Gambit is in the Wrong Game

Every time I try and get back into Destiny 2, someone suggests I quickly do Gambit. Gambit is a weird cross between PvP and PvE. Its basic premise is that you have to kill AI enemies, collect the motes they drop and put them inside a container to spawn a massive boss. In the mean time, a portal opens up between two teams and a player can jump through and make life hell for the other team.

First team to kill their boss wins.

Simple, right?

However, there is a small problem with Gambit: no one seems to like it. Despite being an interesting game mode, no one at all seems to like playing Gambit outside of hardcore PvP folks. It’s a difficult balancing act between getting enough motes to spawn the boss and protecting yourself against invaders. As much as Gambit tries, it’s more of a PvP chore than anything else.

But luckily for me, I have a potential solution to Gambit’s problems.

Gambit is in the wrong game.

The way I see it, Gambit has little appeal because you can’t always do things on your own. A player looking to win has to deal with enemies, blockages and invading players. Often, the best way to win is often to keep on invading and killing the opposing team. At the same time, while you are invading, the rest of your team can pick up motes. Assuming that someone on the other team hasn’t already sneaked over and killed everyone.

In the meantime though, you have to keep on killing enemies to make them drop motes. There is a LOT going on in Gambit, so it’s easy to trip over. And it’s often insanely difficult to do these jobs at once: gathering and depositing motes, defending the mote depositor, defending against enemy invasions and invading the enemy yourself.

However, I feel like it’d be a great game mode if you stuck it in Warframe.

“Hang on, no one likes Conclave!”

Admittedly, yes, Conclave is mostly inactive or sometimes even dead. But a lot of that feeling is mostly because the Conclave is very hard to do well in, as it’s pure player-vs-player combat. You simply murder or get murdered by speed demons which barely even touch the floor. However, a less-PvP-like game mode would fair a lot better, because it gives you different roles. Destiny 2’s character classes are fine, but they mostly feature killing rather than defending. Warframes however are built for specific purposes and roles, meaning you can dedicate a task to a player, and that player will (hopefully) pick an appropriate Warframe for the job.

Tweak the numbers

All that being said, it’s worth that the Tenno and their Warframes are insanely powerful, and probably more so than Guardians. So just dropping Gambit as it is into Warframe won’t work. Gambit in Warframe would be a lot quicker, due to mobility and abilities, since sugar-craving murder ninjas are generally a bit faster than a standard human in armour. But I think with some nice number tweaking, we can create a PvPvE game mode that players would actually play.

I suppose, worst case scenario, you could probably make an Index/Ra’Thuum arena game out of Gambit. There’s plenty of Corpus and Grineer mini-bosses around, and the Infested would easily work as mooks to kill and get motes from…