Can We Ever Balance Power Fantasy in Live-Service Games?
The Destiny and Diablo communities went at each others’ throats on Twitter last month due to a comment made by a Destiny 2 developer who called out Diablo 4’s enemy scaling. He said that “it is one of the worst ideas in video games” and said that it takes away from playstyles and ruins power trips. Blizzard President Mike Ybarra responded with a simple “Lazy, huh.” but gamers on Twitter were divided over how games should adjust the difficulty.
Since it was primarily Destiny 2 and Diablo that were involved in the discussion, let’s talk about them first. Destiny 2’s approach to power scaling involves arbitrary numbers that exist only to give players something to do.
Destiny used to increase the power levels of characters in increments of 50 for seasonal updates and we had larger power cap increases in annual expansions. If you chased “pinnacle” gear, it gave you an extra 10 levels of power and additional power levels could be earned via your battle pass experience which translated to something known as artifact levels. The game has cut down on the grind but the effect of power levels has remained the same at large.
If you jumped into The Shattered Throne dungeon in say Season of the Haunted (S17) and then completed the dungeon the next time in Season of the Deep (S21), you should have a power increase of over 200 but there is no difference in how powerful you felt back then versus now by virtue of an increased power level.
Destiny has difficulty levels known as Legend, Master, and Grandmaster for some of its content. When I was actively playing the game, it was possible for players to gear up and match the power levels of Legend and Master content. The very next season, you would need to grind another 50-60 levels to
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