Not that it’s really a new thing from my perspective, but I kind of just view Bungie (again) as just a dead end. Which is to say that they haven’t made anything since the first two Halo games that I gave a flying damn about even though they obviously continued to sell plenty of stuff after.
I thought that Destiny 2 being brought to pc with more updated tech might bring me back to enjoying one of their titles, but I hit level cap and never actually finished the story due to being bored out of my mind. Is this really what people want these days? It’s pretty, slick and completely soulless and uninteresting.
I was thinking about this yesterday, before reading this, and in a certain light, almost all of Destiny’s problems come back to problems creating content.
From vanilla D1 through every expansion and into D2, almost everything at some level seems to come down to “shit, we have no good way to produce content as fast as they expect it”.
On one level I wonder what it would take for any developer to keep creating AAA FPS content at a pace to keep up with MMORPG style progression. I should really get around to trying The Division (and probably some other “regular” MMORPGs for context), but I doubt it’s an easy task for anyone to tackle.
But fundamentally I think things may still be broken in some specific Bungie ways. I wonder if the nightmare stories we heard about the Destiny 1 dev tools are ongoing, and I wonder if something is just broken in their management. And I say all that completely separate from the challenge of funding whatever shape this development takes. From expansions to the Eververse, Destiny’s tried everything other than a subscription fee, and I wonder both if it will ever come to that (I’d be happy to subscribe if I thought that would solve things), and if money could solve their problems in the first place.
Eververse is just another name for their real money loot boxes, right?
As for Bungie’s problems, well, there are so many. Reading that Halo retrospective recently was really enlightening. And then reading Jason Schreier’s book’s Destiny section was also very enlightening. The part that I thought was so funny was that they spent so long chaffing under Microsoft at not being able to make a diverse lineup of games anymore. So they bought their independence and could make anything they wanted. But over the years of making Halo games, the people they’d been hiring throughout the company were people that came to work for Bungie because they loved Halo and wanted to make more games like Halo. So that’s why Destiny was just Halo all over again.
They get their subscription fees via $20 DLCs and Eververse.
The problem has to be management and process, it’s not the people. The people are obviously very talented. Destiny is beautiful, plays well, and is technically solid. The game design is great. All the questionable shit reeks of management meddling and not understanding their audience.
I also think PC was a huge mistake because they fragmented their audience. They need cross-play as soon as possible. If Sony won’t allow it, at least let Xbox and PC players share the same PvE content.
Ha, is that right? I know nothing about what happened with any of the Halo games. I did read Schreier’s book and the Destiny chapter was certainly interesting. Maybe this is just how things are done with some game companies? Just chuck it all out and start from scratch?
Also Destiny 2 needs to decide if it’s a competitive shooter or an MMORPG. Balancing both is probably why the gear in D2 is so boring. Take exotics out of Crucible if they’re so worried about it, and make the exotics fun again. right now there’s no reason to equip an exotic weapon over a masterwork one, and there is exactly 1 exotic armor piece per class worth wearing, the rest are at best meme-y but largely useless.
I’m going to guess not many people buy Destiny to play Crucible. The market is flooded with shooters. Just stop trying to make Crucible a real thing and focusing so much attention on it.
This new DLC added a planet but there is nothing to it. There’s so much potential for the Infinite forest, they could create random dungeons like Diablo for example, but they don’t do it. You can’t even get into it unless you replay the story missions or randomly roll the strike that takes you inside. Otherwise Mercury is even smaller than Titan, which is already pathetically small.
Hey that’s really cool, I never saw that! Just thumbing through, all the inside MS stuff amuses me, takes me back to my old days. I liked the bit where Steve Ballmer told Ed Fries to call up Steve Jobs to calm him down after MS bought Bungie. Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall.
Edit: oh and showing Hideo Kojima Halo 3! Funny that he gets motion sickness easily and they couldn’t show him much, so he asks someone to shoot a plant at the very start and when he sees it react to getting shot, he just nods and walks away. Creative types, man.
Bingo. I was stoked when the disembodied Ghost voice was describing this place–or was it Ikora, doesn’t really matter–but the reality is, yeah, underwhelming.
Made the mistake of going onto the official forums yesterday. The salt over eververse is so ridiculous. I really don’t get why people are so pissed about it.
You should keep coming back and commenting on other parts as you reach cool parts of the story. That whole saga is so long, you’re liable to forget the middle by the time you get to the end. Best to comment on it as you go.
I’d forgotten all about that call to Steve Jobs to calm him down. Or showing Hideo Kojima Halo 3.
People are pissed because the seasonal event put everything behind Eververse. The only way to get the items without paying was to do an absurd daily that required you to grind resource nodes on a planet for rare drops. Resource nodes that they conveniently reduced the spawn timers for.
Compare to D1 where the seasonal events had everything available to acquire by just playing the game normally, and in the winter one they added a racing mini-game that was very fun.
Eh, I didn’t think those quests were that big a deal. Annoying, but not worth torches and pitchforks. On top of that, it appears that once you do those for a few days then they just auto-decode. The bigger issue, imo, is that the best stuff can’t be obtained through those drops, only through playing crucible and strikes. Even so, I had enough bright dust to buy the thing I most wanted from the armor pieces and could easily get 2-3 more if I wished.
I finished it, and it was a really informative read. I remember the comment from Schreier’s book about it being a miracle that any game gets made - that seems to go double for Bungie. I didn’t know their process was so tumultuous, at least not until Destiny when that seemed to be on everyone’s minds.
But mainly, as I posted in the Xbox thread, this article has made me nostalgic for Halo. I like Destiny, and it’s certainly gotten it’s share of my time and money, but I lived Halo. It was such fun, in campaign and co-op and death match and just all of it. I miss that Bungie.
Unfortunately that article got less interesting as it went on, much as the Halo games did for me. The last couple Bungie did, Reach and ODST, were I think my favorites and I just have not connected with the 343 games, it’s just not the same. I never did finish Halo 5 though, maybe I’m not giving it a fair shake.
Oh no, I finished Halo 5, you’re right, it’s mediocre.
I enjoyed Halo 4 a lot though. I thought it was right there with Halo 1 and ODST and Reach, among my favorites. I do miss Halo as well. I really hope we get a better Halo game next time. It’s a nice idea to revisit the HCC. If my backlog of new games wasn’t so full I’d love to join you in replaying ODST or Halo:CE as part of the HCC.
That is just great, loved the two tokens and a blue and eververse endboss pieces :)
The Dawning event was just another nail in the D2 coffin with everything at eververse… its amazing that they could disregard 3 years of QOL updates just to put everything in a microtransaction box, but I guess they earn a lot more now than they ever did, so its not bungie’s fault the game is shit, but the players that buy silver.
