no (Destiny)

by electricpirate , Tuesday, January 19, 2016, 23:53 (3325 days ago) @ cheapLEY

1. It's a fools errand, Some small piece of content isn't going to hold off a major release and the player base dropping off to go play it. Trying to fight a multi million dollar marketing campaign is a fools errand. If Bungie wanted to they'd be better off waiting till people are getting bored with it, then dropping some content.

I guess that's sort of what I was trying to get at in my post, albeit in a roundabout way. I was thinking more along the lines of dropping an "event" maybe two or three weeks after The Division's launch. That might be long enough that many folks have played their fill of The Division and give them a reason to jump back into Destiny (if simply being bored of The Division and/or loving Destiny isn't enough).

2. It's not that useful. People can leave destiny and come back. Destiny is actually doing pretty well in terms of player base numbers (A year out daily uniques in just the crucible was up around Halo3/Reach Numbers). People ebb and flow.

It sounds like this is kind of happening naturally. The division hits early march, and Destinies content drop will probably be sometime in march-may given the 2 month cycle between events.

I don't disagree with that from a personal viewpoint, but I'm not sure Activision and/or Bungie see players leaving, even if only momentarily, as an okay thing. Every day they're not playing Destiny is another day they may find something to replace it completely. I'm a perfect example, honestly. I stopped playing Destiny a few weeks before SRL dropped. I played for like three evenings during the first week of SRL, and I haven't touched it since. It's not that I don't love Destiny (I do!), but I've done most of the things I want to do in Destiny, and I'm using this lull in new releases to catch up on my backlog. Every time I even consider putting in Destiny, I know that as soon as I do I'm probably just going to end up playing that constanstly again, so I'm intentionally avoiding it for the moment. There might be more folks doing the exact same thing, and if The Division is given the chance, it might replace Destiny as their go-to game.

Again, I don't see that as a problem, but Destiny has pretty obviously been designed to try and keep as many people playing for as long as possible, so letting players leave in droves to go play the new hotness doesn't really seem to fit in with their plans. On some level, they have to know it's always going to happen when a new, highly anticipated game launches, but I'd be surprised if they don't do something to at least try to bring some folks back into Destiny after the fact.

According to that Kotaku article on the ups and downs, a big moment for Destiny was when the diablo guys told them that it's okay for people to leave, they just need to leave happy. I think that's where they are going, and I think that's evident in the design of the end game. Eg: the ramp to the raid in TTK is really good, very little grind time. A player could have a pretty good time, and get great value going through TTK content to the raid, and walk away. The end game of TTK however, is pretty heavy on those infinate replay hooks, (light level, perk system, etc).

This brings up something though; In Destiny, it's important if your friends come back too. There are mismatches when you want to come back but your friends walked away causing you to walk away. (OTOH, you may convince them to buy more). Moving to a more free content model helps, but I think at some level it's a community management/matchmaking problem that Bungie needs to solve if they want to keep it viable long term.

3. The division offers something pretty different, I think people will come for the darkness zone and real world setting, but those who want decent gun play and encounter design and classic PVP will stay with destiny.

I dunno, the videos of the division are really bland, but I hear some really positive impressions from those in the alpha.

I don't disagree with that at all. I think it looks like it could have some promise, but unless it's much deeper and more interesting than what we've seen, I don't see it really earning my purchase.

After watching a ton of videos of a recent Press event, I've also come to the conclusion that no one who is paid to talk about videogames knows anything about how to do it. The few people who can do it really well aren't professional (Campster, Mr. BTongue etc)