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The article barely touched on the most important bit (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, June 23, 2016, 15:30 (2836 days ago) @ Claude Errera

"Bungie stated they've been working on improving their tools so they can make more content faster" (paraphrased).

That's the key. The entire game is built on the core of having functional tools. At my old studio if I couldn't compile in under 2 hours or a designer couldn't load a map in minutes, the programming team would have shifted en masse to fixing the tools. Hearing that their map loads took 24+ hours blew my mind. You guys know that floating chest in the room in the scablands that's been there since vanilla and never been fixed? It's not gonna be fixed because it will cost them two days of designer time just to change its coordinate position down 1 meter. This is the sort of fix I could have done at my desk with a text editor (okay I used excel most of the time) without even bothering anyone else (to be fair, I would have confirmed the bug with the designer first, but I didn't *need* to in order to make the fix). But the way the Destiny tools were set up was ungainly in the extreme.

So now they've got faster tools. That's YUUUUUGE. Seriously it will allow for tiny fixes to be made instantly, large changes to be experimented with quickly, and lots (LOTS) more content to be made overall. It's such a fundamental thing for game development to have really solid tools, and hearing that Bungie reinvested in making their backend better is very encouraging.

Honestly, I feel like for as off track as Bungie was when Destiny launched, they've been really doing a great job with TTK and beyond. While I with TRL was back already, I'm super pleased with all of the news I've been hearing out of Bungie HQ lately. It really seems like they have making a great game back on their minds rather than making a game that feeds off of addictive loops and exists purely to get us to throw our money at the screen.


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