I’ll get up to 600 soon enough. That’s the power level I need to do basically anything in Black Armory, Destiny 2′s newest mini-expansion that, apparently, is sort of fun once you can actually play it. I don’t know, because I can’t play any of it yet, and were it not for my professional obligations I’m not sure I ever would. I took a break from Destiny 2 to play things like Red Dead Redemption 2, and when I came back, it was clear that Destiny 2 was not happy about that. It’s not a particularly pleasant experience, signing into a game you’ve played extensively and enjoy only for the game to unceremoniously declare you not hardcore enough to enjoy the new content.
It’s had me thinking about that other major multiplayer shooter I’ve been spending time in recently: yep, Fortnite. No, these games are not particularly similar. But it’s interesting to compare them in terms of their status as games-as-service, and how they cope with running a game over a long period of time. And the approach to how they both handle the ebb and flow of how a player might interact with them is telling when it comes to the riotous popularity of one and the struggles of the other.
Fortnite, of course, has no real in-game progression save the cosmetic. You start every match in a bus with a pickaxe, and no matter how much you pay or how much money you spend, you start every match in a bus with a pickaxe: it’s the great equalizer. And that means that whether you’ve been gone for a day, a week, a month or an entire season, the game welcomes you back with open arms. In fact, taking a break can actually make things better. You get new, weird toys to play with, probably a limited time mode I’ve never seen before, maybe even a new point of interest or vehicle. When I sign back into Destiny the game looks down its nose at me, sending me off to grind before I can see anything fun.
It couldn’t be further from the experience of taking a break from Destiny 2. The messaging around Black Armory is essentially that only good little Destiny 2 grinders get new toys.
It goes without saying: Destiny 2 is a grind-based MMO and shouldn’t be drop-in, drop-out like Fortnite. And the year-1 appeals to the more casual players didn’t make much sense: things like eliminating interesting armor perks and high-end rewards, nuking player mobility and allowing you to hit the level cap in a matter of seconds. Those things managed to dampen the excitement of hardcore players much more than they managed to increase the enjoyment of less-hardcore players.
And yet there’s got to be a middle ground here, where the game rewards commitment without chastizing you for not doing your homework if you commit the sin of not playing for a few weeks. Bungie should think about that feeling you get when you take a break from Fortnite and return to a veritable Christmas tree full of new stuff to play with, and think about how it could work to bring an element of that excitement to its own game.
In the case of Black Armory, the solution seems frustratingly simple: increase the soft cap to 600, meaning that it is quick and easy for any player to get up to the level necessary to begin engaging with new content, but that it will still take some grind to be able to complete new endgame content like the raid. High-end players will still be sitting at a much better version of that 600 with a wide range of powerful weapons and synergistic loadouts, but others will at least be able to access some of the content they’ve paid $35 for.
That feels like the solution in this instance, but it’s more of a general problem than that. Bungie has spent the past year bringing back those hardcore elements that the most intense grinders liked about the original Destiny, and it’s been a wild success. But with Black Armory, in particular, it feels like it has done that at the expense of everyone else. And that’s the tightrope that Bungie has to walk. It needs to offer the sort of high-end rewards that keep dedicated players coming back every week to finish their milestones, but it needs to loosen things up with each new content drop to ensure that other players aren’t left behind. And I’m not even taking “casual” players here: I’m talking players that ground the game out for maybe two solid months before letting things lag, the sort of players that would be considered hardcore players in most any other game. It’s important to remember that such a player will buy every expansion and maybe drop some money in Eververse, and from a financial perspective the mid-core is every bit as important as the hardcore.
Let’s hope the developer can manage it: it did a decent enough job in the original Destiny, at least in its second two years. We’ll see what happens with The Dawning.
