kotaku: Destiny 2 for PC, won't carry over year 1 characters (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 19:58 (2768 days ago) @ Kahzgul

I didn't want to crap up the first post with my opinions, so I'm posting them here in this reply.

This is a good move for business, a good opportunity to improve the quality of the gaming experience, and equally good opportunity to fuck up the quality of the gaming experience, and a shit move for legacy players. If true about year 1 characters not moving on, an outright betrayal of the "ten year promise" that Bungie made when we all signed up for this. Personally, I hope that year 1 characters will be able to transfer to the new game, even if we have to leave our weapons behind. If not, Destiny 1 + all of its xpacs will have failed to tell any sort of story about our guardians. Who they are, where they came from, why they're in this fight, how they were chosen, and how they end... None of that is really in the game we have now, and for them to simply... cease... will be an utter disappointment.

Bungie is apparently comparing Destiny 2 with Diablo 2, per the article, and that's a massively high bar that not even Diablo 3 could live up to. Bungie needs to stop patting themselves on the back and start serving up the goddamn meat for this game. I know they have the vision and talent to do it. They certainly have the manpower. But where are the actual results? "Our game will be like one of the best games of all time," says company who promised the same thing two years ago and delivered a 6.5/10.

As for the business side, yes, you're opening up a massive new market. You will sell lots and lots of games and make lots and lots of monies and reap all that sweet, sweet microtrans profit. Yes you will.

But you will expose the already cheatable game to exponentially more hacking attempts. Many will be successful because it is nearly impossible to make a video game that is hack-proof. We already know how prevalent cheating on PS4 was. Now imagine actual PCs. It's much more likely to be The Division than it is to be Diablo 2 in terms of the results, and keep in mind that Diablo 2 was chock full of bots, hacks, and scammers. The aiming systems for PC and Console will also have to be completely different because mouse-aiming is SO MUCH BETTER than thumbstick aiming. Worlds fucking better. This is why CS:GO is so good on PC and why Halo kinda sucked on it. You need different aiming systems. And if they don't get this right the game will not have the feel that it has right now, which is pretty much 90% of what makes the game fun to play.

There is, however, an opportunity here. I'm assuming that Bungie did the right thing and threw out their entire backend and development system from Destiny 1 and built a brand new one that is dynamic and responsive in the way that you need to be when you have live online support for a shared world environment. Something that can make on the fly geometry changes to the live game, daily or weekly tweaks to weapons traits for balance purposes, and can easily adjust spawns, drops, etc.. I'm also praying that they eliminated the bullshit lag-fest nonsense of their pseudo token-ring architecture for PvP and established some dedicated servers. Because any modern online FPS needs dedicated servers. I really hope they learned these lessons from Destiny 1. Assuming Bungie did the behind-the-scenes stuff correctly, there is also an opportunity to design the game by approving the story FIRST and then building the game to match the script. Please, guys, give me a game worthy of your logo.

And please, Bungie, start that game with my guardian arriving at a pivotal moment in time, fresh from Destiny 1, and tell me a tale that makes me excited for the future instead of afraid of how you're going to fuck it up even more.