And now they’re making games for the worst streamers online.
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I’m not surprised, all the footage of their internal play tests show teams of 3 well-behaved people on voice comms, which is fine for testing what coordinated groups will do in-game but absolutely worthless for testing the average matchmaking experience
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matchmaking was a just released experimental beta feature for select raids when I was playing online raid game destiny like two years ago
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I played a lot of Gundam Battle Operation 2, and the largest deciding factor of whether you win a match or lose a match is the player archetype I-Am-A-Gundam. An I-Am-A-Gundam will charge out on their own, or will shoot team mates in the back with rockets trying to hit an opponent that’s out of range. They will not read a map because they don’t care where the rest of their team is. Their actual game knowledge is largely immaterial because their behavior will always be detrimental to the team mechanic. Winning games in low ranks in GBO2 is largely a matter of having fewer I-Am-A-Gundams on your team than the opponents have.
In GBO2 this type of teammate will cost you ranking points, and you’ll feel that loss coming seconds into the match. With Marathon you’re also going to lose your Gelgoog to this type of teammate.
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My optimism for this game has shattered. I left destiny because pvp got no love, and it sounds like they’re managing to achieve that again in a game that’s almost entirely pvp.
Well played Bungie
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that article is comparing marathon to apex (which from what i’ve seen seems to be a pretty apt comparison, longer time to kill, character classes, single life, etc) but i think it’s missing a piece of what a long time to kill actually implies.
it posits that games like tarkov are unfriendly to new players because of how fast you can die, and games like apex (with a longer time to kill) are better for beginners because they have a chance to react to being shot at.
i think it’s true that players FEEL this way, but from my experience the longer the ttk the worse chance you have as a new player. i played an ungodly amount of apex, and the long ttk meant that i would almost always lose a fight to a player better than me. in fact, i started to be able to recognize how good a player was just by how they’d react when i shot at them. in apex, even if i got the jump on a good player, they’d still have time to turn around and shoot me back. and on top of that there’s a bunch of movement and abilities for skill expression, they can get away, reset the fight, and now the information is even and you no longer have your element of surprise.
in a game like hunt showdown, it’s much more possible to kill players that are better than you, because they die in one or two shots. a good player might get unlucky and you get to click them in the head before they even know you’re there. or they miss a shot you happen to hit yours. it doesn’t matter how good they are, they can still die to chance. if you catch them out, there aren’t nearly as many ways for them to maneuver out of a bad position.
while at first blush high ttk SOUNDS friendlier to new players, i think it’ll actually make the new player experience even worse. by making ttk longer in marathon vs. other extraction shooters you reduce the role of variance to decide outcomes, which results in new players literally never killing anyone, ever. that’s certainly how a lot of people on this forum felt when trying apex (and how i felt when i was learning apex!)
so like long ttk may make you feel like you have more agency because you don’t die immediately out of nowhere, but it’s a false sense of agency – the longer the ttk, the more chances the better player has to outplay you. you were actually dead when you took the first bit of damage, you just didn’t know it yet.
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very useful read
I think this is the crux of why we keep coming back to Bungie : the sense that they can do better than this, they’ve proven they can, and for some reason of stubbornness they just stand by the ways that this game doesn’t transcend its genre or moment
regarding TTK, I’ve seen it argued that high TTK prioritizes mechanical aiming/movement skill (but in aggregate, so it’s very hard to come back against being outnumbered) and low TTK prioritizes planning and positioning, tactics, mental game (but on an individual level, a large ability to turn the tables on an ambush). I believe it, these two forces are in constant dialectic within any specific shooter.
that’s why I think marathon would be better as a mid-low TTK game. it would be consonant with the idea that this is a dangerous planet, it would incentivize tactical positioning, but you could fight your way out of an ambush if you were prepared for it.
notably, halo CE is much lower TTK than subsequent Halo games, and so you get intensely complex 2v2 battles on LAN. whereas halo 3 is very high TTK and therefore becomes Teamshot: The Game
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yep, this aligns w/ my experience. hunt’s ttk is so low that most of the skill is positioning, game knowledge, exploiting asymmetrical information, tactics, etc. if the person you’re shooting at doesn’t know you’re there, you can take all the time you want to aim.
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more and more i question what even is the value of “IP” for shit like this (to the people playing the game - the value is obvious to the shareholders) - even as i can’t help but think about this game… like, of course… it’s marathon… or, well… “marathon”…
surely many times i’ve taken for granted to some degree that something being “official” matters, like. yeah. they’ve got the Intellectual Property rights to put a name on this thing that you already recognize. you’ll talk about it because it’s now nominally connected to that thing you like.
i suspect i wouldn’t give much of a shit about this game if it was called destiny 3: extraction royale, my ears only perked up because they named it Thing I Like. i keep repeating to myself that there is vastly more crossover in personnel between late-stage Destiny 2 (Thing I Don’t Like) and nu-Marathon than the latter and the original trilogy…
like… actually… is there any crossover whatsoever between any of the original games and this thing?
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This is objectively true based on studies done in Call of Duty, CS, and the like, for the exact reasons you lay out. Fast TTK favors players with lower gamesense and higher aiming skill, and allows new/“bad” players to get one over on skilled players more often than slow TTK.
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yeah the only way i am killing anyone in destiny pvp is very sudden flashes of luck
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I have zero interest in this game, but shouldn’t better players win? the idea that a high ttk ‘tricks’ new players into thinking they have chance, rather than actually giving them a chance, seems like the point. I might be able to luck into a kill in a game where the other player dies in one or two shots from a place where no one can see them, but how is that fun in the slightest, especially when 9 times out of 10 I’m going to be the one dying to that same scenario? high ttk I lose but at least I get to play the game, engage with the mechanics, learn what the fuck the weapons do, etc.
For long term audiences a low ttk is favourable because people (as in the largest possible audience) will not be put off by a learning grind and having to confront their own shortcomings in terms of motor skill. I thinki this also explains the death of arena shooters generally which could have a very high ttk
speaking of TTK, and because I happened to remember these exist, here is a commentary of a 2v2 on damnation. go to 0:25 to see match start and how quickly someone can die in Halo 1
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arena shooters died because they are snowball games, once you get ok at them kills = map control = power imbalance = more kills. halo 1 – which killed the genre before CoD made that more visible – kept a lot of the map control ideas from arena shooters, but spawns you with the best weapon and limits you to one other, which changes the equation quite a bit.
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Doom16 actually has my favorite iteration on the modern arena shooter formula, balancing map control with giving you two very good weapons as your core loadout, letting you mix and match your build while still favoring players who put in the work to learn layouts and power weapon spawns and such.
“Better” players shouldn’t always win individual duels, no, because it drives away new or middle-skill players. They should always win the match overall. Also, fast TTK doesn’t mean you can’t get good and consistently dominate, it just means that on a whole, players with less raw movement / gamesense skill won’t win every single time.
This predates the modern FPS landscape. Counter-Strike has a very fast TTK, and nobody would call it a game for bad players, and good players consistently dominate. But it means that sometimes a “lesser skilled” player will get a headshot on you and win the duel. This is probably better for the health of the game in the long run since it lets people who aren’t aimgod twitchlords feel good sometimes.
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one of the things that makes q3a’s balance so good is that while map knowledge still matters, it is de-emphasized vs the unreal branch of arena shooters (and earlier quakes and doom, etc) and what matters most is knowing how to use the weapons you do have. Weakest weapon is also a hitscan weapon so it’s not useless, game mostly centers around railgun, lightning gun, and rocket launcher, two hitscans with high skill floors and higher skill ceilings, and a projectile that even novices can use effectively. relatively high ttk is coupled with comparatively extreme movement tech so many duels are not zero sum and running away is common. This goes with fast respawn times to mitigate the “well I’m fucked” feeling that newer players tend to have. Even if they lose a given exchange, they can regroup without waiting more than 30 seconds to try again.
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so the reason this works at a high level in cs, for example, is like you said – they’re winning the match overall because you play so many damn rounds the variance smooths out. for extraction/brs i would argue that this variance means that the best players don’t always win (they still usually do), but i still think this variance is wanted by those players bc it fits the theming and actually makes more engagements exciting. like these players still want the feeling of having the odds stacked against them even when they’re the better player.
good apex players usually look bored and disengaged in public matches while good hunt players are locked in bc they could die at any moment. shorter ttk means comebacks are always possible. it makes it feel like you always get by by the skin of your teeth. and it gives the best players the opportunity to play a rather deep statistical game where they slowly get rid of habits that get them killed a small % of the time. there are still things you can get better at, even against worse players than you.
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