10 dead flies all day. (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, June 29, 2016, 18:32 (2858 days ago) @ Kermit

I'm not sure how they can argue that the 1 month delay in The Division is somehow comparable to the 1 YEAR delay in Destiny.

Because in Destiny, it's a handful of exclusive content that doesn't alter the game (except when Hawkmoon WAS the entire Meta of 2/3rds of Year One).

In the Division, it's a huge piece of endgame content to the game, and PS4 players are 100% locked out. Would you be okay if The Taken King had been a month-long PS4 exclusive, if it meant no Year 2 exclusive content?

This can never be said by a Bungie employee, but I have yet to see Playstation exclusive Destiny content that lived up to the hype (and sometimes I've wondered if that was deliberate). I've played on both platforms from the start, and I've never felt like my Xbox experience was "diminished" in any way. The most substantive exclusives have been the strikes, and I never thought, man, I really want to play Undying Mind. I always had trouble finding randos who wouldn't quit when Undying Mind loaded. I like the strike but never felt it was important to events in the story, like, say, Omnigul.

Agree/disagree. The "bonus" strikes have all been kinda meh, but some of the items like Hawkmoon literally helped define the pvp meta. You may not have "missed" it per se on the xbox, but it changed the overall game experience in a substantive way.

Well, that's cool for you, but I never got one until long after it had been nerfed (it may have even been year two). Is an exclusive so wonderful (or so unfair or shittier to left-out players on the other platform) if there's a fair chance that you, as a player on the "best" platform, won't even get it? I've long thought the exclusives are not really substantial and little more than grist for platform hype that helped defer the cost of marketing.

Whether or not you got one (and I'm truly sorry to hear that you didn't), it still helped to define the meta of PvP as enough other people had it to shift gameplay to knowing when and where it was safe to engage a hawkmoon user. I mean, you don't need to have nukes to know that you don't mess with a state that does have them, right? The game shifted. I wouldn't say it was "wonderful" at all, but it was certainly impactful in a way that made the pvp experience on PS4 different, fundamentally, from that on Xbone. To be honest, I can't even say if that difference was for better or worse for either platform, or just simply different without actually improving the play experience on either one. Even so, the fact that the exclusive item was so significant in the overall experience of pvp means that it was an exclusive item of substance. Was it intended to have that effect? Probably not, but have that effect it did.

Does the fact that the gun had a noticeable effect mean it wasn't pure marketing grist? No, not really. The conversation around that was probably along the lines of, "Which exotic did you make that we can have as exclusive? How about this hand cannon, "The Hawkmoon?" Everyone will be using Thorn anyway."

Frankly, all of the "special" Destiny content has been underwhelming grist. The pre-order exclusives uniformly suck (which is why I'm not in the least excited about a black Gjallerhorn - what a shit gimmick) and the exclusive content is (aside from the exotics) so rarely in rotation as to be practically non existent. I suppose the pvp map comes up a fair amount, but with so many other pvp maps in the game and with none of them bringing a special or unique pvp experience other than giving you a different venue in which to murder people, you're really not going to feel its absence.

But even in the face of that grist, I think it's way shittier to hold back this additional content from a released product for a year than it is to just not release an xpac for a month.