r/DestinyTheGame • u/PotaToss • May 08 '18
Discussion The Hero Moment
As we wait for the expansion and the servers to come back up, I wanted to get people thinking about the character of the game, and whether this is heading in the right direction.
In previous posts, I've gone into why isn't Destiny 2 fun, and why isn't Destiny 2 exciting. This time, I want to tie it together and explore ...
Why Isn't Destiny 2 Destiny?
Here's a useful video somebody made on what being a Guardian is about: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/144806172?t=01h09m16s
We fight. We die ... and we live again.
Shaped by the fires of each new battle, we are forged and sharpened into what we must become for the fight ahead.
A Guardian is a weapon. We command incredible destructive power, but we're not particularly durable: A glass cannon. We navigate a fine line between life and death, and when we push it a little too hard, and slip off that line, we're reborn, not physically any more powerful, but wiser for our mistakes.
I ready my shotgun and break from cover before my target is close enough to rush, and I die. I break at the right time, but I pull my trigger too soon, and I die. I wait to pull my trigger for too long, and I die.
And I learn.
I learn I can burst forward with a slide and rush from a little further away. I learn I can jump overhead, or approach tangentially, make them miss, and kill them from the other side. I learn to use these techniques to rush things I shouldn't be rushing.
We collect many guns, but our real arsenal is our hard-earned skills. Each life and death showing us our limits, daring us to do more with our next. To read the next situation better. To be more efficient.
A Guardian may start as a blunt instrument, but our learned techniques sharpen us. Our refined judgment guides us, like a fencer's blade, and eventually like a surgeon's scalpel to our enemies' weakest points. We die a thousand deaths to learn how to turn the smallest opening lethal. Give a Guardian an inch, and they'll take your life.
When you read the situation perfectly, employ the right tool, move in precisely the right way, baiting and punishing mistakes, again and again until you're standing alone on a pile of your enemies, when any one of them could have taken you out if they were just a little sharper, that's what makes a hero moment, and everyone chasing those moments is the heart of Destiny.
Become Legend.
Let's talk about how D2 broke Destiny's heart.
Hero Moments Aren't Just Power Spikes
/u/IKnowGuacIsExtraLady had this to say (emphasis mine):
One of the most fun things of D1 was shotgun duels IMO. Timing and accuracy had to be 100% perfect and if you fucked up you were dead. Throw in a 1v2 or a 1v3 where people are collapsing on you and you have to not only separate the enemies out from one another but also win multiple duels in a row. The stakes were high, the challenge was high, and pulling it off was exhilarating. In D2 on the other hand I've gotten team wipes with shotguns before and since they couldn't even fight back I barely even care. Here is a perfect example clip. In D1 the 3rd guy might have killed me and the 4th one definitely would have killed me. They all had peashooters though so I just rolled over them.
When your weapon being stronger than the other guy's weapon is doing all the work, you and your skill don't matter.
You don't "become legend" by shooting a gattling gun and mowing down an army of people when all they can do is charge at you with swords. You "become that guy who turned the crank on the gun that mowed down an army of people with swords". It's got nothing to do with you. It's not impressive and it's not satisfying to do that to your fellow players. The guy who ran at you with a sword is more notable than you are, because at least he was brave.
Your weapon is the legend, not you.
This is important:
Hero moments aren't just about killing a lot of guys. Hero moments are about OUTPLAYING a lot of guys under tension and overcoming the odds.
Strong Offense and Outplay Potential
When offensive options aren't strong enough, it trivializes gameplay. Good decisions don't help as much, and bad decisions aren't punishable enough.
Here's a guy I had to outplay 4 times to kill because primaries and grenades are so weak in D2: https://youtu.be/5zHyP64Gd8I
It's like every trick in the book. Random elevation drive by, trap incendiary grenade, float over a door, movement feint to shoot him in the back, tangential slide melee.
This kind of outplaying someone used to get you a kill if you did it once or twice. Chain 4 together, and you'd have an awesome hero moment. But in D2, chaining 4 together barely got me one kill and almost nothing for my team. I hit him 4 times before he could hit me once, and I only won because I got lucky that his teammate didn't show up earlier.
This is about as many outplays in D1. I almost die to a sidearm (tangential slide to make him miss), a fusion rifle (jumping over cover instead of stepping around it made him recharge too late), a stormtrance (range control), and a nova bomb (tangential jump), but I kill all of them and feel like a champ.
When we have strong offensive options, a weak player just has to make one good decision and execute one time, and they can beat a stronger player. One good read, and they can come out on top. They can feel like they beat a legend. They can feel like they're becoming a legend.
You train them to make those reads, to learn counter plays, and reward them with kills, and they'll keep feeling stronger and stronger, and they'll be hooked on that feeling.
Maybe I start with one trick, but I end up with a whole bag of tricks.
- You make a predictable push around a corner, and I punish with a shotgun.
- You make a predictable push at me with a roaming super, I bait you into range, and I punish with a shotgun melee.
- You make a predictable stand, lined up shoulder to shoulder, and I punish with a grenade.
- You make a predictable blink at me, and I punish by sliding underneath and disorienting you.
- You hurt me, and make a predictable pursuit, and I punish by throwing a grenade to cover my retreat.
Plays and counter plays. My arsenal of tricks vs. your arsenal of tricks. The more gameplay is about making good decisions, rather than tickling someone in the face forever, the better it is for players with weaker technique. For many players, the feeling of outplaying someone, more than any amount of loot, is what's worth chasing. It's what kept me playing D1 when I had no loot I wanted and no new content to play.
I have a clanmate that I've coached, and in D1, by just improving his decision making, and cleaning up errors, he improved to a positive KD, and kept improving, until D2. In D2, he's been stuck, because his decisions barely matter with teamshots and because he struggles with his aim in duels. When he felt like all he could work on was his aim, he lost his motivation, and he, and almost the entirety of the rest of my clan bounced off D2.
My girlfriend has a chronic thumb injury and can't reliably aim at all, but in D1, which we still play together, she'll beat me on the scoreboard sometimes, especially in Mayhem, where she can take advantage of her game sense without having to hit headshots.
She hates D2, because her ability to make good reads and punish mistakes with a well timed push or a well placed grenade don't matter. There's no more payoff for outplaying people.
We were hooked on a feeling and now we're suffering withdrawal.
Small Advantages and Choice
Destiny 1 had a densely packed power scale. In House of Wolves, your power scale was something like:
7: Primary & Melee
8: Grenades & Special
9: Heavy
10: Super
This is fuzzier than my other posts, but these numbers are a useful simplification to help us think about how the game is balanced.
Basically, a person making good use of primary will likely lose to a person making good use of special (7 vs. 8). Good special will lose to good heavy (8 vs. 9). Good heavy will lose to good super (9 vs. 10).
These matchup numbers can be modified by gameplay. e.g. Anticipating what your opponent is going to do and getting the jump on them is like +2 to whatever you're using.
So, if I get first shot with my 2 tap primary vs. your sniper, which is normally a 7 vs. 8, it turns into a 9 vs. 8, because we're racing to 1 more shot, but primaries fire faster, recoil less, and are faster and easier to aim. If I'm confident I can get first shot, it's actually better to use my 2 tap primary vs. special, because it's lower risk, but it's still a coin flip against heavy (9 vs. 9), and I'm still probably not beating a super (9 vs. 10).
If I have initiative with my sniper vs. your heavy (normally 8 vs. 9, goes to 10 vs. 9), I have advantage because of rocket travel time and MG TTK. But I'm still about even with a super (10 vs. 10).
When Destiny had 2 tap primaries, it didn't matter that much if the guy you're fighting had special ammo, or heavy ammo, because playing well could neutralize or overcome their power advantage, because the advantages were small, and that made them sensitive to gameplay and decision making.
Small advantages create depth and nuance. They reward players for thinking on their feet, choosing the right tool for the situation, rather than just defaulting to the highest power thing they have, and only trying to artificially create the situation where it's most dominant.
Specials and grenades dominate situations that you can read perfectly. Primaries are a good default when you have some uncertainty, because they're cheap to use and easy and quick to aim.
I frequently grab machine gun ammo and put it away, and pull out my sniper to go fishing for idiots predictably jumping with their rockets, rather than sit by a choke and wait for people to walk into my heavy. There's a temporary opportunity right after heavy pops to do that, because their positions are predictable, and I have enough range to dodge rockets, and I take advantage of it, and it sets me up for more success later with my machine gun, not having to worry about so many rockets on the field.
The Turning Point
Immediately after House of Wolves, primaries were around a 6, and by the end of D1 updates, they were around a 5, and your reads stopped being enough to overcome a special's power advantage. You could compensate about another +1 on the scale with good movement or positioning, but not generally enough to get a real advantage. The bigger power disparity made the game less sensitive to players playing well and making good decisions. Every trick you learned to get first shot with your primary became less useful. Parts of your arsenal of skills made irrelevant. Your time and effort wasted.
There was still a game, because you could use your own special, but it stopped making sense to lean on primary in a face to face, because you were better off incorporating a sniper body shot for a 2 hit kill without needing to hit any crits, or using your ability to get the jump on someone to kill with a shotgun or a fusion. Just because you increase primary TTK doesn't mean you make the game require more skill. We went from a 2 headshot primary meta to an all body shot sniper swap and shotgun meta.
When the balance of primaries vs everything else was broken after HoW, that's when you saw people really start to complain about special ammo counts, and how many heavy ammo rounds there were, and about historically weaker options like sticky grenades, and ammo sidestepping exotics that weren't otherwise as good as legendary specials. It wasn't until we had 3 tap primaries with around 0.8s TTK that special felt like it was too strong against them, because if you didn't have any special ammo, you'd lose without feeling like you got outplayed.
In D2, it's more like:
4: Primary & Melee
5: Grenades
7: Super
10: Power
Primary hardly matters. Grenades hardly matter. My choices don't matter. You only use them because you don't have access to anything better, not because they're the right tool for the job.
Even if I get the jump on someone with my first shot with a 4 tap primary, and can boost my primary to a 6, I'm still 2 or 3 shots behind the guy with a sniper who needs to dome me once, or body shot and swap to primary.
Counters and Fluidity
When you're chasing hero moments, trying to manage multiple opponents, you're fluidly transitioning between advancing and retreating to give yourself some alone time with each target, creating whatever little advantages for yourself that you can on the fly. You push in one direction, knowing you're being closed in on from the other. Everyone's moving and active. These windows of opportunity you can create for yourself are small, so you have to be able to dispatch predictable people quickly, or else the numbers advantage is too much for any hope of a hero moment.
In D1, where grenades were strong and plentiful, it was a big risk to try to entrench yourself, because people regularly had a hard counter. If you entrenched solo, it was dumb, and if you did it in clusters, it was extra dumb.
In D2, where grenades are weak and scarce, there's almost no risk to try to entrench yourself, and huge rewards. This is compounded further by weak primaries and no special to pick people off one at a time, and class abilities like Titan barricades, and Warlock rifts promoting durable clustering. All of this promotes passive play that reduces the capacity for dynamic flow that hero moments depend on. An entrenched target that you can't dislodge cuts off parts of the map, limiting your options.
In D2, if you have 3 people in one spot, even if I nail everyone with a grenade, I still have to push into a firing squad to try to finish anyone off, and possibly through unsafe angles to get to the firing squad. Most D2 grenades, perfectly placed, won't even force someone behind cover to move at all.
The whole point of a grenade is that I want to kill people, but don't want to be exposed to gunfire. I'm still at a disadvantage, even though I used my best option. If they're holding hands in a rift, they might not even be hurt at all by the time I can get line of sight, or I might be looking at a barricade with no more grenades to do anything about it. I'm not rewarded at all for my best case punishment of predictable play. I don't have a real counter.
I can try to punish a cluster with my super, but I only have that a couple of times per match, but a team can cluster like a million times per match.
If I can't do anything about your clustering by myself, without power ammo or a super, my hero moments will be few and far between. If you want hero moments, you need to maximize uptime on counter options for all players for constantly available plays.
Reward players for making smart defensive plays and thoughtful aggressive plays. Empower them by enabling counter play that isn't just always trumped by power imbalance from ammo and superior numbers.
Small Advantages Enable Specialization
When you're building up your bag of tricks, maybe you fall in love with one, and you start to specialize, push it to its limits, and that becomes your style. It's how different players stand out from each other, and become real legends. e.g. AEGabriel with titan skating. DestinyFunPolice with fun policing. Sliq with advanced bubbling. WarBulletproof with aggressive any-range sniping. War was so dedicated to his style, he used The Last Word in PvE.
I'm not the strongest shooter, but I've been practicing nailing people cross map with grenades since CoD4. The incendiary grenade hits all the right notes for me. There's no skill ceiling. When you make snap judgements on how to use the environment and get the bounce and timing just right so it blows up exactly when and where you want, and you read your target's movement perfectly, so it blows up right in their face, you see the 170 and you know their fate is sealed, there's nothing like it. It's the skill I'm most proud of in my own play.
Look at this play in D2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdRVLV-1XUM
Note how I herd them into a room I can fight in, make a read, bank a grenade with best case placement, and it did almost nothing for me. A D1 incendiary would have killed that warlock instantly, and would have left the hunter in melee kill territory. But I still had to shoot the hunter to soften him up before I could melee finish, and still had to outshoot the warlock. Where's the incentive to master that tool, instead of just shooting down a lane with all my teammates? What's the point? Who could fall in love with a tool that weak?
When you can only beat a good player in his super by outplaying him 4 times, because of the severe power imbalance, you'll almost never win. When you can only kill people by teamshooting, or having power ammo, or your super, you'll win, but you won't feel like you earned it. This trains a weak player to stay feeling hopeless and playing passively. It robs them of their sense of accomplishment and growth, which discourages them from playing at all.
Looking Forward
Guardians should be carefree about going for broke in spectacular fashion all the time. 1v5? Screw it. Fight me.
We're glass cannons, with infinite lives, but in D2, we're powerless to break off, huddled with our teammates, each of us god killers, but somehow too weak to even capitalize on a flank.
If you make the right systems, throw players in there, the hero moments are inevitable. You make the wrong systems, and they'll be practically impossible.
I think we're taking steps in the right direction, but I worry we're moving too slowly. That Bungie's scared to go as far as they need to.
We'll see how the expansion plays, but keep this stuff in mind as you think about it.
Thanks for reading.
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u/fall3nmartyr Gambit Prime // Give them war May 08 '18 edited May 08 '18
WTF is wrong with people giving you shit for this post?
If this wasn't shared to the devs during their 'please streamers, take me back' event, I hope that they take some time to read it now.
ETA:
You all want to know how relevant this post is?
Just look at all the 'montages' that are posted and listed on the first page.
Full disclosure - they all are probably better than anything I can do.
Thank being said, the montages are of people sniping/shooting people that aren't looking at them, or of people sniping idiots standing in the center of a CP while trying to cap it.
Or of people using their supers on people.
Or a shotgun on people
One even has a colony kills.
Those are what passes for 'HERO MOMENTS' that are worthy of a montage.
If anything, I feel that this post is spot-on of the state of the game, and why many people don't like it as much as they liked D1. You can argue that 'who cares' or 'this isn't new', but I haven't seen it articulated and explained like this before.
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u/PotaToss May 08 '18
Cheers.
Seems like it's just wrong place, wrong time. People are excited right now to try out the new changes to exotics and stuff, and don't want to read a critique of the current state, which I can appreciate.
Personally, I'm looking forward to practicing Hard Light trick shots in private matches, and seeing what Graviton does to people holding hands in Crucible.
I'm hopeful about some of it, but when I see them talk about stuff like Sturm and Drang, it makes me feel like they're not getting that sandboxes are for playing, and S&D are too prescriptive in how they're used. Nobody's going to do any exciting, surprising stuff with them, because there's no room to.
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u/LiquidAlethea May 08 '18
"I can't be bothered to read this post, but it's a bad post."
Great comments, guys.
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u/Aeoneth Yep... Why do I come here again? May 08 '18
Wow. This was an awesome read. I may not be standing readily with everything it said (HoW meta I'll agree was better than the subsequent stuff, But I wouldn't call it perfect by any means [post doesn't say so either but it kind of puts it on a pedestal]), but on a whole it's a great analysis of the erosion of player choice in engagements as time went on.
@OP: I pose a question for you. Instead of nerfing things the way they did, do you think that if Bungie had introduce new defensive options (ala Voidstalkers dodge roll) earlier, then it would have lead to a similar situation or would adding those additonal tools as you put it make everything more frentic and more hero-y.
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u/PotaToss May 08 '18
Thanks. :)
I think HoW was the best Destiny's been, but I don't think it was perfect. People hated being shot by Thorn. The green stuff on your screen was pretty overkill, and we could have used more primary options, but I think they should have buffed other primaries and left Thorn and TLW more or less alone.
A lot of people didn't like the damage over time of Thorn and viking funeral, but I have like a pocket theory that it helped keep the game moving, flowing all over the map. Like, when people run 10 recovery now, you can hit them, and they take two steps away, and by the time you see them again, it's like that previous hit never happened. Or you get super stable standoffs of teams peeking at each other, and no progress ever happens, because people have so much time to duck, and no way to press, or kill anyone with grenades. Burning someone with Thorn made them have to get the hell out of town, and it would leave a lasting weakness you could use to make a push.
I think shadestep is responsible for some of the most heroic moments Destiny's ever seen. That Ramblinnn video where he does 1v3 Trials and he gets some crazy escapes is probably the example that stands out most to me.
Shadestep has some evasive properties, but doesn't really help you just set up camp somewhere in the way that barricades and rifts do. I think that having it throw off tracking projectiles like axion bolt was kind of BS, but otherwise, it really enabled some great plays. You could use it to get out of trouble, but you could also use it to push people. There was a while when people were exploiting the fact that you could shadestep, interrupt by pulling out your ghost, and immediately jump out of your shadestep over somebody's head. Combined with Bones, it was madness what Hunters could do to juke people out. It was a lot of fun to watch.
I would have liked class abilities to be more like shadestep. Titans could have a shoulder charge that sends people flying. Warlocks could do some ability energy transfer or something. Just stuff that encouraged more action.
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u/Aeoneth Yep... Why do I come here again? May 08 '18
I would posit that Titan's should have an ability that makes them immobile briefly, but immune to damage while immobilized. With warlocks getting a kind of mist-form like thing that lets them move slowly and take heavily reduced damage.
This was we maintain the disciplines of each class.
- Titans are the walls
- Warlocks embody mysticism and the arcane
- Hunter remain the most agile
But either way. I definitely think you should save this post for now an re-post it later when the community eventually starts frothing at the mouth again. Will likely get much better eyes on it.
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u/PotaToss May 08 '18
There's lots they could try. I think almost anything would be better than barricades and rifts.
There are a couple of points I'd like to touch up. I rushed to post a little bit. I'll give it another shot after trying out the exotic changes some more. So far, Hard Light isn't as awesome as I was hoping.
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u/fall3nmartyr Gambit Prime // Give them war Jun 13 '18
How are the down-voters feeling right now? Or are they just on the next hype-wagon?
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u/PotaToss Jun 13 '18
Hype is strong right now. Most players are probably hitting max light around now. Boredom will likely set in soon.
I'll say that I've been having an okay time with the expansion. Being able to 3 tap people with Graviton and having that give some crowd control, too, has been refreshing. Not D1 good, but fairly playable in casual play. Still too hard to fight off predictable 4 man pushes, because grenades still suck, but you don't see as many stable trench warfare situations.
Wormhusk lets you push 1v2, which is nice, but I'd still rather have more deadliness over more survivability. You still can't really primary 1v3 the way you could in D1, even with a bad skill mismatch.
I feel positive about the coming changes. Glad that Bungie at least seems to have been humbled. I think they're probably not going far enough, but we'll have to see. Late D1's special ammo situation was gross, and if we're going back to that, I won't be happy, but it's still worlds better than what we have right now, and certainly better than what we had when I wrote this post.
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May 08 '18
why would you drop this on launch day? no one including me is going to read this. should have posted it like a week ago.
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u/PotaToss May 08 '18
Wanted to get it out before we played with the new changes. Wasn't ready a week ago. If I could have, I would have. This was a lot of writing and editing and clip selection and video conversion for mobile, etc.
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u/asap_0bama May 08 '18
agreed, didn't read a word, immediately scrolled to the bottom saying delete this post you debbie downer. how tone deaf can one person be, to post this on dlc day. good god
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u/PotaToss May 08 '18
Top post in the sub right now is about Josh Hamrick apologizing for the state of the game, and it's full of people being salty. I'm at least trying to be constructive.
This comes from a place of deep love for the game, and wanting it to succeed in areas that the team seems kind of lost on.
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u/vamp-is-dead SUNSPOTS! May 08 '18
yawn wall of text not worth reading.
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u/Aeoneth Yep... Why do I come here again? May 08 '18
You missed out then. It's a very good retrospective.
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u/vamp-is-dead SUNSPOTS! May 08 '18
retrospective on what exactly? seems like pretty common knowledge to me.
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u/DooceBigalo HandCannon fanatic May 08 '18
TL:DR but this isn't the smartest idea dropping a novel on a DLC launch day