One of the hottest topics of contention in the Destiny community is Power. In Destiny, power is a number used to determine your effectiveness in combat. It defines how much damage you do, and how much damage you can take. It is taken as an average of all of the attack and defense numbers of all of your equipped gear (weapons and armor). Your power number is compared to the power of your combatant to determine how easy or difficult the encounter will be. For instance, if you are 500 power and your enemy is 450, you will do more damage to them, and also take less damage.
This difference is referred to as your power delta. And it actually has a limit of 50 power. This means that you will only notice a difference of difficulty up until a delta of 50. If you are 500 and your enemy is 450, they will fare the same as someone at 10 power. This being the limit, means that enemies will be immune to your fire. Inversely, being 50 power above your opponent is the limit of how much more powerful you will be against your opponent. Being 60 or 70 power above wont make a difference.
This is the game’s way of making all of your encounters somewhat challenging, no matter what you do. Its the reason why the game’s first raid, Leviathan can still feel challenging. Leviathan is still set at 300 power, and the current max power is 650. However, when you load into leviathan, the enemies will actually feel like they are 610 power, because that is the weakest the game will make an enemy feel.
It might sound lame, but it turns out to be a pretty intelligent system, designed to help activities feel relevant, and constantly available for lower power players. If makes it so that you can take a new player through older content and still have a fun time. Assuming you agree with your fun with Destiny somewhat resides in the fact that activities continue to challenge your skills. If you could steamroll through the content, you may not have a lot of fun. The game would get boring.
The Forever Climb
When new content is released, the maximum power is typically increased. The increase typically depends on a combination of how expansive the content is how quickly players are to reach it based on that content.
So the big question asked sometimes is: “What’s the point of increasing the maximum power?”
Well the quick answer is difficulty. One of the big motivators of an action shooter like Destiny is to prove your skill and to overcome challenges. But once you reach the maximum power, you are evenly matched. With the current design of the game, one of the main ways global difficulty is implemented is through power deltas. The new raid, Scourge of the Past has a recommended power of 640. So unless you’re at least 620 or 630, you’re going to have a bad time.
Players need to build up power before facing it. The teams going for worlds first completed the raid in about 90 minutes. However, it took teams playing the previous raid, Last Wish, over 18 hours to complete that raid. Yes Last Wish was a bit longer, but to give you an idea or how little that factors in, we can observe raid speed runners.
The current record for completing Last Wish is around 20 minutes, and 14 minutes for Scourge of the Past. That’s makes Last Wish roughly 25% longer. So why did it take teams 18 hours to complete Last Wish the first time. The answer is power. Players were actually able to get to the mid 630s and 640s before Scourge went live, allowing the teams to focus more on the different mechanics of the raid. For Last Wish, the average teams were around 540, and that’s even the most hardcore players. With a recommended power of 560, the raid proved too challenging to most players, especially considering that the recommended power of Last Wish actually scales up to 580. Enemies just hit too hard and it took way too much firepower to take out even the weakest enemies.
The Pursuit of Greatness
Power is the first and most important pursuit for most players because of this. It’s what they want the most. However, we know from experience that a game that centralizes the power chase as its most prized pursuit is doomed to fail. This was the case of Destiny 2 year 1. The old milestones tab kept track of your weekly rituals, each promising the ultimate prize of more power. And that’s it. With the exception of 4 hour-long world quests, there was nothing else to really chase. Once you hit the power cap, the milestones became irrelevant. And this was a time where weapons only had fixed perks, all armor was about the same, and your subclasses were set it stone (and still are). So the game had no horizontal progression. You couldn’t expand outward and chase new guns or test out interesting load-outs.
Forsaken made a fundamental shift away from this by trying to make the pursuit of power more of a passive experience. However in a climate where the most compelling activities and loot are set at the highest powers, the pursuit of power will always be in the forefront, which is fine in the case of Forsaken because of all of the other pursuits that have been introduced, making you feel more like you’re chasing special weapons and items as opposed to simply power all the time.
It’s hard to tell whether an alternative system could ever be implemented into Destiny, or if it really ever needs to be. Power and power deltas are simply the most compelling and most engaging way of introducing challenge and difficulty into the game. The challenge Bungie continues to face is striking the balance of presenting power increases as simultaneously needed and not impactful to the overall experience. Needed to achieve the most challenging of activities, but also not wholly necessary so that you can still play and have fun with under-leveled players. In my assessment, the answer will always be in the distribution of rewards, but that is a topic for another day.
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