[url=http://www.gameinformer.com/themes/blogs/generic/post.aspx?WeblogApp=features&y=2013&m=12&d=13&WeblogPostName=designing-the-rpg-elements-of-destiny&GroupKeys=]Tyson Green's Game Informer Interview[/url] gives a great comparison between Destiny and Borderlands. It really seems like the things going on behind the scenes try to make each drop meaningful to you. I'm not sure if this means you might never get a gun that's "below your level" but in theory it could. It seems as though they're putting a lot of effort into making everything the player gets meaningful. Not to say that Borderlands didn't. I went to a GDC talk that covered the humor in Borderlands and a theme I saw that kept coming up was that the writers kept wanting to have joke weapons - but they were always initially shot down because they didn't want any weapons that the player wouldn't possibly want to use. (For example no gun that has a ridiculously low damage of 1 or something) so they thought of other ways to make the guns serve as gags (the screaming gun that was fairly powerful). However, due to all the guns stats being randomly generated sometimes you end up with things that don't appeal to you as a player. The way Tyson Green talks about the loot drops could imply that the things going on behind the scenes could actually predict what a good drop for you is. Things like play style taken into account could perhaps determine if you really want a shotgun from this drop. For example maybe you've been using a sniper but you're build is all wrong for it. You've got a lot of things stacked so that you would really benefit from a close quarters play style or despite using the sniper maybe you still end up in a lot of fist fights with people. Or maybe they look at your "shopping habits" in the tower. You've been eyeing that pulse rifle for a week now checking the price so here you go take it from this encounter. These are obviously contrived examples but the words Tyson uses throughout that interview really speak to me as wanting to provide the player with meaningful rewards. I don't think you could just get any gun from any encounter. I'm sure encounters have loot tables with possible drops and such but I don't expect you'll be sitting on a pile of guns any time soon. There was also an excerpt from a weekly update earlier this year that relayed a story of a group of employees who took the game home and came back to discuss the possibly broken loot system because no one got an exotic gun. Except one guy who immediately became the talk of the studio. This also seems to point to the likelihood that weapon drops will be less like pinatas and more like birthday presents.