First off, great post. It makes a nice change from some of the other stuff on here! My thoughts on the exotic items are that there should be a mixture of ways of getting them, almost like sub categories of exotic items. For example some can only be obtained from random drops/treasure chests but maybe aren't quite as powerful as other exotic items, some can be obtained by completing specific difficult tasks and some can be crafted by using different rare items. Like you said, you don't want them to be so common that everyone has them, yet at the same time you don't want them to be so difficult to get that it puts people off.

Another fascinating read as usual. Keep up the good work, and I hope to read your thread on space combat rather soon. Good luck with that one, although you don't need it.

Great read! I think you have a lot of great ideas that I completely agree with. One of the ideas that I do agree with and hope that this is how it is, is about gathering exotics. I like your idea of not having to grind for a specific weapon as that doesn't sound fun, nor does it make me think that gun sounds that cool. The idea of a weapon that you can only get once, just like an achievement. That sounds pretty awesome.

Hylebos plis. I want to read all this but I ain't got time

[quote][b]4) Epilogue[/b][/quote]As we approach the end of my narrative, I'd just like to address a few miscellaneous points that I couldn't fit in elsewhere in no particular order. I'd first like to remind the reader that even if exotics turn out to be very accessible, they still won't hurt Destiny's build diversity or balance because of several systems Bungie has already implemented. Namely, the fact that guardians can only equip one exotic weapon and one exotic armor piece at a time restricts players to choosing the two exotics that they feel best complement their build. Even if many players end up unlocking all of the exotics that Destiny has to offer, this restriction helps to prevent an exotic overload so to speak and will hopefully increase the variety of exotics you see on the battlefield if all of them are viable options. Not to mention, just because a player obtains an exotic doesn't neccessarily mean that he'll train it up to its full potential. It presumably takes a lot of resources and time to fully upgrade your exotic, and if you already have an exotic that fills the same role, leveling up the new exotic seems more of a novelty than a neccessity. It's much like how if I catch a level 50 Moltres in Pokemon Red, I'm not going to automatically use him in my party if I have a perfectly fine level 70 Charizard that has the same typing and has been pulling its weight the entire game. Secondly, I'd like to clarify some of the assumptions I made while writing this thread and where they came from. Over the past year, Bungie has repeatedly shared this anecdote where a player sees some veteran guardians that are decked out with equipment that tells a story of where those guardians have been and what they did. He goes over and asks them "Where did you get that cool gun?" and they reply "Want us to show you?" and so a new adventure, ignited by the social aspect of the Destiny, begins. From this short story which seems to be one of the big postcard moments for Destiny's experience, I inferred that not only will Destiny's exotic acquisition process be deterministic, but that every exotic is untradeable. To elaborate, by deterministic, I mean that every exotic in the game is in a specific location with a specific set of challenges that must be beaten in order to unlock that exotic for the player. Afterall, how could those veteran players show the newer player where they got their gun if its location and method to unlock isn't consistent? It's possible that certain challenges might unlock one of several exotics (like in the E3 Demo), but I feel that a design which leans more towards the deterministic side of the spectrum will create a more powerful and thematic experience. With regards to the untradeableness of exotics, it seemed like a neccessary quality to prevent the anecdote from deviating from its intended narrative path. Imagine, the player walks up to these veteran guardians and says "Where did you get that cool gun?" and they reply "If you want it you can buy it from us, it's no skin off our backs, we know where to find them and it's not terribly difficult for us at this point to unlock it again." That's not a particularly a satisfying conclusion, and it also introduces some problems. Should a player be allowed to purchase (or simply obtain through charity from a friend) an exotic and skip out on the resulting growth that would have resulted from the acquisition and investment process? I selfishly say no, I think that Destiny will benefit more if finding an exotic is like unlocking an achievement, you can only unlock it once, and it's not somthing you can just hand off to another player when you're done playing with it. Naturally, this removes what would otherwise have been an important cornerstone of Destiny's economy, but the alternate world where exotics are tradeable would require us to go back in and implement random drops on exotics to help ensure that the market doesn't get flooded by players who are able to grind the same challenge over and over again, not to mention it would cheapen the value of these supposedly one of a kind items if you had players on the corners of streets selling them out of a trench coat... it just seems like the more inferior of the two possible games that Destiny could become. One promotes personal growth and shared experiences, the other is way more grindy and unfriendly. Finally, I feel that in general the reason why exclusivity is such a huge talking point for our community at the moment is because of leftover feelings about the way that Bungie handled Recon in the Halo era. When Halo 3 first came out, Recon Armor was only availible to Bungie employees or community members who were recognised by Bungie. I feel that this decision backfired tremendously; people were completely obsessed with this reward that they couldn't obtain to the point where [url=http://halo.bungie.net/stats/reach/online.aspx]a quarter of all the threads made on the old Bungie.net website were about Recon.[/url] That's a rather crazy statistic! I feel that Bungie's subsequent decision to make Recon accessible to all players through the Vidmaster Challenges was the right choice. As I hope I've shown through this thread, many of the Vidmaster Challenges were designed to create unique experiences that could also be quite difficult, but still accessible to the average player. But many players were still upset that this previously exclusive armor set could now be obtained by everyone, they saw it as a betrayal of those who had earned the armor the right way in the first place, and I feel that some of these feelings linger as we head into this bright and hopeful universe of Destiny. Don't get me wrong, it's not that I feel that amazing players shouldn't be rewarded with exclusive things, be it for their actions in the game or their actions in the community. On the contrary, I feel that things like titles, ranks, and leaderboards are good ways of officially rewarding people who invest heavily into the game and the community. Arguably, an even more powerful reward than those is the status and respect given to these people by the community itself, but I just don't see a reason why these rewards need to be something like the exotic equipment which have a ton of interesting in-game aesthetics and mechanics attached to them, trying to make them as exclusive as possible would honestly bring out the worst of our commmunity for the sake of the few at the top. [b]It doesn't need to be this way.[/b] Our story begins at this moment of great adventure and peril. Do we want to be a community that is obsessed with and jealous of the destiny of other players, or do we have the courage to be satisfied with our own personal Destiny? The choice is yours. Be Brave! ...I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who has successfully read this thread from start to finish, I feel that is has been somewhat more dense and lengthy than usual, which is ironic considering that I originally intended this to be a very short piece, but it somewhat evolved and, well, here we are. I can imagine that some aspects of the material that I covered will no doubt be somewhat controversial, and so I encourage anyone who disagrees with me or anyone who has questions to share their perspective in a civil and constructive way. I'm certainly not dead set on any of this, and I'm willing to try to explain myself better or listen to reason if it is properly presented and makes quite a bit of sense. For my next topic, I was thinking about refactoring a thread that I had half-written about the sorts of special powers and abillities that we might see on exotics, but since the last three threads I've written have all been about exotics, I might want to take a small break from all of that. I've had this idea for a thread about Space Combat that I've been kicking around in my head, but it might be a little while until I find a good way to present it. Who knows? It's a very exciting time to speculate about Destiny, there are so many untouched topics that could be discussed, make sure to keep the fires of speculation burning, even in this time of darkness! Until we meet again! Hopefully sooner rather than later... ~Hylebos [b]If you would like to comment, please reply to the Original Post. [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_Destiny39s-Design-Exotic-Exclusivity/en/Forum/Post?id=64293430]Please click on this Hyperlink to return to the top![/url][/b] [quote][b]Table of Contents 1) [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_Destiny39s-Design-Exotic-Exclusivity/en/Forum/Post?id=64293430]Introduction / Original Post[/url] 2) [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293439&path=1]Analogues, Exclusivity, and the Exotic Experience[/url] 3) [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293438&path=1]Exotic Acquisition[/url] 4) >> Epilogue <<[/b][/quote][quote][b]Related Threads: 1) [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_Destiny39s-Design-Exotic-Restrictions/en/Forum/Post?id=63230808]Destiny's Design: Exotic Restrictions[/url] 2) [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_Destiny-Speculation-Exotic-Ascension/en/Forum/Post?id=63605619]Destiny Speculation: Exotic Ascension[/url][/b][/quote]

[quote][b]2) Analogues, Exclusivity, and the Exotic Experience[/b][/quote]Whenever you speculate about a partially revealed feature, it can be useful to look at games with similar mechanics to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. With regards to exotic exclusivity, I first looked at a number of games with strong analogues to Destiny's exotics and I found that many of them really didn't seem to strive to preserve exclusivity with their design. For example, even though they have been somewhat bastardized as the series has progressed, at their core Pokemon's legendaries embody many of the qualities that Destiny's exotics aspire to. They're one-of-a-kind, they possess powers that normal Pokemon do not, they are steeped in lore and fiction... and yet it's really not too difficult for the average gamer to find and eventually catch most of them. While some people might attribute Pokemon's lack of exclusivity to some notion that it's catered to casuals, even a more hardcore game like Dark Souls doesn't place a heavy emphasis on exclusivity with their sandbox. While some of the really powerful and unique items are hidden very well, locked away as Covenant rewards, or obtained only by forging a new item with a boss soul, it's still not terribly difficult to obtain most of them if you keep your eyes open while you explore. A notable aspect of both games seems to be that no one really cares about the lack of exclusivity, whether it's the fact that everyone and their second cousin has a Zapdos, or that everyone and their mom has a Dragonslayer Spear. I figure that if these games can get away with a lack of exclusivity, then why couldn't Destiny? What does Destiny serve to gain by refocusing its design? For one, developers like Game Freak and From Software realize that in some sense true exclusivity is somewhat of an unrealistic expectation in this modern era of gaming. When you have millions of people around the world playing and talking about your game daily, players will find ways to eventually beat the odds and obtain the items that they seek. The only viable way to create true exclusivity is to implement heavy-handed mechanics that put a hard cap on the total number of rewards that can be handed out to players for completing a certain objective. This is naturally somewhat counterproductive. I feel that games should be designed in a way so that they can be enjoyed by everyone, reserving specific gameplay elements for use only by the most elite players seems ill-advised at best and irresponsible at worst. If ever there was a reason to make an item difficult to obtain, it should be to encourage players to try new experiences, transcend their limitations, and travel deeper down the path to personal investment in Destiny's universe. With that notion in mind, I'm not sure that there is a reward more compelling in Destiny's sandbox than the weapons and the armor belonging to the exotic tier. They are very attractive to a wide variety of players for many different reasons, but from a mechanics standpoint, what makes the exotics special are the unique powers and abillities that bring their fantasy to life. An important aspect of these powers and abillities seem to be that they are not unlocked by default when you first acquire a new exotic, inviting players to invest in their new toy to bring out its true potential. In my mind, the best rewards in Destiny will be the ones that are capable of inspiring new adventures, so in that regard, exotics will become a core component of the grand engine that will power Destiny's experience. The quest to obtain an exotic is merely the beginning. To transform your exotic from its initial vanilla form into an item worthy of the legends written about it, you'll need to take it along with you on many more adventures. These encounters will in turn inspire their own stories and rewards that can later become the starting points of a new journey. Even after you've completely upgraded your exotic, the struggle to get it to that point will have no doubt generated a backlog of activities and opportunities that require your attention, and so you set off, armed with a new and powerful tool to continue your epic adventure. An endless cyclical adventure of discovery and self-reinvention wrapped around a core of strong gameplay, meant to be enjoyed with friends... this is what I envision Destiny's experience to be. Naturally, this will only work out well if we can find a way to emulate exclusivity in a way that encourages players to improve themselves. As you can imagine, this can easily become somewhat of a tricky task. What sort of things do we need to consider while designing the exotic acquisition experience? [b]Destiny's Design: Exotic Exclusivity continues on the next post. [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293438&path=1]Please click this Hyperlink to continue reading![/url][/b] [spoiler][b]Table of Contents 1) [url=http://www.bungie.net/7_Destiny39s-Design-Exotic-Exclusivity/en/Forum/Post?id=64293430]Introduction / Original Post[/url] 2) >> Analogues, Exclusivity, and the Exotic Experience << 3) [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293438&path=1]Exotic Acquisition[/url] 4) [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post?id=64293434&path=1]Epilogue[/url][/b][/spoiler]

I think of exotics like the legendary gear you have to farm for in Diablo 3.

Such a clever analysis! Cannot wait to see it verify!

Since they have classes shouldent they have sub classes theres three classes there should be like 12 sub classes to further drive the uniqueness of your players

I don't have anything constructive to add, but just wanted to say I always enjoy reading your ideas.

You need any more bricks or drywall? I'm selling a ton for cheap.