When I think about encounters, there are several factors to consider when tuning difficulty. Player ability. Player management. Boss management. Traversal. With the announcement of Destiny 2: Shadowkeep - I wanted to explore a possible raid encounter in the Black Garden that would demonstrate an age old encounter design that has been largely lost on the Destiny meta. No adds. For years, we have had many encounters that rely too heavily on the involvement of adds or trash mobs. You go from one phase to the next, dealing with adds, and then onto the damage phase. So, for Black Garden, I wanted to design an encounter that was centered very heavily on boss mechanics and pattern recognition. Could you design an encounter that relied heavily on the difficulty of the boss, and not the overwhelming nature of horde mode mentality? Let’s find out.
The wild phenomena of Apex Legends
A Case For Loot Windows - Destiny 2
As a loot shooter, Destiny 2, lends itself to continue dropping precious loot at our feet. It’s one of the core game loops. We shoot, we kill, we get loot. But one of the more troublesome prospects of always having an ingress of loot is inventory space: personal or vault. As the system works now, every single piece of loot is given to you and automatically looted. If you miss a piece of loot, that item is sent directly to the postmaster. If you have no room for that piece of item, it too sends directly to the postmaster. This is a beneficial quality of life system to have, but it can also become very cumbersome. Especially in the loot shooter genre when everything gives you loot. So I’m going to be making a case for a more streamlined and classic loot system that gives players a more meaningful experience when looting and organizing inventory space.