Friendly reminder: Pre-orders are a metric guaging support (Destiny)

by Harmanimus , Friday, March 31, 2017, 15:09 (2576 days ago) @ Kahzgul

Other folks have touched on the money thing, and that is without considering that budgets for large projects can and do change from year to year. Regarding your examples (only one of which I pre-ordered) I would agree that there were problems. But Diablo 3's were design choices that would not have changed due to pre-orders, as the problems were rooted in the core design. I don't think a change to funding/advertisement would have impacted any of those games.

And Bungie is a known quantity. Bungie was never a handful of high profile faces. While that may be the way one interacts, the games themselves are reasonably consistently "Bungie." Obviously they tried new and different things for Destiny. But comparing it to Reach it is clearly iterative in most regards and at its heart still very Bungie. I could probably write a dissertation on what i mean about this but I'll stop here. The important thing is not to confuse my use of "known quantity" as "always amazing" as no developer has released a perfect game.

And I while I agree with the notion that sequels can be worse, Destiny has been functionally live in its development. You can see Bungie is learning from their mistakes, even if new mistakes may be getting made. But the overall game is better than it was at launch. I also won't start on PvP because I am keenly aware of major disagreements you and I would have there.

Biggest part of this that concerns me is that the last part reads like you would rather publishers buy reviews than invest in marketing.