One thing that has become painfully clear as Bungie has kept talking about Destiny is that they don’t see the problems in their own game. And, in discussing the Loot Cave at the Game Developers Conference, boy, did they ever throw that into sharp relief.
According to Kotaku, Bungie’s head of user research, John Hopson, discussed the Loot Cave and basically said it wasn’t as cool as you thought it was:
“They were very weak enemies that didn’t drop very good loot…The actual drop rate per minute spent is not any different than anything else. So you actually will get less loot [shooting into the loot cave] per hour than you would just playing the game. But the players weren’t doing the math that way.”
Well, of course they weren’t. The entire problem in Destiny, or really any game where the only way to get an advantage is to find better loot, is that eventually, you need to grind for loot. And if there’s only a relative handful of missions that you’ve already played a dozen times with infuriatingly sparse and random drops, 90 percent of which you have no use for, of course people will just plant themselves in front of a cave and shoot at it. There’s no essential difference at that point. You’re just doing the grunt work to get the tools to have actual fun.
It remains baffling that Bungie doesn’t understand their own game. It’s not like these are unique problems they’ve uncovered. World of Warcraft players in particular have been griping about these problems for years. Maybe for the sequel, you could ditch the on-rails progression and mindless adherence to loot for some mechanics that work and an actual open world. That might switch things up!