Destinys a curious game. A product years in the making, its Bungies most ambitious project to date, and a franchise they hope to be working on for the next ten years.
To get it out of the way quickly: I enjoy it. I think Destinys a good game, but theres definitely many ways Bungie can improve upon the experience through patches, expansions, and make more major changes for the eventual sequel.
Ill start with what I dont like, and please keep in mind that Im not a game developer. Any suggestion or idea I propose may or may not be reasonable due to manpower or technical logistics.
Anyway, lets get started.
Theres a lot to be said for repetition in Destiny. While I do think the games multi-use areas arent as monotonous as the internet makes them out to be (hardly anything is what the internet makes it out to be), the game is indeed repetitive, and theres a bunch of things Bungie can improve upon in the sequel.
Lets start with the most conspicuous, most visible, most-likely-to-be-stuck-in-our-heads, refashioned task in Destiny: pressing square to deploy your ghost.
You do it in every mission, and by halfway into the game you can guess, with a more-than-reasonable chance, whats going to happen next: wave(s) of enemies. A simple, obvious suggestion, which Im sure Bungie is already working towards, is more variety in mission objectives.
But theres another thing Bungie can do they might want to ponder about. If Bungie wants to keep ghost-scanning as a mission variation, theres a much more natural way to implement it: remove the required button-holding and have your ghost scan an object by some other trigger (say a guardian gets within a few feet of it). Not only does this remove the annoying task of holding down a button to launch your ghost at several points in a mission, it makes the battles and the overall pacing flow significantly better.
Allow me to offer an example from a mission I enjoy, The Archive. The finale is set in an interesting space that offers many opportunities for fights to play out in an unpredictable and great way and they do! I always enjoy fighting in this encounter.
The only problem is the pacings all wrong.
There are three breaks within the fighting, so to speak. Well, two if you dont count the first time you deploy your ghost. When you first arrive in the actual archive, you set up your ghost as you usually do. Cue wave of enemies. Once youre finished with them, your ghost says something about a Servitor draining power, so you to take out that enemy and its group.
Thats when things grind to a halt. Once you dispatch with the necessary aliens, you have to walk over to a certain spot and have your ghost do what it needs to do. You then fight another group of enemies and have to walk over to another part of the space and do it again. Its monotonous and completely disrupts the flow of the encounter.
There might be some technical reason, but I would have much preferred if the ghost flew around the archive repairing the facility. The same tasks get performed, but you dont have to interrupt what youre doing and can place yourself strategically for the next fight. This logic can be extended to almost every other mission in the game, and suddenly the game feels surprisingly less repetitive without even doing anything to the type of objectives, fights, or areas the player faces.
It also makes the encounter feel more and alive and gives the whole experience more character. Remember Guilty Spark flying around the Pillar of Autumn's engine room in The Maw?
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"What if you were doing something and ran into another player?"
That sentence basically captures Bungies goal with Destiny, and they accomplished it reasonably well. Do I need to go into (okay, Ill talk about it later) how amazing it is to be in the public space walking to do a story mission and a public event happens where you team up with two or three other guardians?
Bungie accomplished this idea reasonably well in Destiny, but their execution left a lot to be desired in terms of variation. I dont see Bungie changing their structure for Destiny (or Destiny 2) fundamentally, but there are ways to significantly diversify the missions and strikes while keeping the overall layout in mind.
Throughout Destiny, players often tread through the same areas in story missions and strikes, contributing to the games overall sense of sameness and can leave one feeling drained. I already played through this in X story mission, you say to yourself while doing a strike. Rather than exciting, the fight becomes something you have to trudge on through.
Not only that, but you can visit most of the areas featured in story errands and strikes in patrol mode, further adding a sense of repetition. You just played through that area in patrol mode, so now youre gonna play through it again in this story mission?
Lets start with patrol mode because almost everything connects through that. What I would suggest, firstly, is block off the areas that are used for story and strikes players can be teleported through the obstacles set up while their siphoned off into their own game while in patrol mode, ensuring players can only access them for the appropriate activities.
In addition, or if that proves too difficult to implement, expand what areas players can explore in patrol mode only. If players have more to explore while in patrol mode, the areas actually used for campaign and strikes will seem less consequential, and thus less repetitive. If they dont visit the areas as often, its not something to trudge through.
Take the Citadel in Venus patrol. That tall, hauntingly beautiful structure you can see from anywhere on Venus can only be accessed through patrol mode. Well, limited access. You can only go so far before youre stopped by a forcefield that surrounds an elevator (or, at least, I assume its an elevator
there are swirly things going up). None of the strikes or story missions touch it. I would have loved to have been able to explore more stuff like that exclusively in patrol mode for all the planets.
Additionally, by expanding areas you can only access in patrol mode, it makes the world feel more alive because theres more to this planet youre one besides the missions and strikes you do.
Of course expanding the playing spaces in patrol mode comes up against manpower resources, so I personally would be willing to sacrifice one or two of the small side missions we have on each planet for a more fully realized patrol mode/overworld.
And then theres, of course, the easy suggestion of not using the same area for different story missions and strikes.
