quests).I see so many issues with the game, now. This game could have been the most amazing thing ever to be made but it just failed in so many ways. I'm still sad about this game. 🙁
Yeah. Hopefully Destiny 2 meets the potential this game had.
Great gunplay and nice graphics, subpar everything else.
I think this game continues to get better. Heck a lot of what people have wanted has been implemented.
More content, less farming, multiple ways to get to and past level 30, more balancing of the weapons, in game communication between none friend players.
Personally I think most people just keep trying too hard to be negative.
This game is far from subpar everything else besides gunplay and graphics.
Originally posted by Newjak
I think this game continues to get better. Heck a lot of what people have wanted has been implemented....
...less farming...
What do you mean?
Because I have 1 legendary weapon: that's it. And doing Raids is out of the question: I have a life and it is impossible for me to make the time to play a lame and repetitive mission that long. "But you can do them in parts." I can't do them alone unless I want to take much much longer. It's just too exhausting to even contemplate having to do raids for better equipment.
It seems impossible to find any equipment with light that is superior to my current equipment.
They have artificially inflated leveling in the game by adding an arbitrary layer of RNG to finding equipment with light. That's not cool. They just want more people on their servers for longer instead of generating good content (they are trying to artificially inflate he longevity of their players on the server so they can take longer on rolling out content because they want to work on concurrent projects).
Originally posted by Newjak
...multiple ways to get to and past level 30
How so? Play missions, Raids, and strikes. Leveling up past 20 is still the same, imo.
Basically, everything about the game I have problems with, I still have problems with. Nothing has changed. It is still the same disappointing game.
Originally posted by NewjakAgreed. Bungie is doing a good job of following and implementing fan feedback. Unfortunately most of the people that dropped the game in the beginning have too big a sour taste left,.
I think this game continues to get better. Heck a lot of what people have wanted has been implemented.More content, less farming, multiple ways to get to and past level 30, more balancing of the weapons, in game communication between none friend players.
Personally I think most people just keep trying too hard to be negative.
This game is far from subpar everything else besides gunplay and graphics.
Originally posted by dadudemonFirst I want to preface my comments with saying I am not trying to say you have to like this game. I in no way believe that this is a game that people must enjoy.
What do you mean?Because I have 1 legendary weapon: that's it. And doing Raids is out of the question: I have a life and it is impossible for me to make the time to play a lame and repetitive mission that long. "But you can do them in parts." I can't do them alone unless I want to take much much longer. It's just too exhausting to even contemplate having to do raids for better equipment.
It seems impossible to find any equipment with light that is superior to my current equipment.
They have artificially inflated leveling in the game by adding an arbitrary layer of RNG to finding equipment with light. That's not cool. They just want more people on their servers for longer instead of generating good content (they are trying to artificially inflate he longevity of their players on the server so they can take longer on rolling out content because they want to work on concurrent projects).
How so? Play missions, Raids, and strikes. Leveling up past 20 is still the same, imo.
Basically, everything about the game I have problems with, I still have problems with. Nothing has changed. It is still the same disappointing game.
Everyone has different likes and dislikes and I understand that.
I was not trying to say the leveling has changed. I simply said there are now multiple ways to get to or past level 30. Before you could only get level 30 gear in the first Raid. Now you can do it through multiple raids, vangaurd, crucible, and iron banner.
Also as to you having only one legendary. If you put some time into the game doing missions or playing the crucible you should have enough marks by now to get more Legendarys than what you have. That is how I got most of my initial purple gear.
Also I am sorry that you have such a time constraint with your life. Perhaps, and there is nothing wrong with this, Bungie simply wasn't targeting you as their primary audience for this game.
I mean with such time constraints it seems like you need games that care less about leveling and are more just games that you can spend a little time on. Destiny does require you to put some more effort in than most other games will. It is like WoW in that regard although not nearly quite that level of time commitment.
I'll start compiling my list of complaints about the game.
The Story:
1. The Darkness - This game is built on the idea of being an amazing story that is supposed to engage and involve players for a decade. You cannot do that with pretty much a non-existent, un-present antagonist. We know very little about The Darkness or why we should are about it. You'd think the Grimoire cards would reveal more.
2. The Collapse - What are the details of the Collapse? Why is the single most catastrophic event in human history so shrouded in mystery? Why would this key piece of information be missing from the story?
3. Enemy Species - Why did the other species come along during the war between the Sphere and The Darkness? What are their motives? For secondary antagonists, you'd think they'd flesh their motives out a bit more.
4. The Grimoire - Stupid idea. Let the players enjoy the game from inside the game. Don't force them to have to experience more of the story outside of the game. Additionally, make sure if you DO make players have to learn more about the story in a way that requires effort, make sure it actually gives players more of the story instead of what the Grimoire. What the The Grimoire offers is very little in story clarification. It's shitty, stupid, and lame.
5. Leveling past 20 - Why introduce such an irritating and cumbersome method of leveling past 20? Just increase the amount of XP required, like it was working before level 20, instead of artificially inflating the way people level to force them to have to play longer. Objections to my suggestion amount to, "But, you do level by continue to play the game just as you normally would." No you don't. You come to a screeching halt. You have to rely on a very unreliable RNG to get lucky. Some players leveled very quickly from 20-30 and some just got very unlucky. Removing the ability to control how you play the game, from the player, is usually a bad idea.
6. Ghost - The acting, at times, is very bad from Peter Dinklage. It's like they only did 1 take. Dinklage is an excellent actor. I don't use that phrase, "excellent actor", lightly. For Dinklage to come off as a bored and disinterested voice actor, you have to really rush the recordings. Clearly, the voice acting director was shitty. Also, I felt the Ghosts were just lacking. They need to do...more? Seems like they should do more than just server as a plot device while they open doors or hack stuff (the same thing, functionally, which brings me to my next point...).
7. Missions - All of the missions essentially come down to shoot these enemies while your Ghost opens/hacks this. All of them. It seems like the game could have done so much more. It gets so very close but fails horribly. It should unlock powers and abilities for completing quests. It should make the player care more about the game. Sure, more stuff gets unlocked as you complete the game but there's nothing about the game that makes you directly focus on doing so. In the beginning, completing your first mission unlocks your ship. Cool. Awesome. Now I get to travel around and shoot stuff in space, right? Nope. Your ship does nothing but show up on your load screens. I will break down more of my mission complaints in more points because this one could last for posts.
8. Weapons - The weapons are not modular. I want to upgrade my weapons by buying parts at the stores. The weapons are also generally feel weak against characters that are around your level. There are exceptions such as snipers and rocket launchers. I wish you could build your own weapons based on a base-model. So if you wanted to build your own auto-rifle, you get an auto-rifle chassis that always has a certain base stat, then add chamber, magazine, grip, etc. until you get the desire outcome. For those that do not want to build their own guns, they will have pre-built guns. This seems simple and has been done in other games. A plus is how the naming conventions on the guns work: they are recognizable and standard. I do not like the fact that you have very few vendors to visit to buy weapons. And they sell extremely limited quantities. You should be able to visit any vendor and be able to purchase any weapon up to your current level. There should be a steep penalty for player wanting amazing stats on pre-built weapons and that penalty should be prohibitive costs. But that brings me to another point (more on weapons, later)...
9. Currency - Why is there 5000 different currencies in this game? Eliminate all currencies and keep it at glimmer. Why even cap glimmer to 25k? Why even have many types of currencies? They did so to force players to have to play other aspects of the game. It is, again, artificially inflating player interest in the game. Here are all the currencies in the game:
a. Glimmer
b. Mote of Light
c. Strange Coin
d. Vanguard Marks
e. Crucible Marks
All of those should be eliminated except for glimmer, the cap removed for glimmer, and the Xur merchant should always be available. I understand wanting players to have to increase the reputation with factions in The City: that's okay. If players want access to a vendor that specializes in something, just like the real world, you wear their sponsorship stuff and it will increase your reputation with that sponsor as you play public matches wearing their "tags." But the sponsors should pay you to do so, as well...and they don't. If they wanted to add a bit of fun to the game, they could have each vendor pay out certain stuff (in other words, give the factions personality). So one sponsor may pay out crappy amounts of glimmer for each match but they greatly discount their exotic equipment once you get to a rep of 5 (meaning, you get their sponsorship for an end-game long-haul with them). Another sponsor may pay huge amounts of glimmer and sell low-capacity but highly accurate equipment (I'd play with their sponsorship). And yet another sponsor would pay very low glimmer but offers weapons and armor parts every 10 matches (meaning, over time, this one probably pays out the most value but it is a trickle). All of the non-factional equipment should be purchase-able at one of several The City vendors at differing prices. Each vendor should have a very large number of choices. If players want to gamble, they could buy cryptograms (what I am calling "decoherent emgrams"😉 and play the lottery on it decrypting to good stuff.
Also, bounties should pay out glimmer and XP. If you complete bounty with a sponsorship, you get reputation with that sponsor.
It seems that the currency system this game is too ambitious. They should have scaled back the complexity and added more fun to the game under a simpler currency system. Some people don't like online PvP and thoroughly enjoy cooperative missions (like me) so they should not be forced to have to do PvP missions. Also, there needs to be clear and definitive missions for earning some of the currency they do currently have. For instance, if players want to grind the same 30-minute mission for a single mote of light or a single strange coin, they should get that. They shouldn't have to exploit the game or rely solely on RNG for those things. Some of you may say that exists, but it doesn't.
For example, here are all the ways to earn Strange Coins:
"Completing a weekly Heroic Strike mission will grant the player three (level 22), six (Level 26), or nine (Level 28) Strange Coins. Completing a weekly Heroic Strike mission at a higher level after already completing it at a lower level the same week will award the difference in coins. So the maximum number of Strange Coins that can be won per week from this method is always nine. Strange Coins can also be randomly awarded for completing Public Events with a Gold Rating, completing Crucible matches, completing Weekly Nightfall Strikes, completing raid phases, decrypting decoherent engrams, or opening loot chests."
Good Lord, that's ridiculous. And where is that documented in the game? Where does it say that? Anywhere? Does the player have to piece that information together? Yes? Of course. Because going into your inventory and highlighting that item in your inventory to get that information, would be too easy.
More whining incoming. I must stop, for now. I typed this throughout the day.
Originally posted by dadudemon
Because I have 1 legendary weapon: that's it. And doing Raids is out of the question: I have a life and it is impossible for me to make the time to play a lame and repetitive mission that long. "But you can do them in parts." I can't do them alone unless I want to take much much longer.
This is something that really bugged me about the game. I hear the raid is great - the best part of the game. But I don't want to put in the effort that is required to simply FIND a group to do the raid. Having to either have an entire group of friends willing to do the raid with you, or failing that, having to resort to using third party websites to find a group of random players is just unintuitive and dated. This is something World of Warcraft has had for years and it works wonderfully. It allows people to very easily experience the endgame content without having to rely on planning or scheduling just to get in. You log into the game, press a button, and wait, and then you're doing a raid. This not being in Destiny is mind boggling and frankly rather stupid, and is something they will eventually have to add if they want the game to have any kind of longevity.
They really should have just copied WoW's raid finder 100%. It's funny because both games are under the activision banner so you'd think it'd be obvious for Bungie to copy what the makers of the most successful MMO of all time did in that regard. It'd be perfect. Do it exactly like WoW, where you queue for smaller parts of the raid individually. You can do one segment of the raid in 30 minutes, and do each part whenever you like until you're finished. It's very very nice and removes a lot of the hassle of doing these types of things.
I would probably still be playing Destiny, despite its other severe problems, if it had this.
Originally posted by Newjak
First I want to preface my comments with saying I am not trying to say you have to like this game. I in no way believe that this is a game that people must enjoy.Everyone has different likes and dislikes and I understand that.
I was not trying to say the leveling has changed. I simply said there are now multiple ways to get to or past level 30. Before you could only get level 30 gear in the first Raid. Now you can do it through multiple raids, vangaurd, crucible, and iron banner.
Oh, that's what you meant. In that case, yes, that's awesome that Bungie did that.
Originally posted by Newjak
Also as to you having only one legendary. If you put some time into the game doing missions or playing the crucible you should have enough marks by now to get more Legendarys than what you have. That is how I got most of my initial purple gear.
I have replayed tons of missions. This is the problem. I shouldn't have to replay the same boring shit, over and over, to get access to more of the game content. Those things should just come naturally as I play the game....and not the PvP. I still got bored of the PvP aspect of this game, very quickly.
Originally posted by Newjak
Also I am sorry that you have such a time constraint with your life. Perhaps, and there is nothing wrong with this, Bungie simply wasn't targeting you as their primary audience for this game.I mean with such time constraints it seems like you need games that care less about leveling and are more just games that you can spend a little time on. Destiny does require you to put some more effort in than most other games will. It is like WoW in that regard although not nearly quite that level of time commitment.
The primary target of this game was actually people like me. I am one of the most profitable types on this game. I play, at most, an hour every 3 days. I gave them money and will probably give them more for their next major release. But I spend very little time on their servers. This makes me very profitable. This allows them to continue with this massive project. People like you, while part of the idea, are not nearly as profitable (until expansions).
Millions of people purchased that game but only a few million consistently still play this game. Those consistent players are the targets of the expansions. The profit pieces are the first release to continue funding. So, yes, because of me, you got an expansion. Those 10+ million who bought the game but rarely played it (which greatly outnumber the people still playing) made them shitloads of money. It would have been amazing had they created a better game, how many more people would still be playing this game. All the players I talked to said they were playing Destiny until Call of Duty Advanced Warfare came out. Seriously. This game was their "hold-over" until that game. Every singe player that I ran into. Isn't that a bit disturbing to you as a big Destiny fan? I would love to see Bungie's numbers before and after Advanced Warfare's launch.
At this point, I am complaining about stuff you like and stuff I disliked. While you like what I consider a shitty system for getting good equipment, I strongly dislike it, clearly. I hated Borderland's system of getting gear but it felt better than Destiny's.
Originally posted by BackFire
This is something that really bugged me about the game. I hear the raid is great - the best part of the game. But I don't want to put in the effort that is required to simply FIND a group to do the raid. Having to either have an entire group of friends willing to do the raid with you, or failing that, having to resort to using third party websites to find a group of random players is just unintuitive and dated. This is something World of Warcraft has had for years and it works wonderfully. It allows people to very easily and experience the endgame content without having to rely on planning or scheduling just to get in. You log into the game, press a button, and wait, and then you're doing a raid. This not being in Destiny is mind boggling and frankly rather stupid, and is something they will eventually have to add if they want the game to have any kind of longevity.They really should have just copied WoW's raid finder 100%. It's funny because both games are under the activision banner so you'd think it'd be obvious for Bungie to copy what the makers of the most successful MMO of all time did in that regard. It'd be perfect. Do it exactly like WoW, where you queue of for smaller parts of the raid individually. You can do one segment of the raid in 30 minutes, and do each part whenever you like.
I would probably still be playing Destiny, despite its other severe problems, if it had this.
Yes, this was going to be one of my points: "group" finders that resembled WoW's or Borderlands 2's group finders. Super easy...if you want to play on a raid team, select the mission, then select "play with group", and bam, you're in. And in Borderland's 2, it was quite granular.
DDM, I agree with a lot of your complaints. The story was a catastrophe. And I think that a terrible script may be to blame for Dinklage's subpar performance. He probably got the script, knew it was trash, and just phoned it in.
Also Grimoire not being viewable in game was such a stupid idea. I don't know what they were thinking.
The mission design was shameful. Really terrible stuff. I don't know how Bungie justified having the same objective in every mission. It's not like they're some new company that's just dipping their toes in the FPS genre for the first time, they've made good games with varied objectives before. I don't know why they didn't just lift some of the more interesting objectives from the Halo games. The one unique one mission was with that sword. Shame they didn't do more stuff like that.
As far as the leveling system past 20 goes, when I first heard about it I thought it sounded really weird and awkward and thought I wouldn't like it. Then when I got to 20 I at first kind of liked it. Leveling from 20-25 this way was fine, I thought. It happened at a decent pace. But from there it slows down way too much. It's weird how the game has a soft level cap (20) and then a hard level cap (whatever the armor level cap of the current expansion is). It's kind of confusing. When it's all said and done I think I would have prefered just a normal leveling structure. Where each expansion just increases the level cap by 5, or whatever. That way at least you can still feel like you're making progress even if you aren't getting new gear.
Your complaint about currency is an interesting one. Honestly having multiple forms of currency is something that most MMO's have. The reason they don't just rely on "money" is because after a certain point people will have absurd amounts of money and will just be able to buy whatever new gear they want as soon as it's released. Though with the game's very low glimmer cap I guess that wouldn't be a problem. I do think there are too many forms of currency, though. I think two would be fine. Glimmer for your basic upgrades or starter gear, plus one other type of special currency for exotic/legendary gear that you get slowly from dungeons or from the daily heroic missions. That's how most MMO's do it.
Something else unrelated to anything you said that I would have liked having to do with loot, is if there was an explosion of loot upon killing a boss, instead of just having items appear in your inventory at the end of missions. This isn't a big deal, but in games like Diablo 3 or Borderlands, when you kill a boss, a bunch of stuff explodes out of him like a pinata. You see various beams of light on the ground and it's exciting to go actually pick up the items this way. I think this was a big reason why people were doing the treasure cave, it gave off that type of sensation. It's simply exciting to see items drop onto the ground and gives a rush when you see that purple or yellow beam of light. It's just more fun that way.
I also personally don't like being able to buy exotics. They're supposed to be the top of the line, extremely rare items, but being able to buy them from a merchant is just so dry. And they seem balanced around that. I'd prefer if they removed Xur and just upped their drop rate so that you'd be more likely to get them just randomly while playing. I think it would be more fun and exciting this way and would make it feel like less of a grind. Goes back to my previous paragraph about how it's just more fun to see loot on the ground, than grinding coins and then going off to buy it from a merchant.
I also don't like how they're doing the expansions for this game. I don't understand how they expect people to keep paying 20 dollars every 3 months to continue playing the game. That just doesn't seem reasonable. They should just do larger expansions every 6 months or so. With each expansion having a new planet and a couple of new raids, along with some new dungeons. That'd make it feel more like a proper expansion pack. As it is, these current ones feel more like smallish dlc's than actual expansion packs.
Originally posted by BackFire
DDM, I agree with a lot of your complaints. The story was a catastrophe. And I think that a terrible script may be to blame for Dinklage's subpar performance. He probably got the script, knew it was trash, and just phoned it in.Also Grimoire not being viewable in game was such a stupid idea. I don't know what they were thinking.
The mission design was shameful. Really terrible stuff. I don't know how Bungie justified having the same objective in every mission. It's not like they're some new company that's just dipping their toes in the FPS genre for the first time, they've made good games with varied objectives before. I don't know why they didn't just lift some of the more interesting objectives from the Halo games. The one unique one mission was with that sword. Shame they didn't do more stuff like that.
As far as the leveling system past 20 goes, when I first heard about it I thought it sounded really weird and awkward and thought I wouldn't like it. Then when I got to 20 I at first kind of liked it. Leveling from 20-25 this way was fine, I thought. It happened at a decent pace. But from there it slows down way too much. It's weird how the game has a soft level cap (20) and then a hard level cap (whatever the armor level cap of the current expansion is). It's kind of confusing. When it's all said and done I think I would have prefered just a normal leveling structure. Where each expansion just increases the level cap by 5, or whatever. That way at least you can still feel like you're making progress even if you aren't getting new gear.
Your complaint about currency is an interesting one. Honestly having multiple forms of currency is something that most MMO's have. The reason they don't just rely on "money" is because after a certain point people will have absurd amounts of money and will just be able to buy whatever new gear they want as soon as it's released. Though with the game's very low glimmer cap I guess that wouldn't be a problem. I do think there are too many forms of currency, though. I think two would be fine. Glimmer for your basic upgrades or starter gear, plus one other type of special currency for exotic/legendary gear that you get slowly from dungeons or from the daily heroic missions. That's how most MMO's do it.
Something else unrelated to anything you said that I would have liked having to do with loot, is if there was an explosion of loot upon killing a boss, instead of just having items appear in your inventory at the end of missions. This isn't a big deal, but in games like Diablo 3 or Borderlands, when you kill a boss, a bunch of stuff explodes out of him like a pinata. You see various beams of light on the ground and it's exciting to go actually pick up the items this way. I think this was a big reason why people were doing the treasure cave, it gave off that type of sensation. It's simply exciting to see items drop onto the ground and gives a rush when you see that purple or yellow beam of light. It's just more fun that way.
I also personally don't like being able to buy exotics. They're supposed to be the top of the line, extremely rare items, but being able to buy them from a merchant is just so dry. And they seem balanced around that. I'd prefer if they removed Xur and just upped their drop rate so that you'd be more likely to get them just randomly while playing. I think it would be more fun and exciting this way and would make it feel like less of a grind. Goes back to my previous paragraph about how it's just more fun to see loot on the ground, than grinding coins and then going off to buy it from a merchant.
I also don't like how they're doing the expansions for this game. I don't understand how they expect people to keep paying 20 dollars every 3 months to continue playing the game. That just doesn't seem reasonable. They should just do larger expansions every 6 months or so. With each expansion having a new planet and a couple of new raids, along with some new dungeons. That'd make it feel more like a proper expansion pack. As it is, these current ones feel more like smallish dlc's than actual expansion packs.
You actually covered 3 more of my points. One of them was going to be the complaint about getting jack shit from major boss fights. I was going to use that as my compromise about the currency system and suggest that they could build 1 hour missions (such as strikes) to pay out the currencies. So people who wanted to grind could grind particular strikes for the particular currency they wanted. I would still prefer people to be able to just use glimmer for everything but, perhaps, a compromise is to require the purchase, via glimmer, the other currencies. Say, 5000 glimmer for 1 strange coin or something silly. I've seen other MMOs use a system like that and I enjoyed that.
I'll continue my list and you'll see your perspective show up in that list. I have 23 but need to type them out in "human understandable language" as 4 words makes sense to me but is gibberish to others who can't read my mind.
Edit - And I'm stuck on 24.8. Meaning, almost 25 but I cannot get any other equipment. Someone else in this thread got stuck around 24/25 and then the RNG God smiled upon him and he started to level up faster, again.
All of the points is the reason I stopped playing in Sept and traded it in.
I played the beta and the opening sequence drew me in. I bought it because I thought that's what the story missions will be like. As well, the gunplay was very satisfying.
Incredible disappointing after finding out every mission is the same and there isn't any side missions that I can do that are somewhat interesting.
I agree with Backfire, Borderlands loot system is much better than Destiny just because you get the satisfaction of running around and looking at all the loot that dropped. You either get annoyed by the drop, or yelling in glee with a super awesome weapon. In Destiny, it feels like getting Xbox achievement. There was a few times in Destiny and I didn't even notice I got a weapon....
I also find it interesting that a lot of the issues Destiny had are issues that have been solved. The Grimoire debacle? Bungie should of play the Mass Effect series where they have in depth codex and explain every single nuance of the world Bioware was trying to create (which made the world utterly believable). Interesting side missions....try Borderlands or Skyrim. There are sooo many issues with this game that other developers have no problems with. It just seems Bungie had no idea what they **** they were doing.
I wonder what type of game Destiny would be if MS was the publisher, or Sony for that matter. It just seems like there is no love or passion that went into this game.
This post is continued from here:
http://www.killermovies.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=15001136#post15001136
10. Strikes: Part 1 - Strikes are one of the more satisfying things about the game. They give you loot after the mission and the loot is very very rarely good (meaning, every now and again, you get something other than shitty "alternative" currencies (see #9) for completing a strike). They are hard. Unnecessarily hard. Not because they are difficult to beat but because the bosses have absurd amounts of health. IMO, one of the strongest signs that a developer has made a shitty game is when an MMO gives bosses ridiculous amounts of health. They do this to artificially inflate the difficulty and increase the amount of time it takes to beat a mission/quest.
What's worse about strikes is that only 3 people are in them at a time. Raids improve this by allowing a team of 6 and, damn, that's a great idea. I think all strikes should get a bump up to 6 players. Keep the health the same on the bosses, keep the same number of "little enemies" that spawn in the strikes, and keep the damage the bosses and minions deal the same. But just make it to where 6 people can play in them at once.
But there is something worse about strikes than the above. Much worse. It is the most artificially inflated reason of them all: you are paired with people around your same level. Some of you may say, "But, dadudemon, that's evening the playing field. Why does it matter?" Of course it matters. It matters greatly. When the enemies can one or 2 shot you (or kill in in less than 1 second of continuous fire such as Phogoth in the moon strike), you need someone stronger than you on the team. Someone much stronger. When a thrall is level 24 and you are level 21, those little shits takes lots of bullets from an autorifle but only require 2 attacks to kill you. That's absurd. I understand making a level difference important to how much damage you deal and take: I'm okay with that. That's a staple in more matured MMO systems. What I'm not okay with is the system matching you up with 2 other level 21 or 22 players for a strike that has the lowest of low enemies being level 24. I am level 24 and I do level 20 strikes from the level 20 strike playlist, all the time. I'm almost never paired with any player lower than 23 or higher than 25. Why? Why not throw me down there with the level 21s who are going to struggle in those strikes? One of the funnest things about MMOs is getting that beastly high-level player on your team that can help you conquer a mission you definitely could not do otherwise. It gives you a sense of something to look forward to as you play the game. Like, "Man, I am glad she was on my team. I wouldn't have been able to get this far. This gal rocks. And this loot?!!?!? Awesome!" Whereas, how the system is now, you think, "Motherf*cker. I can't kill a damn thing and these other guys are less experienced and shittier than I am. There's now way we are going to win." *3 failures later* "Well, everyone is quitting, now. Everyone is disheartened and doesn't want to play this anymore. Wish we all had higher level gear and higher character levels. This strike sucked."
Basically, like all aspects of this game, Bungie made the game artificially difficult. They love love love to waste your time and increase frustration. They don't want you to sign in and have a blast for an hour with your buds. They want you to be forced to play 5 hours to accomplish the same. They want your time. And this is why millions of players quit the game within a month of release. Imagine that...millions. F*cking millions. Everyone was like me and was expecting an amazing game with an absurdly amazing story. They were expecting Borderlands/Fallout NV loot system (but BETTER! right? RIGHT? 😄 .....🙁 ) with Skyrim-esque sidequests. They were expecting Halo-like gun fighting and controls (we got something similar...they did well, there: give them props where it is deserved).
But I'll save that ranting for later. More on strikes, later, too.
11. Ships - All they do is look pretty. That's it. You can't fly them. Your ships is basically "equipping" a background for your loading screens. What a massive f*cking waste of a potential vehicle that we all expected to open up later in the game. "But, but!!! We will get ship fights in a future update." STFU Then they should have waited a year before they released the game. 😐 Why make having a ship seem so important to the game (in the beginning) and then do jack-diddly squat with the ships? I'll tell you why: this game is unfinished. Everyone knows it. Everyone thinks it. I honestly thing Bungie did that on purpose because they thought that they were like Apple and everyone would buy and play their game while they trickle down the rest of the game to the sheep who are guaranteed to always buy their "releases." hehehe, if there's anything about this expansion, it should be obvious that their shitty plan didn't work as well as they wanted. We need dog-fights. 🙂 We need massive 30-guardian missions where we take on Fallen fleets and destroy capital Archon ships (Ketch's ) with the mid-sized ships being Skiffs.
12. Player Classes - The player classes are decent but this still seems like a beta class system. The game lacks complexity so we end up with 3 main classes with 2 sub-classes, each. But the class system only deals with your bonuses with weapons and grenades with the exception of your "training." Magically, selecting a different training class changes 1 or more of a total of 3 player stats. Awesome...so amazing (sarcasm). Why not make the hunter class have an implied specialization of "hacker-class"? You know, a way to improve your Ghost to focus on hacking stuff? Fallout 3 and NV did a great job of allowing you to invest skillpoints into stuff as you level up. That's amazing! That system would be great. Sure, it would have to be adapted but imagine playing a strike, in comes an enemy skiff and your hacker-class companion can cause that skiff's engines to overload and, boom, the skiff explodes saving your time lots of time and trouble of having to fight one of the Fallen strike teams. Just another way to beat the strike and it is within the power of the players. Players that memorized where the skiffs warped in and who specialized in hacking would be awesome additions to your team. And instead of being able to use a special ability just once every so often, why not make it an energy system that allows you to use multiple special abilities (with 2-3 mega abilities per class, like they have now, that drain it all at once)? For instance, the hacking trick against ships could drain 50% and maybe you also specialized in a healing class and that uses up 25%. What about a "long-distance" revive ability that uses up 50%? Would be a great addition. Hacking is not the only thing. Sure, it is over-done in sci-fi, but it is just an idea of how to make the classes more fun.
13. Fireteams - As I mentioned, before, the game should allow up to 6 players on a fireteam on any mission except Raids (which I think should be bumped up to 10-12). Making a fireteam should be as simple as going to a location at The Tower and joining one. You could go to a screen that has lobbies with all the strikes/missions lined up and at what difficult, shows you how many slots for a particular mission are filled, and it shows you the name, levels, and "clan" each person is. This allows the player to choose his or her team when doing a mission. Of course, they could offer something similar to what they have now in that screen and allow people to do "general playlist: level 20 strikes" and it randomly matches you up to do level 20 strikes. Just anything to improve how fireteams are done. Now, how it is, you have to going through some shit to add the player to your fireteam. I guess I am just wanting a much easier way. I shouldn't have to start a mission, see that another player is doing the same one, and then force both of us to choose which one of us is going to quit. We should already be jumping into the mission together because we were intelligent enough to approach the mission through the pairing system that...doesn't f*cking exist.
This post is continued from here:
http://www.killermovies.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=15003704#post15003704
14. Mission rewards. - If you do a strike or a raid, you shouldn't have to worry about a RNG (random number generator/generation) god giving you something very shitty or very good (extremely rarely). For instance, if you do a level 20 strike and you have around level 20 weapons that are all of "rare" quality, the rewards for completing the strike should, at a minimum, give you level 20 rare equipment. The system could work on a probability system (and the math can be very quickly done in the background) to where there is a 50% chance you get another level 20 piece of loot, 25% chance to get level 21 piece of gear, and a 15% chance you will get a level 22 piece of gear. The last 10% is a random chance to generate a legendary piece of gear with a random level between 20-22. If you feel that 10% is too high of a chance, think about wanting to get that awesome legendary piece of gear at a level 22 instead of a 20. Well, you may have to do 100 strikes to get that to happen but you are always guaranteed a 50% chance of getting something better than you have in my system (because there is always a 50% chance you will get something of equal value). But if your gear is all over level 20, you are much less likely to get something of better value.
Someone might object to my suggestion and say that I clearly do not understand the system because the "legendary and exotic" stuff is all level 20 and is named, not leveled. Perhaps you are right. Or perhaps my issue is with the lack of leveling in the gear. You should be able to get level 24 legendary gauntlets. And they should be better than the 23's of the same name. Also, as I said in #5, you should continue to level, normally, and not rely on some bullshit light system. After 20? No, no difference. Just like any other RPG, you just need to earn more XP per level to level up. And the gear you get from missions is directly dependent upon you getting gear from that level of strike, story mission, or raid.
I know people complained about getting no loot when the shittiest player in the strike or raid got 2 awesome pieces of equipment. Cool. I understand. I think there should be 2 separate rewards. 1 is 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place reward (and so forth to 6th place, if they ever expand to 6 players in a strike team). This should be currency. You know, my idea about consolidating the currencies. 🙂 So the top player is guaranteed a payout for being the top. The bottom player should definitely get a higher chance of getting better gear because they clearly sucked. But, the top player or players should get a higher chance of getting legendary gear. Meaning, the shitty players can get more help from the system but the better players have a better chance of hitting end-game equipment for their level. I can think of a dozen ways to make my idea better but this is the most basic way.
I think you guys have some legitimate complaints and I will try and talk about your points and say why certain things are they way they are. I will also try and point out where opinions are just opinions.
I will even agree with some of the stuff you said (RNG and Missions) to a point.
One thing I will not accept as a point is that this game was lacking content at launch time.
This game is going to be an evolutionary process. Things will get better over time but it had more content than most games at launch time. Especially for a first game in the series.
Most people's problems were that the content did not match exactly what they wanted or experienced for their section of the game. Truth is though the fact that you are pointing to Borderlands, WoW, Halo, Fallout(Bethesda games) when mentioning one games should show the scope in mixed genres this game was trying to do.
I mention this because I am developer right now and I can while some of your points are valid and some of your suggestions are good(Better RNG would be nice, but most people I've talked to don't want Call Of Duty style weapon customization) the time it would have taken to do would have been costly and timely.
If they had waited an extra year and half to do everything you wanted. The game would have likely died from development costs being too high as the cost would have likely approached 1 billion and Activision would have cut the plug.
This game has progressed and will continue to get better as time goes on. Come back in two years and you may finally get the mega content (Halo/Borderlands 2/Fallout/Skyrim/World of Warcraft/Bioshock ) game you want but while you may not have gotten that game on launch this game in terms of content and gameplay quality was worth 60 bucks. Most people have played this game longer than they would have most other 60 dollar games.
Saying otherwise just seems petty to me.
So basically your saying that people should wait 2 years to get content that they thought they would get at launch. For a game that is not free to play or early access but a full price release?
And then say come back 2 years to get content you can get from Halo, Borderlands, Skyrim and etc.....which is crazy because all those games had the content when it was first launched.
To think that people should expect that content should be an evolutionary process is bullshit. If this was free to play, I could expect that but it was not. Activation sold the game for $69 (in Canada) and people should expect a good amount of quality content.
And the game did not cost a billion dollars. To think that it did is crazy.
The game has plenty of content. Problem was that it felt repetitive. And this becomes more of a problem because the game keeps forcing you to do the same thing over and over with the bounties.
Things would have felt better or less annoying if the bounties were more diverse.
Bungie's main problem is the way they handle their hotfixes/public relations.
Everything is shrouded in mystery and it leads to a lot of misinterpretation.