Damage Creep: Destiny’s Weapon Problem

With Destiny’s next expansion the Taken King coming out in less than two months there seems to be a number of questions on gamers’ minds. Traversing r/DestinytheGame , Destiny’s extremely active sub-reddit page I found one question (or statement really) to be especially interesting: “Bungie will invalidate a *lot* of players if year one gear’s plans aren’t handled properly, or revealed soon”. The author of this post describes their hope that the game’s developer Bungie doesn’t leave behind the year one gear since it would invalidate all of the year one player’s many hours of game play. This got me thinking about the old gear, the nearly 600 hours I have put into the game so far, and how Bungie should deal with continuing the franchise forward. The conclusion that I came to was that Bungie should be selective about the gear that they continue to bring forward through the following expansions and that some gear should, ultimately, be left behind.

Now, that was probably a very unpopular statement to make but I make it for good reason: the old weapons are just too powerful. Destiny is beginning to suffer from what traditional MMO players have called “power creep”, a phenomena where weapons become increasingly powerful because they have to be balanced against older powerhouse weapons (Extra Credits made an excellent video about the matter here). We can see this with two weapons: Fatebringer from the Vault of Glass (a vanilla Destiny encounter) and Six Dreg’s Pride II from the Prison of Elders (a House of Wolves Destiny expansion encounter). Both guns have nearly identical stats but ask any Destiny player and you will find out that Fatebringer is the more preferred weapon.

You might be asking “if they have the same stats how is it that Fatebringer is the preferred weapon?” The reason is simple and is the reason why guns like Fatebringer shouldn’t be brought forward through future Destiny expansions: perks. The fact of the matter is that Fatebringer has some of the best possible perks for a hand cannon in player versus environment encounters. On paper this may not be immediately apparent but try it out and you will immediately understand as an entire wave of thralls is decimated by a single critical hit and its subsequent firefly explosion. That’s not to say that Six Dreg Pride II isn’t a good weapon though! In fact, Six Dreg Pride II is one of the best hand cannons in the game for its ability to get any of the 3 elemental burns found in the game. Even with this Fatebringer will stand a head above it simply because it lacks the same level of perk power.

This problem can be seen in nearly every class of guns available in Destiny with one being far more powerful than all of the others. This wouldn’t be a problem if guns like Fatebringer were exotic guns because those are supposed to be the most powerful weapons available and can continue forward through the expansions until the end of time. The problem comes from the fact that it is a legendary weapon that all other legendary weapons must compete against. By simply existing in the game weapons like Fatebringer make similar guns irrelevant and that’s a huge issue for Bungie going forward.

Each weapon that Bungie adds to the game takes a great deal of effort to design, play test, and implement so it is important for them to figure out a way to bring the old guns down to size without overtaking them with new, more powerful guns. As it stands right now there are two options with regard to balancing old guns: to re-balance perks or to leave them behind with the future updates. Re-balancing perks, at first glance, seems like the ideal option since people will be able to continue to use those hard earned guns of theirs and everything will suddenly be all hunky-dory. The problem here is that it doesn’t account for the fact that those re-balanced perks are also available for other guns making it so that if you wanted to make the perks on Fatebringer worse you would end up bringing other, similar, guns down with it, thus keeping Fatebringer at the top of the pack.

It is from the inability of perk re-balancing to dethrone guns like Fatebringer that will force Bungie to retire the old gear. Retiring the old gear would allow Bungie to create new gun setups and archetypes that can shine because they don’t have the old powerhouse archetypes to compete with. Now, when I say “retire the old gear” many people, including me, begin to think about all the gear they currently have and how many hours it took to get that gear. Many of those people, like the post mentioned at the beginning of this article, would rightfully feel that their actions were invalidated and that it would make the old content irrelevant (much like the Dark Below DLC did with the old raid gear and weapons). This reaction is completely warranted but stems from a problem Destiny has that goes deeper than power creep. Instead, this problem stems from the random nature of loot drops and the grind that many players have to go through to get gear.

For some people getting the top tier gear in Destiny was a matter of running the end game content once or twice. For others it took dozens of attempts at the end game content to get the top tier gear. If Bungie left that top tier gear behind in future expansions the players who took a great deal longer to build their arsenals would be much more likely to feel like their invested time was all for nothing because it would be as if the game was holding them back from the gear. Why would you put the same kind of effort into the game if you knew that the weapons that the game is holding you back from having would be useless by the time you got them? All of this because the loot is handled by a random number generator.

If content was handled such that you were guaranteed a certain reward after completing a piece of content then players wouldn’t feel like their work was invalidated because the luckiest person on earth, the most skilled players, and the lesser skilled players would all get the top tier equipment after going through the same amount of trials and tribulations. For a great deal of the older content it is a shame that this wasn’t the system put into place but looking forward we can hope that Bungie will change the way that loot is earned so that we players don’t ever get that feeling of invalidation.

As some may have noticed the majority of this discussion has revolved around weapons and much of what I have said really only applies to weapons. With player armor there is no power creep, owning a different pair of gloves from another player doesn’t make you player better or worse than them, it simply makes you look different. The fact that armor doesn’t affect the interactions between players and the game it should honestly be kept relevant through all future expansions. That way at least some of the loot earned will not be invalidated and maybe that will be enough to keep players content. I know that it will for me.

Looking at the future of Destiny, a franchise that is supposed to last for 10 years, it is obvious that there will be a number of growing pains. As the game currently stands it is in a good position but is held back by its random loot drop system. It is also held back by the lack of foresight Bungie had in making the vanilla game weapons. To move forward I think all of us players would benefit from dealing with the power creep in the game sooner rather than later.

Just let us keep our cool armor Bungie. Lord knows I spent an unreasonable amount of time getting it.