What happened? (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, June 23, 2016, 18:04 (3166 days ago) @ Xenos

Didn't they do a ViDoc before Destiny launched about how great Grognok was?

Well and it is for most things. They had a few goals they were trying to achieve with their tools that they talk about in the GDC presentation, and the one they admit they failed on (pretty badly) was being able to make changes quickly. The tool itself is still awesome because it lets you design very quickly and fluidly, and I'm sure they thought with the original idea they had about content in the game it wouldn't become TOO big of a hindrance. I'm sure they weren't happy with it, but they thought it was workable. Then on the first weekend there was pretty universal hatred for the first event they released, and then demands for actual new content after that came much more quickly and insistently than they expected.

This is a great point. They hadn't built a game with dynamic, live events before, and they weren't prepared to actually design, implement, test, fix, test, and publish new content at the rate in which they really should have been. Furthermore Bungie has never made a "bring your own guns" pvp shooter, and they had not thought about how to respond to balance issues nimbly.

Events like Crimson Doubles were probably a CRAPLOAD of work for Bungie because of how crappy their tools were set up, even though to the rest of us it just looked like a reskin of the tower. But I bet that was a month of work for for the live team for basically no payoff in terms of actual new content.

All of this ties in to why SRL was so amazing (not just amazingly fun, but amazing in the sense that they were even able to implement it to begin with) and why I'm so disappointed that it hasn't come back.