The enquiring mind of an online game virgin... - by DarkForge
DarkForge on 15/10/2018 at 15:20
So I just recently bought a PS4 and I was considering trying out the Destiny universe (I never bothered with the PS3 version as I knew it didn't have all the expansions.) Now I've never played any "persistent online universe" style games before, so this may be a totally noob-like thing to ask about, but I'm wondering how different the experience might be for someone jumping into a game like this years after it was released.
I'm someone who likes to play solo, so for Destiny 1 I'm really not too bothered about how many or how few other players might still be around in the game to interact with (I'm guessing most other hardcore Destiny players will have already made the jump to Destiny 2 anyway), but I'm more concerned with how these games work with regards to playing the story and the state of the in-game world.
As well as Destiny, it's really the upcoming Anthem which has got me thinking about this. I've read interviews where the developers have talked about the persistent world and how (paraphrasing here) "players can play solo and at their own pace, but all major events in the shared world are experienced by everyone together." So would this mean that, if I didn't pick up Anthem and start playing it until years later, all the key changes in the world have already happened without me and so I've missed out on everything?
Essentially, I just need to know how possible it is to still play the game and experience the full story of it even after all this time. Is Destiny 1 still going to make as much sense to a new player now as it did when it was first released? Do I run the risk on losing out if I wait a while before jumping into Anthem?
So please share your thoughts and advice. Many thanks in advance. :)
Thirith on 15/10/2018 at 15:24
There isn't much (if any) persistence in Destiny. You have hub areas and you often share the game spaces with others, but you can play the story at your own pace. Some things might change, such as special events for Halloween or Christmas, but it's not like the world will move on to a later stage in the story so you don't have anything left to do.
I suspect that they're exaggerating the persistence in Anthem for marketing reasons. By and large, players don't want their agency taken away by other players.
DarkForge on 18/10/2018 at 15:26
Thank you for the reply, Thirth. It's good to know there's some flexibility to how you can approach these kind of things and that jumping in later shouldn't be too much of an issue. My mind's still working along the lines of "It's a persistent shared world, so if another player already defeated a boss (like, presumably, that Taken King guy in Destiny), how could said boss still be around for me to fight later?"
I think when I heard the Anthem developers talking about shared world events, I started getting thoughts like "oh there could be some massive storm or volcanic eruption something that crashes through the world, but what if that totally destroys an area and then makes that location impossible to reach, potentially locking out any mission which used to take place there?"
You know the sort of stuff I mean? I'm probably overthinking it though.
Thirith on 18/10/2018 at 15:57
You're not overthinking it, but this is one of those areas where the tension between game features and PR speak is biggest. An open, persistent world sounds exciting in theory - your actions have real consequences! - but in practice it leads to players being pissed off because someone else has beaten boss X or grabbed ultra-rare item Y and therefore they've taken gameplay away from the vast majority of players.
In practice, there are usually very minor persistent elements that allow companies to say that they weren't lying when they promised the feature, but they're nothing as momentous as the ads want you to believe.
Unless Bioware has managed to square that particular circle, but I doubt it. It's better to overpromise and have a loophole ("See? Your actions contributed to the overall shading of the sky! Because more people joined faction A than faction B, it's just a bit more purple than green! Persistence, folks!") than to piss off the majority of players due to what persistence would really mean.
Twist on 18/10/2018 at 16:26
Quote Posted by DarkForge
I think when I heard the
Anthem developers talking about shared world events, I started getting thoughts like "oh there could be some massive storm or volcanic eruption something that crashes through the world, but what if that totally destroys an area and then makes that location impossible to reach, potentially locking out any mission which used to take place there?"
Since I got Destiny 2 from the Humble Monthly Bundle a couple months ago, I'm curious about this, too.
I think what DarkForge is describing is a little different than the persistence Thirith is describing. For example, as I understand it, in Fortnite there have been single narrative events that have permanently altered significant parts of the world, changing where you can go and what you can do in chunks of the world. While this is okay for a multiplayer game, I imagine it could be problematic for someone coming late to a game with more of an emphasis on singleplayer narrative.
Have these kinds of events happened in Destiny or Destiny 2? I mean... permanent world-altering, mission-retiring one-time shared events? Or is the shared experience just the kind of thing Thirith described, with some variables altered just to suggest a degree of shared persistence?
Malf on 18/10/2018 at 19:30
Nothing quite like Guild Wars 1 or 2, but when the first team to beat the latest raid, The Last Wish, did so, there was a global story animation played for everyone playing and the Dreaming City (the end-game open world zone) changed. Of course, that change is now on a three week cycle, so I wouldn't really call it significant persistence, but it was fun being online when it happened.
DarkForge on 19/10/2018 at 09:57
Quote Posted by Thirith
You're not overthinking it, but this is one of those areas where the tension between game features and PR speak is biggest. An open, persistent world sounds exciting in theory - your actions have real consequences! - but in practice it leads to players being pissed off because someone else has beaten boss X or grabbed ultra-rare item Y and therefore they've taken gameplay away from the vast majority of players.
In practice, there are usually very minor persistent elements that allow companies to say that they weren't lying when they promised the feature, but they're nothing as momentous as the ads want you to believe.
Unless Bioware has managed to square that particular circle, but I doubt it. It's better to overpromise and have a loophole ("See? Your actions contributed to the overall shading of the sky! Because more people joined faction A than faction B, it's just a bit more purple than green! Persistence, folks!") than to piss off the majority of players due to what persistence would really mean.
Yeah, if it's just minor changes like the appearance of a certain area or something like that then it's totally fine. Just as long as missions/weapons/enemies etc. already taken care of by one player in their game doesn't mean that other players have missed their chance to encounter them.
Quote Posted by Twist
Since I got Destiny 2 from the Humble Monthly Bundle a couple months ago, I'm curious about this, too.
Thanks Twist, nice to know I'm not the only one who was wondering! ;)
Quote:
Have these kinds of events happened in Destiny or Destiny 2? I mean... permanent world-altering, mission-retiring one-time shared events
That's essentially what I was worried about as well, yes. Hypothetically, in the real world, if you were to go and kill a guy before I've met them, then obviously I've missed my chance to ever know them. For online "shared world" games, how likely is that kind of scenario?
Thinking about it, the new
Destiny 2: Forsaken springs to mind: I already know that
the character Cayde apparently gets killed off during that expansion. So is he still around for new players jumping into Destiny 2 for the first time now?I would also have to assume that, if a new player is fighting a boss that an old player had already dealt with previously, then couldn't there be a possibility of Old Player meeting New Player and helping them out, therefore Old Player would be fighting a "magically resurrected" boss they had already killed in the past?
Ahhh, my head's going to explode! :confused:
Malf on 19/10/2018 at 10:36
Regarding Destiny 2 and
Cayde, the character's at the Farm I believe while you play through the original campaign. Once you complete it though,
Cayde's no longer at the
tower. And at the moment, due to it being the Halloween event, "Festival of the Lost", there's a memorial to lots of dead characters, including this one.
If you do strikes that were in part narrated by the character, they still are. You can also do heroic adventures that feature the character.
Somewhat amusingly, the original voice actor doesn't reprise the role in Forsaken. Instead, it's played by the same actor who voices the
ghost. And in a further twist, the original voice actor was partly not available because they were playing the central part in a live action short based on a game where the replacement actor played the central role.
In less twisty language: Nathan Fillon played Cayde originally. Nolan North played the Ghost. Nathan Fillon starred as Nathan Drake in the recent live action fan short of Uncharted, traditionally North's role, while North played Cayde in Forsaken. This tickles me perhaps more than it should, especially as there are parts of Forsaken where Nolan North is essentially talking to himself, much like in (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpRkT9JxdnE) Mafia 2 :D
Malf on 19/10/2018 at 10:55
To expand on my earlier comment about the original Guild Wars and persistence, they used the fact that the game was instanced on a per-character basis to make permanent changes to some zones depending on the character's progression through the story.
It rarely involved completely changing the geography of maps, but monster populations could completely change. If more than one player was in an instance, it would use the group leader's progression to determine how the instance should be represented. Pretty cool, and playing Destiny, you can see Bungie pinched a load of ideas from ArenaNet.
ArenaNet played with persistence more in Guild Wars 2. They introduced the concept of the "Living World", where regular story events would forever change the game world. Even going so far as to completely destroy and rebuild the world's central hub city, Lion's Arch.
Players would take part in scripted Living World story events, at the end of which the major geographical changes would be made permanent.
Unfortunately, these were saddled with some of the most exploitative Skinner box mechanisms I've ever experienced. They used the temporary nature of these major story events to push the idea that if you weren't constantly playing, you were missing out. And to actually achieve anything of worth in these events, you had to repeat the same 15 minute content hundreds of times. Or you could instead just buy the rewards from the store.
This was part of what drove me away from the game in disgust.
I believe that as with the original Guild Wars, they've now implemented a way for players to experience those past events whenever they like. But that's not quite enough to draw me back.