Low-Hanging Fruit - Strikes
Scoring, Modifiers, and Loot
Strikes are one of the core pieces of gameplay in Destiny, going back to the earliest days of Vanilla D1. They are by their very nature extremely repetitive and routine, but not necessarily in a bad way. There is something oddly addicting about running through these encounters so many times that you learn every single detail of each encounter, every nook and cranny of the environments, and the precise timing of every enemy spawn throughout these 3-man excursions.
Outside of the relaxing nature of running such familiar content, the main appeal of these repetitive loops, I believe, is in the chance they give players to feel powerful and to achieve a sort of mastery over these encounters . Whether that’s a matter of experimenting with different builds based on what works best for each strike, or in discovering routes and strategies to navigate through them that allow you to finish as quickly or efficiently as possible
But there is a limit the enjoyment of these Strikes when you’re given very little variety, even fewer rewards, and zero meaningful feedback. Some of the current strikes in D2 have been around for almost 3 years now, with no changes ever made to them. There are not a lot of surprises or things left to discover in any piece of content that’s been around that long, but especially content that is already made to be ran so repetitively.
In D1, Bungie seemed to recognize this and they offered a number of solutions to try to curb this issue that I can’t understand the lack of inclusion in D2 so far.
They “remixed” several of their strikes, giving alternate versions of them that changed enemies and other details that gave a fresh coat of paint to some strikes that were badly in need of it.
They also added strike-specific loot to the rewards of each strike, and later a system using keys that gave you more control over which loot you got from these strikes. D2 has dabbled in this concept, but basically abandoned it after Year 1 and never fleshed it out nearly as well as D1 did.
Lastly, for whatever reason, Bungie gave us more positive modifiers for these strikes towards the end of D1. Modifiers that worked to our advantage and made us more powerful, instead of modifiers that made enemies stronger or our guardians weaker, which seems to be more the preferred implementation of them in D2. Some of these modifiers were very straight-forward like having a stronger primary weapon, but even these simple ones became really popular within the community and the cries to bring them back have been loud over the years, but met with silence from Bungie.
Strike Scoring
I’d like to see all of these concepts make a return in D2, but before I dive into the details of how I’d like to see that executed, I think there is an even simpler twist on an existing concept that’s already in the game and was also part of D1: strike scoring. Part of the problem with trying to continually improve and get more efficient at clearing non-nightfall strikes is that there is no meaningful way to measure how well you’ve done it in the past.
You could record the completion times and your best individual kill counts for each strike and you could personally track your best runs on a spreadsheet or with pen and paper, but wouldn’t it be better if the game kept track of this kind of information for you and shared it in the game?
What if strikes gave you individual scores instead of just a team score, and every strike was a competition between the three players participating to get the best score, as well as a group effort to put up the best combined score they possibly could? And what if putting up the best score in that strike meant something in terms of rewards? Or if you could start each strike with a goal in mind that you could try to beat? This might be your personal best all-time score, it might be the best score in your clan, it might be something like ending up in the 90th percentile or higher of all scores.
Sitting down to play a strike for the 100th time, it’s obviously going to feel familiar and maybe even repetitive no matter what kind of bells and whistles you add, but there should still feel like you have something to accomplish that you haven’t done before. This scoring concept is already a part of Nightfalls, and previously existed in D1 strikes. But clearly it needs expanded upon, and there are several really great opportunities here to do so.
I’d also love for the post-game screen after a strike to provide much more detail. In addition to the often-asked-for feature of displaying final boss damage that people always want to check out after an activity, especially Raid encounters, it would be great to see details on how your score was achieved: medal counts, precision kill counts, total damage done, etc. That feedback is all part of the “mastery cycle” that Bungie used to focus so much on, but have seemingly forgotten or just moved on from, and I’d love to see it make a return in activities like Strikes in particular.
Strike Loot
In terms of strike loot, it’s pretty inexcusable that not all strikes have a specific drop associated with them, and that the ones which do feature year 1 gear with some sparrows and ghost shells included as well. Those cosmetic items offer very little excitement, but more importantly, you have no reason to ever chase them after acquiring the first time. It’s truly a one-and-done situation with those items, which defeats the purpose of this kind of reward. Strike-specific loot was one of the most popular concepts in D1, and it has just always been treated like an afterthought in D2.
An underrated and maybe slightly overlooked benefit of strike-specific loot was that it gave you a way to directly target certain slots in your character, which is something sorely missing from the leveling process right now where you can go weeks without getting a pinnacle drop to hit the right slot and take you from one power level to the next. If every strike offered a chance to chase different items in all the different equipment slots, you’ve suddenly solved another huge problem while simultaneously making strikes better and giving us us some potentially very cool strike-themed armor and weapons to chase.
Assuming Bungie is able to add strike-specific loot I see no reason that they couldn’t bring back the Skeleton Key concept in D2, and if they’re able to bring back keys I think they could work perfectly with the enhanced strike scoring concept I’ve mentioned. Here’s an idea: finishing with the highest score in the strike gives you the greatest chance possible to get a Skeleton Key drop. Or maybe you could earn key fragments for running strikes and 1st place gets the most fragments, while 2nd and 3rd place receive slightly less. It doesn’t have to be a huge difference in the amount of fragments you get between 1st and 3rd, but it would be enough of an incentive to try to put up big numbers when you play strikes.
Modifiers
So now we’ve got a good deal of incentive and motivation to run these strikes for years on end, but let’s circle back to making them a little bit less of a slog on your 100th or 200th run. I’m talking about fun modifiers and remixed strikes.
Modifiers seem easy enough. You’re just playing with sliders and multipliers for the most part, and we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. Bring back the mods that make our kinetic or special weapon slot extra beefy, bring back the Daybreak mod that refreshes all our abilities and supers incredibly quick, give us back the Airborne mod where we deal extra damage in mid-air. These are just re-hashes of modifiers we’ve seen already in the franchise, surely there are a dozen more fun settings they could mix up in different ways to create unique and entertaining modifiers.
And while we’re at it, remove all of the negative modifiers from regular strikes. If you want to leave them in Nightfalls, I get that philosophy entirely. But there’s no reason anyone should ever look at the Vanguard Strike playlists and see something un-fun staring back at them when we’re expected to run these things dozens or maybe even hundreds of times each, over the course of several years. Especially when there are no other significant changes being made to the encounters, which brings me to the last point…
Remixing
It’s probably not falling into the low-hanging fruit category to ask Bungie to make actual remixed strikes like they did in D1 for the D2 strikes, that’s a serious amount of work to make happen. But they have added Champion enemies and Wanted enemies the last two years, which I’d say have both landed sort of flat given they don’t really add anything. This seems to demonstrate they are able to make these kinds of “insertions” into strikes, which inspires my next idea.
What if strikes all had “rare spawns” in them, meaning high-level unique enemies that only very occasionally show up, or possibly could be triggered by doing certain things inside the strike - say, getting to a certain checkpoint under a certain amount of time, or by killing a previous enemy or group of enemies in the strike in a certain way. This could be as simple or as complicated as Bungie wants to make it, but the point is that there could always be this chance of something cool happening in every strike that is not very common and getting it to happen should be an incredibly exciting moment as this enemy will be the key to getting something else great in the game, which I would suggest maybe tapping into the Eververse store for rewards here. This type of rare spawn is the perfect spot to include rare cosmetics rewards, as these should be the kinds of rewards that not everybody is going to get and you don’t want anyone to feel like they’re being held back in the game by not having a reward. At the same time, it’s something people would proudly display because of its rarity. This is obviously on the far end of what should be considered “easy” to implement, but it’s the kind of idea that I think really lights a fire under the player-base without alienating anyone at the same time.
Recap & Conclusion
So if I had my way, let’s recap how I’ve changed strikes: A strike now has only positive modifiers, and plenty of them. We’ve got randomly rolled gear that is specific to each strike and this loot pool will cover all gear slots in order to help players fill in specific slots that need a boost while leveling. This gear would be acquired with the use of Skeleton keys, which are making their return via Key fragments rewarded at the end of running all these strikes. And the amount of key fragments you get would be tied to your performance in strikes, which are now going to be measured via a revamped, competitive scoring system between the 3-members of the strike fireteam, and/or based on the total score of the strike put together by the cumulative scores of the fireteam members. Lastly, there are now very rare chances for new named mini-bosses to spawn in on every strike which have their own loot pool filled with Eververse items: maybe gifts of bright dust, ornaments for strike specific gear, emblems and shaders - items that will really be fun to chase and exciting to have the chance at getting anytime one of these rare events pops up, but nothing so mandatory that you feel you’ve been screwed if you never get. There’s a chance to have some real extreme rarity here in terms of loot.
I’m getting the itch to log-on right now and grind strikes for a few hours just thinking about this concept. And it all feels like familiar pieces that we’ve seen before, natural additions that should probably already be here, but put together with a bit more care and attention than this playlist has gotten in quite some time. But is it do-able? Is this all low-hanging fruit for a developer that is busy pumping out new content every year?
I’d argue that to the lay-person, it doesn’t seem like I’m asking for much.
Scoring is a concept already in the game, I’m asking for a slightly revised version of it here. Not trivial work, but not a totally new feature.
The modifiers seem extremely feasible, this feels like it would take longer to convince Bungie to remove the negative modifiers from a philosophical standpoint than it would take a developer in the company to actually go in and code.
We’d need a new currency for Skeleton Keys and Key fragments, and a way to tie these into strike rewards.
We’d of course need a new chest to spawn at the end of each strike, and we’d need some new enemies designed to fit into my rare spawn concept - this part no doubt would be the most intensive piece of what I’m asking.
Lastly, and the part Bungie seems to struggle the most with, we’d need the loot to fill in these loot pools I’ve just talked so much about. Which is clearly not easy for them, and maybe not fair to call low-hanging fruit, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret about many of my ideas: they all involve new loot. This is a looter shooter after all. Maybe another day we can talk more about the problems they have supplying the amount of new loot this game needs, but that’s for another post.
I’m over-simplifying things, obviously. There is far more that would go into making these changes than what I’ve listed here, but what I’m not asking for are big things like new destinations, new activities, or even totally new concepts to the franchise. It’s a mixture of things we’ve had in the past, tweaked and re-worked to fit the current state of the game.
Strikes may never avoid feeling repetitive, but that doesn’t mean they have to be boring. With just a few tweaks and a pile of loot, Bungie could revitalize everyone’s interest in the Strike playlist overnight, while solving several other fundamental problems with the game at the same time. Maybe some of this stuff is already in store for us in Beyond Light, but considering some of these ideas already existed in D1, it’s hard to understand why we’ve been made to wait this long to get them back.
But it’s never too late to right a wrong, and I’m dying to see any of these changes make their way to Destiny Strikes as soon as possible.