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

by Kahzgul, Friday, March 31, 2017, 15:22 (2576 days ago) @ Harmanimus

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.

I don't think anyone can reasonably say a game wouldn't be different if it had millions more dollars to spend on its development cycle. Diablo 3, in particular, completely changed their core design just a few months before launch. What that game really needed was stronger leadership, but the money could have helped give those devs more time to work with the changes. It certainly provides an opportunity that more advertising doesn't.

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.

For me, Bungie was Jason, Alex, Joe, Marty, and a few others whom I'm embarrassed I can't remember off the top of my head right now (forgive me!). And yeah, the games were very consistent. Until, I feel, Destiny. I'm also not sure if "not having a coherent story" is the same as trying something new. Certainly on the tech side they're inventing new stuff which is very innovative, but they also built their backend horribly and it caused the entire development to stall out, forcing major changes. Also, I'd argue that, from a gameplay perspective, Destiny plays like a Borderlands clone that is an iterative step from borderlands towards Halo 1, rather than from Reach towards, I guess, Des2ny. The art is clearly next level stuff, but gameplay is the core of any game, and the enemies are boring, repetitive, and uninspired here.

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.

The overall game is far better than it was at launch (PvP aside). BUT, I'm talking about pre-order ad money vs. more dev money. I'm not talking about post-launch adjustments (or microtrans money).

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

This is a real and serious concern. It would be incumbent upon the reviewers to remain neutral and refuse bribery. Would this concern be more present than it is today if no one ever pre-ordered? Sure, there'd be more pressure to have a good review. But consumers would also have to find - just as they do today - reviewers whose sensibilities mesh with theirs and who seem to present honest reviews. Much like the movie biz, you can usually parse the real reviews from the paid ones. Also, journalistic integrity is a thing that I'd hope at least some reviewers would aspire to.