Asset Systems and Scalability

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KXVox0-7lU

Just started watching, but it this seems to be a technical talk from Chris Butcher about the scalability of Destiny, and why they finally dropped last gen support.

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The PS3 support regarding data dependency is what fucked Bungie.

It was pretty fascinating and way more in depth than that. I can do my best to summarize for those who don't have 90 minutes to spare, but I'm not a programmer. I think I understand though.

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Here's some notes I sorta wrote while watching. They explain the problems in a lot more detail and its very much worth watching if you have a bit of programming knowledge. My version below is greatly simiplified and probably a bit wrong but it gets the gist enought right... I hope...

In Halo, all the different assets (sounds, shaders, models, the concept of an enemy AI unit, etc) were all fairly separate. This meant you could swap out the sound an exploding box made with a different sound and quickly rebuild the game and test your result. Maybe that new sound file had to be compressed down into the right console specific format, but no big deal. Same with models, same with everything.

One of the problems with Halo though was you couldn't really do fast small patches. They basically had to ship the entire game as one big unit and the only time we really ever saw major patches was with the big DLC releases where the player was already expecting to download a significant amount of data (or load it off the multiplayer DLC disk they bought.)

For Destiny, Bungie intended to update things much more frequently than with Halo. It no longer made sense to make the player redownload the entire game just to add a mission or whatever. I'm hitting the limit of my understand a bit, but they at the same time were also trying to make it easier to develop Destiny and make rapid changes.

Through some bad assumptions and trying to be too clever they shot themselves in the foot... with a nuke. They didn't go super in depth, but it sounds like a part of this was caused by having to support four very different platforms all at the same time. For instance, the PS3's Cell processor had a main CPU and the smaller simpler high performance SPU sub processors that individually didn't have a lot of memory or resources. So the systems that translated Destiny from artwork and sounds and models into PS3 code had to be very clever about chopping things up so the pieces could each fit into a single SPU.

In Destiny development, unlike in Halo's, it ended up that objects became all linked and tangled together. The example they gave was a box might glow brighter as it took damage. So the box might reference a glow shader and might reference the sound it made when you punched it and so on those sounds and shaders had to know the box's hp value.

In Halo development you could swap out the box or the shader or the sound and since none of those pieces knew anything about the other it all kinda worked.

In Destiny making a change to any of those pieces meant the system that took all the assets and translated them into the proper format to run on the different consoles not only had to recompress the sound file, it had to load up the box's model, and shaders and and everything else that made the box work.

Worse, because of the way the levels are optimized as a whole to save space and memory, changing the sound a box makes when punched might mean that the tool that translated everything to the way it needed to be for the consoles would have to load in and rebuild an entire level area.

So the smallest of changes, like swapping out a sound, would mean the audio guy might need to wait two hours while an entire area like the Mothyards and every object and shader and sound and unit was loaded in from disk and reoptimized back to code the consoles could run.

To make matters worse, some of the systems and tools that were supposed to let them make changes without having to load in everything simply weren't ready in time.

Bungie has since rebuilt their systems significantly to improve build times. They basically found a way to split up the way objects and assets reference each other. Everything still has to reference everything in the end because that's how the game engine works, but their new system lets them isolate each piece so making a little change doesn't kick off a huge overnight rebuild.

So it sounds like swapping out that sound file only triggers a much much smaller rebuild. The tool that builds the game can now often dig down and just mess around with the sound file or the dimensions of a crate instead of having to load in and rebuild an entire level from scratch.

There were other big problems too. The tool that did the job of building the game... it would run out of memory part way through and die because the process it had to do, following the references from object to object in an ever expanding tree of complexity, got so big that the application was literally running out of memory space in Windows.

Ultimately, it sounds like a lot of the big problems have been fixed, or at least significantly worked around. They didn't say exactly, but it would seem that merely swapping out a sound or graphic will no longer trigger an multi-hour or overnight rebuild. What took five hours might now be accomplished in minutes.

We've all been wondering what happened to Destiny. Why it didn't live up to what we hoped it would be. It sound like this major development tool blunder sucked in a lot of programming talent to fix and was a extremely major issue for all of Destiny's development slowing down the workflow of everybody from the mission planners to the individual artists and sound designers. I can't even imagine how they managed to ship such a polished game as they did with these massive problems clogging their development pipeline.

Hearing that things have been made better gives me Hope for the Future that Destiny 2 will be much easier for Bungie to develop and they'll be able to get a lot more work done without super long rebuild times popping up for even the smallest change.

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It started with what ended up being a faulty assumption though.

At the time Halo was created, the consoles were very different than PCs, and so to see how your game 'really' looked you had to look at it on a console. The original Xbox had a custom GPU that wasn't available on PCs, and had some differences with file management and IO etc.

So with Halo, you had two engines: one for the game, and the other for development. The development engine would just load up all the TAGs and let you edit them, but this process was too slow at run time for the actual game since there were tens of thousands of them, but fine in a dev environment on a PC. For the game engine, instead of looking for and loading tens of thousands of TAGs, a kind of monolithic file was created which could be sequentially read.

This worked fine, but you needed to save everything down to this format, transfer over to the XBOX, then run the game. However, it made small update patches hard to create.

For Destiny, they thought it would be nice to not have to do this. It turns out, that doesn't really matter anymore though, since the current consoles are so close to PCs, you can essentially see what your game looks like on your PC development environment. It turned out to be kind of a non problem.

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Indeed.

I sorta skipped over the whole TAG system part, but that's what I was getting at with content changes being fairly hard to do with updates to the Halos. Development was easy, but pushing out new content to the player was hard since you had to bake everything to the big files that the actual Halo engine knew how to read. Especially hard to get a new build into a player's hands given the much slower internet of the time. Kinda terrible that they tried to fix this with Destiny but seem to have mostly just screwed themselves on the development end.

As the explanation of what went wrong kept descending further and further into hell I started to wonder who took the fall for all of this. This wasn't a minor mistake. This was a huge issue for them all the way through the game's development and only started really getting resolved after launch. It sounds to me like it took some extra ordinary heroic effort on the studio's part to even ship the Destiny we got, given how badly this mucked up the dev process. Might even be fair to say that this whole fiasco had the potential to outright kill both Destiny and Bungie! In an odd way, its sorta Halo 2 all over again... but maybe much worse?

It also says to me that Destiny 2 had better darn well be amazing. If they could eek out Destiny with a massive unsolvable blockage in everyone's workflows, then there's very little excuse for lackluster anything now that that blockage seems like it has been greatly reduced.

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Thanks for the summary!

As the explanation of what went wrong kept descending further and further into hell I started to wonder who took the fall for all of this. This wasn't a minor mistake. This was a huge issue for them all the way through the game's development and only started really getting resolved after launch. It sounds to me like it took some extra ordinary heroic effort on the studio's part to even ship the Destiny we got, given how badly this mucked up the dev process. Might even be fair to say that this whole fiasco had the potential to outright kill both Destiny and Bungie! In an odd way, its sorta Halo 2 all over again... but maybe much worse?

Yeah, this does sound like a near-fatal flaw in Destiny's development. It certainly sheds some light on why some elements of Destiny are so wonderfully polished (as one would expect from Bungie) while others feel shockingly under-cooked.

Also worth pointing out that this all seems to support that Kotaku piece about the making of Destiny.

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Yeah, by now we've had confirmations on multiple parts of the story. Off the top of my head we now have hard proof of:

A somewhat late change from the Book / Chapter style mission selection to the Director map style.
There being massive issues regarding the production pipeline with long and troublesome delays associated with changing even minor things within the game.

Still outstanding is a lot of the story stuff and shifting content from the main game to DLCs like The Taken King. At this point I suspect there's a large amount of truth to that section of the article as well. I do wonder if the story changes perhaps took up too much of the article's focus when it could take 2 - 5 hours to move a box or swap out a sound effect.

I think I've mentioned it before, but the Final Hours article on the 2013 Tomb Raider's development process really drove home for me just how massively a game and its gameplay and even its base story and setting can change (for the better in that case) during development. And it didn't seem like the Tomb Raider team was facing massive dooming development tools issues.

Ultimately, my big takeaways are:

1. Bungie probably nearly killed themselves and Destiny because the new tools they developed to build Destiny had horrible debilitating flaws. Some of which were the result of bad assumptions and some of which were the result of trying to support four platforms (including the always hilariously difficult to program for PS3).

2. It must have taken a massive effort to get Destiny out the door when even minor changes could cascade out to having to spend hours to read in and re-export entire level sections. (I'd love to hear more about how they kept their artist and programmers and level designers working when getting their assets into the game engine was so time expensive.)

3. Destiny 2 had better have, at the very least, a comparatively massive scope. I would hope for more Destinations and longer, more complex missions at the bare minimum. With more and better missions should (hopefully!) naturally come more in-game story.

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I'm glad to hear about Destiny's developer tool issues and even more glad to hear that those problems have been taken care of to what sounded like a large extent... but I'm not sure how I feel about the troubles being kept secret.

I've always been a little... bitter... about hearing about Halo 2's development issues after the fact. It felt to me like we had these weekly updates talking about how amazing Halo 2 would be. How great the lighting was and how the different Covenant races would move through spaces in their own way and paragraphs on the beauty of the water textures... but nobody mentioned that they'd had to scrap the graphic engine and cut levels and scrap and restart the development after the amazing E3 real time demo. It was all ninjas in hospital zones on fire good times and nothing about challenges or struggles.

For Destiny, my sense of it is that Bungie said less during development. That we rarely got any real details about Destiny at all outside the major PR reveals. I remember thinking several times during development that I wouldn't have been interested in Destiny if not for Halo and Bungie because Bungie said and showed us so little of what playing Destiny would actually be like. And once again there were massive development issues that we weren't given a hint about. But I kinda feel that a lot of what Destiny would be was left sorta vague for so long that not talking about development issues wasn't as big of a deal because they weren't telling us a whole lot about the good stuff either.

Then there's the question of whether or not game development studios even should talk about development troubles. In some ways it would be neat to know about the struggles and problems and solutions. In others, maybe its best we don't see the frustration that comes with things not working and entire concepts and features being scrapped. But we also miss out on those "ah ha!" moments when a key piece of gameplay or plot or specific features click and the game goes from something that looks poised to fail and turns into the quality output you expect from a project that takes years and costs tens of millions of dollars.

I've really enjoyed getting this better understand of what with wrong with Destiny's development, but at the same time it does seem a bit... I don't know... "unfair"... that we've all been left puzzled for three years as to why the game that might be "Bigger than Halo" had some large areas where it didn't meet expectations when it was being made by the same studio that had met our expectations in the past.

Game development, especially on the scale of something like Destiny, is very hard. But it's also hard as a fan of the studio and game to be in the dark about why thing were like they were.

So, should Bungie do anything different for Destiny 2? I honestly don't know...

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Game development, especially on the scale of something like Destiny is very hard. But it's also hard as a fan of the studio and game to be in the dark about why thing were like they were.

I do not now, and never have, understood this attitude. You're paying them for a game - not a history lesson. When you buy a pound of roast beef at the grocery store, you don't consider yourself entitled to the life story of the cow that beef was cut from (unless you live in Portland, but that's another story altogether). When you buy a chair at a furniture store, you do not expect (and will likely never be given) a list of things that didn't work when the designers were deciding how to put that chair together. More relevantly, you don't expect the farmer that grew that cow (or the company who built that chair) to give you status updates along the way. ("Cow got brucellosis again. Hopefully we get it cured before slaughter.") Why, then, do you think it's okay to ask that of Bungie (or any game company)?

Why do you think you have a right to see how the sausage is made? And (to look at it from the other side) what could Bungie POSSIBLY gain by providing that information? For a tiny, tiny fraction of their fanbase (you, me, another thousand people), it makes them more relatable as people. For EVERYONE ELSE, it introduces doubt into the quality of the final product. It's one thing to look back on the development of a successful product and say "these are the things that MIGHT have killed us." It's another thing altogether (and a stupid thing, from the standpoint of selling your product) to say "hey, we fucked up bigtime, and we're gonna do our best to fix it, but this mistake has the potential to kill us as a company." Why would you think they'd even CONSIDER saying something like that?

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Game development, especially on the scale of something like Destiny is very hard. But it's also hard as a fan of the studio and game to be in the dark about why thing were like they were.

I do not now, and never have, understood this attitude. You're paying them for a game - not a history lesson. When you buy a pound of roast beef at the grocery store, you don't consider yourself entitled to the life story of the cow that beef was cut from (unless you live in Portland, but that's another story altogether). When you buy a chair at a furniture store, you do not expect (and will likely never be given) a list of things that didn't work when the designers were deciding how to put that chair together. More relevantly, you don't expect the farmer that grew that cow (or the company who built that chair) to give you status updates along the way. ("Cow got brucellosis again. Hopefully we get it cured before slaughter.") Why, then, do you think it's okay to ask that of Bungie (or any game company)?

Why do you think you have a right to see how the sausage is made? And (to look at it from the other side) what could Bungie POSSIBLY gain by providing that information? For a tiny, tiny fraction of their fanbase (you, me, another thousand people), it makes them more relatable as people. For EVERYONE ELSE, it introduces doubt into the quality of the final product. It's one thing to look back on the development of a successful product and say "these are the things that MIGHT have killed us." It's another thing altogether (and a stupid thing, from the standpoint of selling your product) to say "hey, we fucked up bigtime, and we're gonna do our best to fix it, but this mistake has the potential to kill us as a company." Why would you think they'd even CONSIDER saying something like that?

I agree with Raga that it can be hard as a fan of the studio and the game to feel "in the dark" about why certain things are the way they are, but at the same time I think you are completely right. Bungie has no reason to share those kinds of details with the public.

I get that some fans (myself included) would love a more open look behind the curtain, but there really is no reason to expect it.

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I have an analogous position, in that I work on automobiles. A little bit of my genius, and lots of madness, get put into every vehicle I help design. It's a tiny thing, i'm not the chief design engineer or anything, but I can point to a part of a car and say "that's mine, I designed it".

I don't elaborate to the press, and to customers in general, all the things that didn't work prior to shipping. Most of the time, I just want the system to hold together and work for everyone. You don't need to know all the grimy details, all the late hours arguing, all the hiccups and issues that we found. Why something wouldn't work in Canada, but would right across the border in Minnesota, for example.

It is the nature of businesses not to talk about this stuff until long after the product ships, and the problem is fixed or moot.

It is extremely unhelpful to get unsolicited advice from people who are not fully knowledgeable about the problem while you are under a major deadline. So engineers will never openly talk about stuff like this until they have a solution. Otherwise it is not getting solved.

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Game development, especially on the scale of something like Destiny is very hard. But it's also hard as a fan of the studio and game to be in the dark about why thing were like they were.

I do not now, and never have, understood this attitude. You're paying them for a game - not a history lesson. When you buy a pound of roast beef at the grocery store, you don't consider yourself entitled to the life story of the cow that beef was cut from (unless you live in Portland, but that's another story altogether). When you buy a chair at a furniture store, you do not expect (and will likely never be given) a list of things that didn't work when the designers were deciding how to put that chair together. More relevantly, you don't expect the farmer that grew that cow (or the company who built that chair) to give you status updates along the way. ("Cow got brucellosis again. Hopefully we get it cured before slaughter.") Why, then, do you think it's okay to ask that of Bungie (or any game company)?

Whenever we had a cow go down and we weren't going to get any money at the sale barn for it, we would butcher it ourselves. Whenever I had a cookout in college I would tell my friends which cow we were cooking. After a few cookouts some of my friends could tell which cow was which just by the taste.

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Game development, especially on the scale of something like Destiny is very hard. But it's also hard as a fan of the studio and game to be in the dark about why thing were like they were.

I do not now, and never have, understood this attitude. You're paying them for a game - not a history lesson. When you buy a pound of roast beef at the grocery store, you don't consider yourself entitled to the life story of the cow that beef was cut from (unless you live in Portland, but that's another story altogether). When you buy a chair at a furniture store, you do not expect (and will likely never be given) a list of things that didn't work when the designers were deciding how to put that chair together. More relevantly, you don't expect the farmer that grew that cow (or the company who built that chair) to give you status updates along the way. ("Cow got brucellosis again. Hopefully we get it cured before slaughter.") Why, then, do you think it's okay to ask that of Bungie (or any game company)?

Whenever we had a cow go down and we weren't going to get any money at the sale barn for it, we would butcher it ourselves. Whenever I had a cookout in college I would tell my friends which cow we were cooking. After a few cookouts some of my friends could tell which cow was which just by the taste.

When Baghdad Bean comes to visit, she brings lamb with her. She tells us who it was (and sometimes how it died). She thinks it's important to know where your food comes from.

This is completely different from developing a product for sale, and you know it. :)

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I totally agree they should not do this during the process.

But honest post-mortems in software are very very helpful. And I think sharing those with appropriate audiences (i.e. game dev and technical audiences) is a big deal. Sharing information like that in the right venue helps everyone avoid mistakes like that, and enables them to show off their successes in addition to their failures.

And bungie does that to some degree, which is where this thread came from in the first place. So kudos to them for keeping the lid on self-negativity to their fans, and talking about their technical process in the appropriate venues.

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Why do you think you have a right to see how the sausage is made? And (to look at it from the other side) what could Bungie POSSIBLY gain by providing that information? For a tiny, tiny fraction of their fanbase (you, me, another thousand people), it makes them more relatable as people. For EVERYONE ELSE, it introduces doubt into the quality of the final product. It's one thing to look back on the development of a successful product and say "these are the things that MIGHT have killed us." It's another thing altogether (and a stupid thing, from the standpoint of selling your product) to say "hey, we fucked up bigtime, and we're gonna do our best to fix it, but this mistake has the potential to kill us as a company." Why would you think they'd even CONSIDER saying something like that?

I think I agree with what you're saying. I think postmortem (post-shippings?), are great for fans of a company and good for the company. It helps us appreciate what we got and understand the difficulties in bringing it about. I think if more of these things happened it might help temper gamer's whiny entitled attitudes (or maybe not). But talking about these before a solution is found or before the game is shipped isn't a good idea, for reasons you outlined.

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Why do you think you have a right to see how the sausage is made? And (to look at it from the other side) what could Bungie POSSIBLY gain by providing that information? For a tiny, tiny fraction of their fanbase (you, me, another thousand people), it makes them more relatable as people. For EVERYONE ELSE, it introduces doubt into the quality of the final product. It's one thing to look back on the development of a successful product and say "these are the things that MIGHT have killed us." It's another thing altogether (and a stupid thing, from the standpoint of selling your product) to say "hey, we fucked up bigtime, and we're gonna do our best to fix it, but this mistake has the potential to kill us as a company." Why would you think they'd even CONSIDER saying something like that?

I think I agree with what you're saying. I think postmortem (post-shippings?), are great for fans of a company and good for the company. It helps us appreciate what we got and understand the difficulties in bringing it about. I think if more of these things happened it might help temper gamer's whiny entitled attitudes (or maybe not). But talking about these before a solution is found or before the game is shipped isn't a good idea, for reasons you outlined.

The problem is that you may reveal information unintentionally that can alter people's future expectations. Rightly, or wrongly.

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Games are art. Art is made by humans. Many many people place value in knowing about the artist, and the artists process. Art is expression, so to understand the artist is to better understand the expression. The fact that you find that unusual is kind of puzzling.

Remember the Revenant? Part of the marketing campaign was about how the movie was impossible to make and how much of a disaster it was!

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Games are art. Art is made by humans. Many many people place value in knowing about the artist, and the artists process. Art is expression, so to understand the artist is to better understand the expression. The fact that you find that unusual is kind of puzzling.

Understanding the artist is NOT the same thing as understanding how the artist works (and more, how the artist's work is occasionally difficult and requires hard choices). I'm actually puzzled that you don't realize this.

I love to know the inspiration that drives an artist, and the lifestyle they live that brings them to the final product. I don't want to know that there was a 2-month period last winter that they were so sick with the flu they were on the toilet 8 hours every day, and it kept them from advancing the final product. That's what we're talking about here - the vomiting and diarrhea that occasionally threatens the final product. I want to know they got past it - but I don't want to know the details, and I'm DAMN sure they don't want to DESCRIBE the details, especially before they're finished.

Remember the Revenant? Part of the marketing campaign was about how he movie was impossible to make and almost was a disaster!

Movies do NOT fall into the same category as games when it comes to consumer confidence before the product is released. It might, in fact, be handled in a directly opposite way (if you say "this movie we're releasing next week was so hard to make we almost failed" you'll get more people to see it because they assume that you overcame ridiculous issues and probably made a fantastic movie, but if you say "this game we're releasing next week had serious problems during development and we almost didn't release it" people will become hesitant, and worry that they're wasting their $60 buying it.)

I didn't see the Revenant (or its marketing campaign), but was this campaign released before the movie? (The "we almost didn't make this movie" info you're mentioning?) I guess it wouldn't matter either way, since NOBODY markets the negative parts of a movie before they're actually ready to release the movie (I can't think of a single trailer that shows off the bad stuff that comes out a year or two before the movie does. ALL movie hype released way before the movie is out is positive.)

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I didn't see the Revenant (or its marketing campaign), but was this campaign released before the movie? (The "we almost didn't make this movie" info you're mentioning?) I guess it wouldn't matter either way, since NOBODY markets the negative parts of a movie before they're actually ready to release the movie (I can't think of a single trailer that shows off the bad stuff that comes out a year or two before the movie does. ALL movie hype released way before the movie is out is positive.)

Yeah, pretty much all the hype surrounding the Revenant was due to interviews with the cast & crew talking about what a nightmare it was to film, and how dangerous and excruciating the whole process was, particularly for Leo Decaprio.

I don't think Cody is making a totally fair comparison, though. In the case of the Revenant, all the talk of the brutal filming process came off as a sort of boasting. "Look how tough our lead actor is, look how much he sacrificed for this role...", that sort of thing. If what we're hearing about Bungie's troubles developing Destiny are true, then a better comparison would be if a director did an interview before the release of their new movie and said "We had a grueling shoot and it was really tough on our lead actor and in the end his performance suffered so the movie didn't turn out the way we'd hoped." That, to my knowledge, has never happened.

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I didn't see the Revenant (or its marketing campaign), but was this campaign released before the movie? (The "we almost didn't make this movie" info you're mentioning?) I guess it wouldn't matter either way, since NOBODY markets the negative parts of a movie before they're actually ready to release the movie (I can't think of a single trailer that shows off the bad stuff that comes out a year or two before the movie does. ALL movie hype released way before the movie is out is positive.)

Yeah, pretty much all the hype surrounding the Revenant was due to interviews with the cast & crew talking about what a nightmare it was to film, and how dangerous and excruciating the whole process was, particularly for Leo Decaprio.

I don't think Cody is making a totally fair comparison, though. In the case of the Revenant, all the talk of the brutal filming process came off as a sort of boasting. "Look how tough our lead actor is, look how much he sacrificed for this role...", that sort of thing. If what we're hearing about Bungie's troubles developing Destiny are true, then a better comparison would be if a director did an interview before the release of their new movie and said "We had a grueling shoot and it was really tough on our lead actor and in the end his performance suffered so the movie didn't turn out the way we'd hoped." That, to my knowledge, has never happened.

Oh it has. It just never turns out well career wise for the people who make such statements (Kevin Smith, Cathrine Heigel, Tony Kaye, etc.)

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Yeah, pretty much all the hype surrounding the Revenant was due to interviews with the cast & crew talking about what a nightmare it was to film, and how dangerous and excruciating the whole process was, particularly for Leo Decaprio.

Shame all that struggle and effort went towards making such a bad movie. At least Destiny was good, if it didn't reach its lofty goals.

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Games are art. Art is made by humans. Many many people place value in knowing about the artist, and the artists process. Art is expression, so to understand the artist is to better understand the expression. The fact that you find that unusual is kind of puzzling.

Understanding the artist is NOT the same thing as understanding how the artist works (and more, how the artist's work is occasionally difficult and requires hard choices). I'm actually puzzled that you don't realize this.

I think it is the same thing. The process is as much a part of the work as the work itself. Art is not just coming up with an idea and voila. The actual mechanisms of creation are hugely important. Anyone can have an idea, but the method by which you make that idea into art is often not so ubiquitous. Video games are highly dependent on technology, therefore the technological nitty gritty is very important in the process and not to be discounted.

As for your flu comment, I point you to the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he shoots the guy with the sword. A funny scene, but it's made even cooler knowing there was a long fight planned, but Ford was so sick he came up with this idea to shoot it more easily because he was vomiting and shitting that day.

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Games are art. Art is made by humans. Many many people place value in knowing about the artist, and the artists process. Art is expression, so to understand the artist is to better understand the expression. The fact that you find that unusual is kind of puzzling.

Understanding the artist is NOT the same thing as understanding how the artist works (and more, how the artist's work is occasionally difficult and requires hard choices). I'm actually puzzled that you don't realize this.

I think it is the same thing. The process is as much a part of the work as the work itself. Art is not just coming up with an idea and voila. The actual mechanisms of creation are hugely important. Anyone can have an idea, but the method by which you make that idea into art is often not so ubiquitous. Video games are highly dependent on technology, therefore the technological nitty gritty is very important in the process and not to be discounted.

As for your flu comment, I point you to the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he shoots the guy with the sword. A funny scene, but it's made even cooler knowing there was a long fight planned, but Ford was so sick he came up with this idea to shoot it more easily because he was vomiting and shitting that day.

My enjoyment of that scene was not diminished one iota by not knowing that story.

And my future enjoyment of it might very well be damaged by it.

I think you just made the opposite point you were trying to make.

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Games are art. Art is made by humans. Many many people place value in knowing about the artist, and the artists process. Art is expression, so to understand the artist is to better understand the expression. The fact that you find that unusual is kind of puzzling.

Understanding the artist is NOT the same thing as understanding how the artist works (and more, how the artist's work is occasionally difficult and requires hard choices). I'm actually puzzled that you don't realize this.

I think it is the same thing. The process is as much a part of the work as the work itself. Art is not just coming up with an idea and voila. The actual mechanisms of creation are hugely important. Anyone can have an idea, but the method by which you make that idea into art is often not so ubiquitous. Video games are highly dependent on technology, therefore the technological nitty gritty is very important in the process and not to be discounted.

As for your flu comment, I point you to the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where he shoots the guy with the sword. A funny scene, but it's made even cooler knowing there was a long fight planned, but Ford was so sick he came up with this idea to shoot it more easily because he was vomiting and shitting that day.

That's a very meta approach to appreciating art. If the art requires that approach for its ideas to be communicated effectively, I bet dollars to doughnuts it's pretentious bullshit.

There's another approach to art which is basically that the artist is dead. I don't buy into that myself because I'm interested in history and context. Sometimes I may even be interested in process (especially from the perspective of learning the craft), but not to the point where it distracts me from the quality of the art. And much of that kind of background information is trivial to the art itself. I might find it interesting, but it doesn't increase my appreciation or understanding of Cormac McCarthy's work to know that he wrote it on a Olivetti typewriter.

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I think we instinctually appreciate the process just as much if not more than the final result. For instance, if I show you a photograph of a woman, you probably would not be terribly impressed. However, if it turns out it wasn't a photograph but a hyper realistic painting that was indistinguishable from a photograph, you'd be hella impressed.

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I think we instinctually appreciate the process just as much if not more than the final result. For instance, if I show you a photograph of a woman, you probably would not be terribly impressed. However, if it turns out it wasn't a photograph but a hyper realistic painting that was indistinguishable from a photograph, you'd be hella impressed.

i would be! It may be rather bland by every other artistic criteria other than realism, though. I think you're confusing art with craft.

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I think we instinctually appreciate the process just as much if not more than the final result. For instance, if I show you a photograph of a woman, you probably would not be terribly impressed. However, if it turns out it wasn't a photograph but a hyper realistic painting that was indistinguishable from a photograph, you'd be hella impressed.

i would be! It may be rather bland by every other artistic criteria other than realism, though. I think you're confusing art with craft.

This is an interesting example, too.

Putting myself in the shoes of the theoretical "viewer" in Cody's analogy, if I see a photo that is in itself unimpressive, and then I find out it is not a photo but a drawing that looks like a photo, I am still not impressed by the actual image in front of me. I would be greatly impressed with the technical skill involved in drawing something by hand that looked like a photograph, but that doesn't make me enjoy looking at the picture any more. It's a bit like No Man's Sky. It is incredible to think that the majority of that game was built by 4-6 people. But that doesn't mean I'm going to enjoy playing the game.

So yes, I do think I am interested in both the process and the final result, but one does not necessarily impact my opinion of the other.

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I think we instinctually appreciate the process just as much if not more than the final result. For instance, if I show you a photograph of a woman, you probably would not be terribly impressed. However, if it turns out it wasn't a photograph but a hyper realistic painting that was indistinguishable from a photograph, you'd be hella impressed.

i would be! It may be rather bland by every other artistic criteria other than realism, though. I think you're confusing art with craft.

This is an interesting example, too.

Putting myself in the shoes of the theoretical "viewer" in Cody's analogy, if I see a photo that is in itself unimpressive, and then I find out it is not a photo but a drawing that looks like a photo, I am still not impressed by the actual image in front of me. I would be greatly impressed with the technical skill involved in drawing something by hand that looked like a photograph, but that doesn't make me enjoy looking at the picture any more. It's a bit like No Man's Sky. It is incredible to think that the majority of that game was built by 4-6 people. But that doesn't mean I'm going to enjoy playing the game.

So yes, I do think I am interested in both the process and the final result, but one does not necessarily impact my opinion of the other.

Bringing this back to Destiny...

If Bungie came out and openly addressed all the raging angry gamers out there demanding to know what happened to Destiny, what would that actually achieve? If bungie laid out the whole story, every nitty gritty detail... would that suddenly change the experience that those disappointed fans had with the game? Not at all, right? They'd still be just as disappointed, wouldn't they?

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Imagine instead a beautiful photograph in my example. Does anything change?

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Imagine instead a beautiful photograph in my example. Does anything change?

I guess my thoughts would shift from "I don't like this picture, but I appreciate how it was made" to "I love this picture because of how it looks and how it was made."

So perhaps my brain no longer separates my opinion on the process from the results, because my opinion is the same for both? This reminds me of a friend in highschool who said to me "I love Lenny Kravitz album's because he plays all the instruments himself!"
Obviously he loved the music itself... His appreciation of the process isn't enough on its own for him to say he "loved those albums". But since he enjoyed the results, his appreciation of the process got bundled up with it.

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Imagine instead a beautiful photograph in my example. Does anything change?

Yeah. If I saw a beautiful photograph, I would admire all of the specific things that had to come together just so in order to capture something so beautiful. If you then told me that it wasn't a photograph, but a detailed painting, then I'd feel like the image is now an artificial construct that was carefully pieced together under ideal circumstances. It would feel fake and unimpressive, regardless of the skill of the artist, because in the end it's not a real moment, but a carefully rendered facsimile.

PS. Games are not inherently art. They are an engineered product made by a company under a corporation's dime in order to extract money from consumers. They can be art, but are not art by default or design. Is the Slap-Chop art? No. Was the Slap-Chop's marketing art? Subjective. Was the Slap-Chop's marketing able to become art? Absolutely..

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But the physical design of the slap chop is art. Do not devalue production art or industrial art simply because its purpose isn't aesthetic.

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Cody, have you seen Russian Ark? It's a fascinating movie, both in terms of the film itself and how it was made. It's an interesting case, because the unique way the film was made becomes apparent simply by watching it.

The entire movie (96 minutes) is a single POV shot. No cuts or edits of any kind. It was filmed in the Winter Palace of the Hermitage museum in Saint Petersburg. The film is about 2 ghosts (one russian, the other french) that are exploring the museum and reflecting on Russia's history. Because they're ghosts, they're not stuck to any specific point in time. So as they walk through the museum, they are also moving from one historical moment to the next. So there are hundreds of extras used to recreate all these different moments of history throughout the museum, while the 2 ghosts walk through all these scenes and discuss them together.

It's amazing that they pulled it off, and it actually works quite well regardless of the film-making process. We see everything from the russian ghost's POV, so we never see him, but we're constantly hearing his thoughts on the historic moments he is witnessing. The French ghost acts as a sort of counterpoint; a European's perspective on Russian history. There's a lot of interesting interplay between the two. It's also a challenging movie to watch. Without any cuts, your eyes never get a moment to rest. Watching this movie was the first time I truly appreciated the way properly-timed cuts are the film equivalent of "taking a breath". Well when you watch this movie, your eyes don't get to take a breath for an hour and a half. It's exhausting, but totally worth seeing.

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Then there is a film like Victoria, which also one long take. And it sucks because there are constantly moments where we need a cut.

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Games are art. Art is made by humans. Many many people place value in knowing about the artist, and the artists process. Art is expression, so to understand the artist is to better understand the expression. The fact that you find that unusual is kind of puzzling.

Remember the Revenant? Part of the marketing campaign was about how the movie was impossible to make and how much of a disaster it was!

Tying this back to Claude's original comparison (to knowing how they make the sausages we eat), there is also a layer of "customer dissatisfaction" that is tied to this whole topic. Running with the analogy, most people don't typically care how their sausages are made... until there's a huge scandal where thousands of people get food poisoning. THEN there would suddenly be plenty of interest in how those sausages got made.

That's obviously a silly comparison, but my point is that the majority of people who play games might not have a burning interest in how their games get made, until something goes wrong. Games like Destiny, No Man's Sky, Street Fighter Five, Halo MCC... all these games were met with disproportionately high interest in what went on behind the scenes, because in each of these cases something clearly went wrong. I don't agree at all with the level of outrage expressed by some gamers over these titles. They're videgames, after all. But people get passionate about the games/developers that they really love. And when gamers feel let down (or worse, "slighted/betrayed/lied to"), it can lead to strong feelings. Some gamers obviously don't handle those feelings in the appropriate way. But I do understand the desire to understand what happened. In part, it comes from a good place. Some bungie fans want to believe that there must have been some kind of behind-the-scenes catastrophe during Destiny's development, because the alternative explanation is that everything went fine and Bungie made the exact game they wanted to make. And for those that want "more" from Destiny 2 (whatever "more" means to them), that is a troubling explanation.

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Given the climate of the internet today, I'm not sure we'll ever see the kind of freewheeling interaction and openness to fans Bungie had years ago, and sure, I miss that, but the bottom line for me is that they make good games and their games are popular enough for them to continue to make good games.

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Given the climate of the internet today, I'm not sure we'll ever see the kind of freewheeling interaction and openness to fans Bungie had years ago, and sure, I miss that, but the bottom line for me is that they make good games and their games are popular enough for them to continue to make good games.

That has just as much to do with Bungie not being the same company anymore as it does the internet changing.

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Given the climate of the internet today, I'm not sure we'll ever see the kind of freewheeling interaction and openness to fans Bungie had years ago, and sure, I miss that, but the bottom line for me is that they make good games and their games are popular enough for them to continue to make good games.

That has just as much to do with Bungie not being the same company anymore as it does the internet changing.

Maybe, but it's not like we haven't seen unfiltered comments by current Bungie employees blow up the internet. The current media environment incentivizes measured, careful communication.

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When you buy a pound of roast beef at the grocery store, you don't consider yourself entitled to the life story of the cow that beef was cut from (unless you live in Portland, but that's another story altogether).

This may end up being my favorite quote of yours btw

When you buy a chair at a furniture store, you do not expect (and will likely never be given) a list of things that didn't work when the designers were deciding how to put that chair together. More relevantly, you don't expect the farmer that grew that cow (or the company who built that chair) to give you status updates along the way. ("Cow got brucellosis again. Hopefully we get it cured before slaughter.") Why, then, do you think it's okay to ask that of Bungie (or any game company)?

In case you care to know about the chair that you should buy.

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There's some good reading in these links

http://www.hermanmiller.com/why/shell-shorts.html

http://www.eamesoffice.com/scholars-walk/eames-molded-plastic-chair-history/

And a video about the production of the chair from way back in the day.

On a slightly different subject from chairs. Don Norman talks in his book Living with Complexity about how in today's age information is extremely important to user satisfaction. This ranges from something like the Domino's website where they give you a live update about your pizza. They tell you who is making your pizza, when it's out of the oven, when it leaves the store and who your driver is, all the while they are keeping you informed of the expected arrival time. The same ideas apply to tracking packages on the USPS, UPS, Fedex websites. The more information they provide, the higher the satisfaction of the end user is.

In a lot of ways this can be applied to watching the development of Destiny unfold. I know I hated being in the dark about something I was extremely excited about. I preordered the game as soon as it was available and then had to watch as barely any information was given out. I would have killed for ANY information while we waited for this game to launch.

Some great reading about design and psychology can be found here http://www.jnd.org/

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You make an excellent point about the role that pre-orders play in this whole dynamic. It's a bit like Kickstarter, actually. Some gamers are paying for their games long before they can actually play them, and as such they expect a certain level of information from the developers to assure them that they will not regret their preorder. And that isn't totally unreadonable.

Personally, I don't think it makes sense to pre-order games these days, but if publishers & developers continue to try and get money for games that aren't done yet, I think it's fair to expect a certain level of service or reassurance in return.

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I do my best to only buy furniture that has a backstory. Unfortunately, I can only afford cheap knockoffs. Maybe when my teenage athletes stop requiring so much caloric intake...

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I do my best to only buy furniture that has a backstory. Unfortunately, I can only afford cheap knockoffs. Maybe when my teenage athletes stop requiring so much caloric intake...

I picked up an ivory Eames fiberglass shell chair for $10 at a thrift store. they dont have to be expensive :)

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You know how I sometimes go off half to three quarters cocked on something I'm interested in but nobody else is?

Do that for chairs.

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Like door walls, the best ones come from Michigan.

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You know how I sometimes go off half to three quarters cocked on something I'm interested in but nobody else is?

Do that for chairs.

I mean, that's all I was doing the first time I mentioned Taylor Swift on the forums. Look how that turned out!

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This piece was originally conceived in early 1989 with the finished product launching on December 13, 1989. While it showed promise early on, it wasn't until years later that it became a world wide phenomenon.

Now about the chair. The Finnish interior designer Eero Aarnio designed the Ball Chair in 1963 and the Bubble Chairin 1968. The Ball Chair sits on a base while the Bubble Chair hangs from the ceiling. It has since become one of the iconic pieces of industrial design from the 60's. This chair was designed to be a "room within a room". The shape of the chair allows outside noises to be blocked from the user.

Original sketch of the Ball Chair

Mold for the Ball Chair

More reading here
http://www.eero-aarnio.com/8/ball-chair.htm
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/04/17/eero-aarnio-retrospective-helsinki-design-museum-curator-suvi-saloniemi-interview/
https://www.dwell.com/article/furniture-designer-focus-eero-aarnio-3bb08d72
http://finnishdesign.com/finnish-designers/eero-aarnio

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[image]

The Coconut Lounge chair was designed by George Nelson in 1955.

The original intent of the coconut chair was to provide a comfortable lounge seat with great freedom of movement.

blah blah blah..... cool chair

[image]

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Got any information on that (chair)? [image]

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She owned an amazing Mid Century Modern house yet there are no pics of her in a designer chair...

The Wong House

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She's sitting in a knockoff reproduction Eames Armchair Shell with a different knockoff base.

She here for the post about the original designers

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She's sitting in a knockoff reproduction Eames Armchair Shell with a different knockoff base.

She here for the post about the original designers

This is amazing :D

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Here's a throw back for you.

Jocelyn Lane sitting on a Harry Bertoia Diamond Chair

Harry Bertoia was mainly interested in being a sculptor working with metal. Through his early education he worked with Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen and Walter Gropius at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. These people are all masters of design in the own right. These relationships lead to the ability for him to create his one and only series of furniture that you see above and below. The royalties he earned off of these designs allowed him to live the rest of his life as an artist and sculptor.

Bertoia had this to say about his chairs: "They are mainly made of air, like sculpture. Space passes right through them"

Further Reading:
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/man-of-steel-mesh-harry-bertoi-106399
http://www.design-museum.de/en/collection/100-masterpieces/detailseiten/diamond-chair-bertoia.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Bertoia
https://www.knoll.com/product/bertoia-diamond-chair

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And none of them feature chairs that I have seen. What gives?

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Make it happen people.

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Just some stuff to read about here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

and info on his furniture
[link]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier's_Furniture[/link]

LC3 Arm Chair with Steve Jobs Sitting on it
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LC4 Chaise Lounge

http://www.dwr.com/designer-le-corbusier?lang=en_US

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I knew Anne Hathaway had good taste in furniture lol

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Here's 50 square feet of leather, 15 pounds of foam padding, plus a bunch of scrap wood. Make a chair.

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There's a chair in that picture? I keep looking for it, but something keeps distracting me from finding it.

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In all fairness, my Master's is in Interior Architecture and Product Design with an emphasis in Furniture Design.

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Seeing this makes me want to try to someday build a ball chair, but out of wood using a geodesic design. That would be a bad ass furniture piece.

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On a slightly different subject from chairs. Don Norman talks in his book Living with Complexity about how in today's age information is extremely important to user satisfaction. This ranges from something like the Domino's website where they give you a live update about your pizza. They tell you who is making your pizza, when it's out of the oven, when it leaves the store and who your driver is, all the while they are keeping you informed of the expected arrival time. The same ideas apply to tracking packages on the USPS, UPS, Fedex websites. The more information they provide, the higher the satisfaction of the end user is.

In a lot of ways this can be applied to watching the development of Destiny unfold. I know I hated being in the dark about something I was extremely excited about. I preordered the game as soon as it was available and then had to watch as barely any information was given out. I would have killed for ANY information while we waited for this game to launch.

The problem is still that this analogy doesn't fully track. They DO answer all those questions about Destiny. What people are talking about in this thread would be more like the tracker telling you "oops, Steve dropped your pizza , and is going to have to start over from scratch." Which Pizza Hut would NEVER do. They might update your delivery time, which is exactly what Bungie would do as well if the game was delayed (as long as a release date was already announced).

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On a slightly different subject from chairs. Don Norman talks in his book Living with Complexity about how in today's age information is extremely important to user satisfaction. This ranges from something like the Domino's website where they give you a live update about your pizza. They tell you who is making your pizza, when it's out of the oven, when it leaves the store and who your driver is, all the while they are keeping you informed of the expected arrival time. The same ideas apply to tracking packages on the USPS, UPS, Fedex websites. The more information they provide, the higher the satisfaction of the end user is.

In a lot of ways this can be applied to watching the development of Destiny unfold. I know I hated being in the dark about something I was extremely excited about. I preordered the game as soon as it was available and then had to watch as barely any information was given out. I would have killed for ANY information while we waited for this game to launch.

The problem is still that this analogy doesn't fully track. They DO answer all those questions about Destiny. What people are talking about in this thread would be more like the tracker telling you "oops, Steve dropped your pizza , and is going to have to start over from scratch." Which Pizza Hut would NEVER do. They might update your delivery time, which is exactly what Bungie would do as well if the game was delayed (as long as a release date was already announced).

More accurately: "oops, Steve dropped your pizza, so we're going to be a little late because he has to pick off all the lint before he puts it in the box."

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This thread is a perfect example of why analogies are a terrible way to argue a point: People start debating whether or not the analogy is accurate, rather than the point itself :)

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Here's MTM on an upholstered Eames armchair

[image]

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First smile of the day.

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[image]

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Trent Reznor, the original performer of the song "Hurt" has featured numerous pieces of designer furniture in his videos during his career.

In the original video for "Closer" NSFW there is a beating heart nailed to the Cherner Armchair designed by Norman Cherner in 1958.

[image]

"In the 1950s, the Herman Miller company, led by George Nelson, was working on creating lightweight chairs out of plywood. Their Pretzel chair was designed by Nelson's office in 1952 and produced by a Massachusetts-based company called Plycraft. The Pretzel chair proved too fragile and costly, so Herman Miller stopped production in 1957.

But because of the Pretzel chair, Plycraft had the materials and techniques for constructing plywood furniture, and they didn't want them to go to waste. George Nelson recommended that Norman Cherner design a sturdier and more affordable Pretzel-type chair that could be more easily produced on Plycraft's equipment, so Paul Goldman, the owner of Plycraft, hired Cherner, contract and all. After Cherner turned in his design to Plycraft, though, he was told the project had been scrapped.

Not long after, Cherner was in a furniture showroom in New York and saw his design for sale! Examining the label, he saw it was from Plycraft and was attributed to "Bernardo." He sued Plycraft in 1961 and won; Goldman admitted that Bernardo was a fabricated name. Plycraft continued to produce Cherner's chair, but Cherner received royalties and proper credit. The chair was produced until the 1970s, but Cherner's sons have recently reissued their father's original designs, not only for the famous chair, but also for various tables and case furniture, as well.

Although now known as the Cherner chair, the chair is occasionally still attributed to Paul Goldman, and is also sometimes called the Rockwell chair, because Norman Rockwell featured it on a 1961 cover of the Saturday Evening Post"

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Later on in the video Reznor showcases the Planter Lounge Chair by Warren Planter designed in 1966

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You can read more about Planter here

One of the coolest things about this chair is that each chair required over 1,000 individual welds to produce the chair.

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Let it go..... Let it go......

Kristen Bell, the voice actress for Anna in Disney's Frozen can be seen below sitting in the Bubble Chair designed by Eero Aarnio

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Idina Menzel, the voice actress for Elsa in Desney's Frozen can be seen below standing on the side chair version of theCherner Chair

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Not much new to post, but figure it's still worth the effort

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Game development, especially on the scale of something like Destiny is very hard. But it's also hard as a fan of the studio and game to be in the dark about why thing were like they were.

I do not now, and never have, understood this attitude. You're paying them for a game - not a history lesson. When you buy a pound of roast beef at the grocery store, you don't consider yourself entitled to the life story of the cow that beef was cut from (unless you live in Portland, but that's another story altogether). When you buy a chair at a furniture store, you do not expect (and will likely never be given) a list of things that didn't work when the designers were deciding how to put that chair together. More relevantly, you don't expect the farmer that grew that cow (or the company who built that chair) to give you status updates along the way. ("Cow got brucellosis again. Hopefully we get it cured before slaughter.") Why, then, do you think it's okay to ask that of Bungie (or any game company)?

You make an excellent point.

On the other hand, I wonder... did you consider the fact that you say this as probably the *least* "in-the-dark" Bungie fan currently in existence?

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Game development, especially on the scale of something like Destiny is very hard. But it's also hard as a fan of the studio and game to be in the dark about why thing were like they were.

I do not now, and never have, understood this attitude. You're paying them for a game - not a history lesson. When you buy a pound of roast beef at the grocery store, you don't consider yourself entitled to the life story of the cow that beef was cut from (unless you live in Portland, but that's another story altogether). When you buy a chair at a furniture store, you do not expect (and will likely never be given) a list of things that didn't work when the designers were deciding how to put that chair together. More relevantly, you don't expect the farmer that grew that cow (or the company who built that chair) to give you status updates along the way. ("Cow got brucellosis again. Hopefully we get it cured before slaughter.") Why, then, do you think it's okay to ask that of Bungie (or any game company)?

You make an excellent point.

On the other hand, I wonder... did you consider the fact that you say this as probably the *least* "in-the-dark" Bungie fan currently in existence?

That might be true - but it hasn't always been true, while my feelings about what we're entitled to have never changed. In fact, it's possible that I'm less in-the-dark BECAUSE I don't expect to not be in the dark. :)

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That might be true - but it hasn't always been true, while my feelings about what we're entitled to have never changed. In fact, it's ~~possible~~ likely that I'm less in-the-dark BECAUSE I don't expect to not be in the dark. :)

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I think there are two views here that can co-exist. Firstly, you're spot on that no one is entitled to know how the sausage is made. I've made quite a few of these sausages and the process is hilariously painful.

And second, Raga is right that if you tell me the sausage is made of pork, there damn well better be some pork in there.

And this is the issue with Destiny. The PR team wasn't just saying "everything is fine, ignore the man behind the curtain." They were saying "This game has X Y and Z. Your weapons will tell the tale of your guardian. Your will become legend. If you see a mountain in the distance, you can go there. Saturn is a thing." So they sold us a "pork" sausage, and what we got was a chicken sausage. It's not the advertised product.

And so I agree with Raga in that, if Bungie had been up front about major changes, or problems, or even top level decisions to just do it differently from how it had been previously advertised, those of us who do feel like we were lied to wouldn't feel that way. And I also agree with you that Bungie didn't need to tell us about the problems in their backend pipeline.

What they could and, I feel, should have done, is told us that some of the advertising we'd seen was no longer accurate. Reasons weren't needed. But honesty was.

Bungie is going to have to earn back my trust, and the livestreams and ads they've been putting out really aren't doing it for me. Fortunately, chats like the link in the OP really, really do make me feel better. They didn't need to tell me what really happened, but the fact that they are is promising.

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And this is the issue with Destiny. The PR team wasn't just saying "everything is fine, ignore the man behind the curtain." They were saying "This game has X Y and Z. Your weapons will tell the tale of your guardian. Your will become legend. If you see a mountain in the distance, you can go there. Saturn is a thing." So they sold us a "pork" sausage, and what we got was a chicken sausage. It's not the advertised product.

I think this consideration lacks context in regard to the fact that they were making a game. Something that requires a degree of crafting, as I anticipate you understand. While the tale your weapons tell is more a case of your personality (I don't use snipers, my main almost only uses Exotics in the Heavy slot, etc) it still tells a tale of your guardian. In universe you are legend. And many folks have made a name for themselves in the community or small patches of it. You could walk to that mountain. It is geometry. But there is probably nothing (just like going up the mountains on Delta Halo in Halo 2) to do there, so the game keeps you from going on a boring walking simulator. And Saturn is a thing - from varying perspectives and degrees.

Not to mention, part of their sell was a 10 year plan. We'll see in the future if it keeps going or not, I suppose. But they were selling you on a game that would be alive for the foreseeable future. And so far I wouldn't say they've wholey missed that mark.

And so I agree with Raga in that, if Bungie had been up front about major changes, or problems, or even top level decisions to just do it differently from how it had been previously advertised, those of us who do feel like we were lied to wouldn't feel that way. And I also agree with you that Bungie didn't need to tell us about the problems in their backend pipeline.

They have been pretty explicit with Destiny that no "in development" content is a promise. I can't get behind any suggestion more explanation was required. Hyping oneself can be a problem, but it isn't their PR folks' job to keep hopes in check.

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And second, Raga is right that if you tell me the sausage is made of pork, there damn well better be some pork i
And this is the issue with Destiny. The PR team wasn't just saying "everything is fine, ignore the man behind the curtain." They were saying "This game has X Y and Z. Your weapons will tell the tale of your guardian. Your will become legend. If you see a mountain in the distance, you can go there. Saturn is a thing." So they sold us a "pork" sausage, and what we got was a chicken sausage. It's not the advertised product.

My weapons do tell the tale of my Guardians. I have Become Legend. Both of theses are highly subjective, sure, but they certainly weren't marketing lies. To frame them as such is just dumb.

So stop it.

Saturn is a thing. Even if it was pushed back there was never the promise we'd go there on day one. If anything, that we didn't go there at first reinforces one of Bungie's biggest PR messages: that Destiny would have an evolving living world that changed over time. Also, it seems pretty dumb to fault Bungie for Saturn when it was mentioned in the same video that told us Destiny was intended to be a ten year plan. Anybody that says Bungie lied about Saturn is being willfully and maliciously dishonest. End of story.

So stop it.

The thing about the mountain... wasn't that only ever mentioned one time in a single E3 demo? At worst, Earth got scaled back along the way and that off the cuff prerelease statement unfortunately turned out to not be true. It certainly wasn't part of the wider marketing and PR effort like you are making it out to be.

So stop it.

We now have direct proof of major blunders Bungie made during the production of Destiny and yet you focus on subjective PR slogans, "lies" that were true within a year of release, and one off comments that as far as I know were never repeated again? None of these were major parts of the advertising or promise of Destiny. Making them out to be is just plain wrong.

So. Stop. It.

There's plenty of real mistakes and issues (multiplayer balance, development troubles, stupid investment system choices, actual or imagined networking issues) for you to focus on. Stick to those and knock it off about these other topics that were, at best, a cut area that one Bungie presenter failed to personally apologize about to you.

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And second, Raga is right that if you tell me the sausage is made of pork, there damn well better be some pork i
And this is the issue with Destiny. The PR team wasn't just saying "everything is fine, ignore the man behind the curtain." They were saying "This game has X Y and Z. Your weapons will tell the tale of your guardian. Your will become legend. If you see a mountain in the distance, you can go there. Saturn is a thing." So they sold us a "pork" sausage, and what we got was a chicken sausage. It's not the advertised product.

My weapons do tell the tale of my Guardians. I have Become Legend. Both of theses are highly subjective, sure, but they certainly weren't marketing lies. To frame them as such is just dumb.

So stop it.

Saturn is a thing. Even if it was pushed back there was never the promise we'd go there on day one. If anything, that we didn't go there at first reinforces one of Bungie's biggest PR messages: that Destiny would have an evolving living world that changed over time. Also, it seems pretty dumb to fault Bungie for Saturn when it was mentioned in the same video that told us Destiny was intended to be a ten year plan. Anybody that says Bungie lied about Saturn is being willfully and maliciously dishonest. End of story.

So stop it.

The thing about the mountain... wasn't that only ever mentioned one time in a single E3 demo? At worst Earth got scaled back along the way and that off the cuff prerelease statement unfortunately turned out to not be true. It certainly wasn't part of the wider marketing and PR effort like you are making it out to be.

So stop it.

We now have direct proof of major blunders Bungie made during the production of Destiny and yet you focus on subjective PR slogans, "lies" that were true within a year of release, and one off comments that as far as I know were never repeated again?

So. Stop. It.

There's plenty of real mistakes and issues (multiplayer balance, development troubles, stupid investment system choices, actual or imagined networking issues) for you to focus on. Stick to those and knock it off about these other topics that were, at best, a cut area that one Bungie presenter failed to personally apologize about to you.

So I totally see where you're coming from, Raga... and you're making very good points about how subjective all this stuff is, and how we all as gamers & consumers are responsible for managing our expectations. All valid points. But I don't think Kahzgul is coming completely out of nowhere with his points either.

I think there is yet another layer to this whole discussion that we haven't touched on yet, and that is how the nature of Bungie's community team appears to have shifted over the years. When I think back to the days of Frankie and Luke's updates & the old Bungie podcasts, there was a "frankness" to their communications (no pun intended). They spoke to the community like real human beings talking to other real human beings. Yes, they had lists of things they could and couldn't talk about, but it never came across as "marketing". It was an ongoing dialog with Bungie's biggest fans, often discussing things that only Bungie's biggest fans would care about. The podcasts were particularly loose, in the best possible way.

For better or worse, that is not how Bungie's community team talks to the public anymore. Everything now feels carefully manicured, perfectly "on brand". The weekly updates & trade show interviews all now come across as the work of a marketing team. Which is all totally fine. It's just a different type of communication, and it creates a different relationship. I must now put all messaging from Bungie's community team through my own personal "videogame pr team filter". In the lead up to Destiny's launch, we would hear/read Urk and Deej say things like "become legend" and as Raga points out, that is so subjective that it is unfair to call them out on it as a "lie". But it was, and still is, a sales pitch. Jump back in time a few years, and we have Brian Jarrard saying "prepare to drop" as a joke about stinking up the studio bathroom... BEFORE ODST had even shipped. So we've gone from a community team that openly teased the marketing lingo being used to promote their games, to a community team that must tow the company line at all times. Again, I'm not saying that is a good or bad thing. It just means we (the community) need to adjust our expectations when it comes to the kind of public-facing relationship we now have with Bungie's community team.

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When I think of Bungie communication from the Halo era, specifically the Halo 2 weekly updates, I always think of <redacted>. I hated that. I was eager for any bit of information and felt like I was being teased, and not in a good way. Now, to be fair, it does sound like I might want to read back through those updates and see if I still feel the same way. (Is there are an archive of those anywhere? :p) It's been more than a decade so maybe I'll feel differently.

For Destiny era Bungie, I feel that they in some ways did us a disservice by barely saying anything about their new game before launch. I made my preorder not understanding the concept of Destinations vs missions. Not understading the process of leveling up and getting loot. Dreading ADS. Not understanding how Supers charged and having barely understanding of how any individual Super worked or what it did. Etc. Etc. Maybe part of what made my perception of all this worse was I had convinced myself that they would finally have to actually reveal their game a lot more since it was a new engine, new universe, new gameplay, etc. So when they didn't, it felt a bit extra bad, I guess.

Getting back to your larger point about Bungie's communication shifting... I would expect you're far more right than wrong. We still do get the occasional more frank communications. Sometimes through ride alongs. Sometimes through podcasts. More recently the dev team posted on the Bungie.net forums saying that no there would not be a weapons balance update with The Dawning but they heard and understood that there were still issues with the god roll shotguns. And a while before that there was a similar post talking about the issues surrounding Hand Cannon inaccuracy.

Is there more or less frank communication? Again, I honestly can't personally say. But we do still get it from time to time from modern Bungie.

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For Destiny era Bungie, I feel that they in some ways did us a disservice by barely saying anything about their new game before launch. I made my preorder not understanding the concept of Destinations vs missions. Not understading the process of leveling up and getting loot. Dreading ADS. Not understanding how Supers charged and having barely understanding of how any individual Super worked or what it did. Etc. Etc. Maybe part of what made my perception of all this worse was I had convinced myself that they would finally have to actually reveal their game a lot more since it was a new engine, new universe, new gameplay, etc. So when they didn't, it felt a bit extra bad, I guess.

The lead up to Destiny was certainly a different animal than the pre-release days leading up to Halo 3, ODST, Reach, etc. Halo in those days was very much a known quantity, which opened up a certain level of conversation about each new game as they approached. Before Halo 3 shipped, we were getting fairly detailed breakdowns of the early missions in the campaign (via the Podcast). Nothing in terms of story spoilers, but we were told things like "the first mission introduces the basic mechanics and combat, the 3rd mission introduces vehicles, etc". In Frank's own words, "the 2nd mission is where you're gonna get gang-banged by Brutes". (<- man, do I miss those old podcasts lol). Between what we already knew about Halo, plus these kinds of details, plus the gameplay demo footage coming out of E3 2007, I feel like I had a very clear idea of the kind of game I was going to be buying and playing.

Destiny was obviously a different story. New IP, new setting, new story and characters, new gameplay systems... we didn't really know what to expect. And that was exciting! I enjoyed being a bit more "in the dark" than I had been for the past few Bungie releases. It wasn't really until the Alpha came along that we had any real idea of how the game was going to play. There was that 1 E3 demo with Jason and Joe where they showed 3 full fireteams all converging to destroy a single Fallen walker (has anyone ever actually experienced that while playing Destiny?). The Alpha was very promising, because it left enough space for us to fill in the blanks with our own expectations. I know how dangerous that term is (expectations), but I think it is totally fair for Bungie fans who have been playing Bungie games for years to have expected a decently fleshed-out story in Destiny. I came away from the Alpha thinking

- "those story missions were pretty plain and simple, but that's to be expected from the early missions... they'll surely get more complex and diverse!" (wrong)

- "patrol gets old fast but this is just the alpha so I'm sure there will be way more to do on patrol in the final game, right?" (wrong)

- "I don't really know much about what's going on here, but I'm sure everything will make sense in the final game" (wrong)

- "Earth is amazing! I hope the other patrol zones are as diverse and fun to explore and full of interconnecting paths and secret caves!" (nope)

So while the Alpha and Beta gave us this amazing hands-on time with the game, we weren't given enough context to understand the scope of what we were playing. My friends and I were having a blast with it, in no small part because we were imagining all the amazing stuff that must be coming with the full game (because the alpha must obviously be just a tiny little slice, right?) In hindsight, I can look at that alpha and see that it was a very honest representation of what vanilla Destiny was, strengths and weaknesses. But we weren't told at the time "earth is 1 of 4 patrol zones, and it is the biggest of the bunch". Nor were we told "the story and patrol missions and the strike are most of the content that will be available on earth in the shipping game".

And that's where I do hold Bungie somewhat accountable for their communication about/marketing of Destiny. They have continually lied via omission. The reason they didn't tell us much about the story or characters is because there wasn't anything to tell. Same goes for lack of information about how the end-game would work, how long the campaign was, how many multiplayer modes would be included, forge/theater/custom games... Bungie stayed silent on all of these issues as long as they possibly could because they knew that the answers were disappointing. And that trend continued long past the release of Vanilla Destiny.

I do realize that at a certain point, the marketing team needs to play with the cards they are dealt. The studio has produced a game, and the marketing team (including the community team) needs to get everyone excited to buy it, whatever it is. It's an incredible tricky line to walk, and I don't envy them one bit. Unfortunately, the state of Destiny as a game put the public-facing portion of Bungie in the position where they simply couldn't talk openly about the game, because there were too many pr landmines they needed to avoid.

As I've said before, I think a lot of the continued contention over this issue of "communication" comes down to the quality of the final product and the "customer satisfaction" levels of the player base. Back in 2008, Bungie had Mat Noguchi on the podcast to talk about the horror story that was creating Halo 3's caching system in order to get the game to run on a console that didn't have a harddrive. But in the context of Halo 3, that story comes across as a tale of victory because it was this huge challenge that almost crippled the entire game, but Bungie managed to pull it off at the last minute and make it work. That's not the kind of story that people are interested in hearing about Destiny (although I'm sure there are similar stories to be told). People want to hear about what happened during the making of Destiny because they want to know why their favorite developer released a game with so many glaring flaws. They want to hear that it was because of some isolated catastrophe, because that makes it easy to believe that it won't happen again. It's largely an emotional issue, not a logical one.

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Even saying nothing screws you. Look at what's being reported about Des2ny. Reboots, personnel shuffling, slip to 2018, etc. And Bungie hasn't even announced the game yet.

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It just means we (the community) need to adjust our expectations when it comes to the kind of public-facing relationship we now have with Bungie's community team.

Screw that, I want poop jokes again.

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And Matt Soell was even more frank when speaking to fans. He'd outright call them on their bullshit if they were out of line. Would never happen with Deej or Cosmo.

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And Matt Soell was even more frank when speaking to fans. He'd outright call them on their bullshit if they were out of line. Would never happen with Deej or Cosmo.

I miss Matt Soell's updates and his obsession with "Wall Hugging Hippos". Out of all the community facing people Matt's updates were my favorite.

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No offense to the others, including you, DeeJ.

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First, thanks to CRUELegacy for understanding where I'm coming from and chiming in. You're the best, dude.

Second, thanks to you, Raga, for always keeping me honest. You, too, are the best.

Here's the distinction I want to draw. Let's throw out Halo 2 or Halo 3 or ODST. Look back at Halo 1. That's a game that is completely NOT the game that was originally promised. Do you guys remember this game?

Halo was originally going to be a 3rd person shooter in a Tribes-esque style where you spawned in as a generic dude and - through the gear or vehicles you took and your own personal skill, became a class. I'm a warthog driver. I'm a sniper. I'm a front line assault trooper. There's a video showing one halo spartan running up to a covenant elite, and that elite drops his gun and raises his hands in surrender.

Early rumors about the server structure were that the game was going to be a "ringworld" of servers, where each server was a different map to fight on, and the two factions would wage war back and forth on two fronts. Win one map, and you could press though the far side of it to fight on the next map. Lose that one and you've been pushed back to the first. Meanwhile, since it's a ringworld, you would be fighting a simultaneous war fifty maps over, doing the same thing.

And Bungie came out and said that those things had changed. It was an FPS now. The server structure was all rumor. The focus was on single player and story now. They walked back the early design, disavowed the false rumors, and steered our expectations toward the path of truth.

Then Microsoft bought them and turned the PC game Halo into a console exclusive. It was a disaster, we all shouted! A travesty! A betrayal! And Bungie came back and said that yes, MS had bought them. Yes, the game would be a console shooter now. That it might be smaller than they had planned. But that it was still *their* game. They had creative control and they were still going to be telling the story they wanted to. In fact, they said, it's coming along great and looks really good. It's really fun. Their mantra was now "30 seconds of fun." Every 30 seconds, by itself, had to be fun. And they were doing just that.

Again, they responded to the playerbase with honesty and realistic expectations.

And when the game came out no one was disappointed. In fact, we were amazed. That game was incredible and far, far better than we'd imagined! It was every bit as fun as we'd been promised. And then warthog launching became a thing. The game was MORE fun than we'd thought, even after playing it. Red vs Blue came out - holy crap, you could make machinima with it! The game was not just good, it was groundbreaking on all fronts.

---

Now look at Destiny, where rumors were never dispelled. Early builds that obviously changed later were never disavowed. Honesty, in short, was never the priority. That's where I stand.

Yes, Raga, you're right. My guns do tell a tale. I use the Lord High Fixer whose tale is "I turned in 50 faction packages to Shaxx and eventually he gave me a great gun." Compelling. I use the Matador 64 of "I got lucky as fuck after a PvP match." And I use the Tormod's Bellows of "I spent a long time dismantling gear to get enough marks to buy this from a vendor." Epic stories, if I'm being sarcastic, which I am.

Saturn; the mountain - these were early reveal things that Bungie never walked back or even hinted at having been changed until well after they had our money. It shouldn't matter that they were mentioned only once. What about the TV spot of "out here in the wild, this is how we talk."? That thing ran like gangbusters and isn't in the game at all. It all comes down to how trustworthy the company is. In the Halo times, Bungie was the pinnacle of under-promise and over-deliver. They *earned* my loyalty and fandom. Now, though, they reek of money-grabs. At the time of launch, they favored hype over honesty, superficial over substance, and temporary over permanent. You can cherry pick your examples all you want, but Bungie never walked back any of their under-delivered pre-launch hype.

I also realize that the game and PR messaging of launch has substantially changed to that of today.

But the damage was done, man. The promises broken, the trust betrayed. I no longer believe what they tell me, and when it comes true in the game, I suspect ulterior motives. "How is Destiny using this to trick me into microtransactions?" I wonder. How long with this fun thing last before they take it away? How will they take my time and effort invested into this game, these guns, that gear, and turn it all into ash in my mouth?

---

The sour taste in my mouth is almost entirely the fault of their shitty "pre-order now" messaging. The game is pretty good, truth be told. It's gorgeous to look at, sounds amazing, and is fun to play. It's just not the same game they sold me. I was promised one thing, and got another, and it does not matter how amazing the thing is that I really ended up with, because that is not what I agreed to buy. If you said you'd sell me The Last of Us and I gave you $60 and then opened to box to find out it was Tomb Raider, I'd be fucking pissed. And it really doesn't matter that Tomb Raider is an awesome game. It's not what I was sold.

Bungie's Destiny is really well encapsulated in the pre-order Vanguard Weapons Pack. Remember that thing? "Pre-Order now and you'll get exclusive access to the Vanguard Weapons Pack!" No one knew what that was, but it had to be cool, right? Because it's the pre-order bonus! Well, it was actually a bunch of shitty level 5 green guns you had to buy from a vendor. Now, every time you visit the vanguard vendor, you can see how Bungie delivered the letter of their promise in the most underwhelming way imaginable. here are some "exclusive" level 5 guns you will never buy, or use, or even want to look at, but you're a sucker who gave us money based on our vague statements which were bioengineered to generate hype while still leaving us legally safe from false advertising lawsuits.

So here's a game that is, technically, legally probably, what they promised, because they dealt in subjectives, or omitted important information, or decided to put promised features in later, for-pay expansions, or decided to take away features you thought you had bought unless you also bought the next xpac. It's a pretty good game. It's a pretty fun game. It's a VERY pretty game. But it's a game I have been conditioned to be disappointed by.

At least in that regard, Bungie always delivers.

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You have just said exactly what I always seem to struggle with saying.

Destiny is a good game, maybe even an excellent game. It's not the game I thought I was getting, and certainly not the game I wanted. Part of that lies with me, for sure, but Bungie isn't innocent either. It's as simple as that.

There used to be a time when I feel like Bungie has faith that the thing they were making was awesome, and that was enough to get people to play it. Now they seem, to me, to have very little faith in that, and instead rely on vague half-promises and grand marketing campaigns instead of actually telling us anything. I'll take <redacted> any day, as at least that was a half funny in joke that we could be reasonably sure would actually amount to something come launch, versus their talk of becoming legend and shitty pre-order weapons.

As I've said multiple times before, Destiny, in its current form just isn't a game for me. I've accepted that, and there's nothing wrong with Bungie making a game that's not for me. It's hard not to feel bitter about it, though, when the things they talk about sound incredible, while the things they deliver continue to be lackluster.

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I've said it before, but I think it's worth reiterating, I'm not as negative as I feel like maybe I come off here. I refrain from posting quite a bit when stuff like this comes up, because, ultimately, the conversation seems to play out the same every time. I've had a lot of fun with Destiny, I just don't anymore. I'm not sure if it's just because the new wore off or if the game is actively going in a direction I don't like. I truly have a hard time making that evaluation--I suspect it's perhaps a mix of both.

I still think that Halo Reach is the best game Bungie has ever made, and I'm not sure I'll ever feel differently at this point. I can admire their vision for Destiny, but I find that I'm becoming less and less interested in that particular vision. I want a single player experience that I can play while offline--I truly believe that the random encounters in Destiny can be neat, but none that I have ever personally experienced, or seen in a video, or read about online, have been cool enough to justify giving up a great single player campaign that doesn't require an always online connection. At the end of the day, that's down to personal taste, and again, maybe it just means Bungie isn't making games for me anymore. That sucks for me, but I'll live. Then again, maybe I'll be surprised, and Destiny 2 will be good enough to get me to come back, or they'll miraculously change their minds and give me the Halo Reach-esque game I actually want. Anything could happen, right? (:

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Here's the distinction I want to draw. Let's throw out Halo 2 or Halo 3 or ODST. Look back at Halo 1. That's a game that is completely NOT the game that was originally promised. Do you guys remember this game?

Halo was originally going to be a 3rd person shooter in a Tribes-esque style where you spawned in as a generic dude and - through the gear or vehicles you took and your own personal skill, became a class. I'm a warthog driver. I'm a sniper. I'm a front line assault trooper. There's a video showing one halo spartan running up to a covenant elite, and that elite drops his gun and raises his hands in surrender.

Early rumors about the server structure were that the game was going to be a "ringworld" of servers, where each server was a different map to fight on, and the two factions would wage war back and forth on two fronts. Win one map, and you could press though the far side of it to fight on the next map. Lose that one and you've been pushed back to the first. Meanwhile, since it's a ringworld, you would be fighting a simultaneous war fifty maps over, doing the same thing.

And Bungie came out and said that those things had changed. It was an FPS now. The server structure was all rumor. The focus was on single player and story now. They walked back the early design, disavowed the false rumors, and steered our expectations toward the path of truth.

Then Microsoft bought them and turned the PC game Halo into a console exclusive. It was a disaster, we all shouted! A travesty! A betrayal! And Bungie came back and said that yes, MS had bought them. Yes, the game would be a console shooter now. That it might be smaller than they had planned. But that it was still *their* game. They had creative control and they were still going to be telling the story they wanted to. In fact, they said, it's coming along great and looks really good. It's really fun. Their mantra was now "30 seconds of fun." Every 30 seconds, by itself, had to be fun. And they were doing just that.

Again, they responded to the playerbase with honesty and realistic expectations.

If this is your memory of the development of Halo 1, it's no wonder you're unhappy with the current communication level.

Unfortunately, very little of this actually happened (this way).

Your 'early rumors about the server structure'? I have NEVER heard those rumors in my life. And I spent a LOT of time paying attention to Bungie and Bungie marketing in those days - I even scanned almost every article written about Halo in any gaming press! Not only would I challenge you to point out a reference to those rumors in anything other than a forum somewhere... I'd challenge you to point out ANY mention of those rumors by ANY Bungie employee, official or unofficial, where they disavowed them.

The 3rd person Tribes-esque version? Yep, definitely existed. Were we PROMISED that Halo would be that game? Not by any stretch of any reasonable imagination. They described the game they were developing. Then they changed that development, and when it happened, they explained that they'd shifted. (The explanation for why they shifted came much, much later - years later. All we got at the time was "Halo is now a first-person shooter.") This idea that the announcement trailer was somehow a 'promise' of what we would be able to play is laughable - and would have been considered laughable by any 2000-era gamer. The fact that you can look back on that and call it a promise now (and not have anyone but me call you on it) says more about the shift in gamer attitudes than in game development.

And the 30 seconds of fun mantra? Jaime enunciated that idea for the first time in 2004 - more than 5 years after the time you're talking about. It was NOT the mantra of Bungie in 1999, or 2000, or 2001. That's your brain, mixing up cool things.

Here's what I believe. Bungie has nailed 'fun' enough times in a row that we get mad when there's a misfire. Marathon rocked. Myth rocked. (Oni rocked, but lots of people didn't notice. And anyone who played on a PS2 would call me a liar, and be right.) Halo rocked. So when Destiny came along, and Bungie said "we think this is going to be the best thing we've ever done", we took that as a contract. We had expectations for Destiny that were out of line with 'a new IP', if that IP had come from ANYONE ELSE - and Bungie didn't disabuse us of our excitement, because they were excited too. Then things went wrong (stuff like what Chris talked about in this presentation), and the game we got wasn't the game they expected to give us. And we were (justifiably) let down.

I just don't look at it as 'lying to us'. I look at it as "we're going to do our best to get back to where we thought we'd be" - something I think they really tried to do. I think they were under contract to Activision, which limited what they were allowed to say to us in any case. And I think they've been working super-hard for the past couple of years, trying to build the game they'd originally envisioned, within the confines of the situation they were in. Whether this is enough for you, or for any other fan, is a personal decision, and whatever you choose to take away is valid. Anyone who says "I no longer trust Bungie because of Destiny" is expressing a fair personal opinion - I just want to make sure it's based on facts, and not misremembered timelines.

I think we'll see a number of talks that come out of this, down the road, like Chris' talk, that explain some of the things that went wrong. (I think there are things that went wrong that will NEVER be shared with the fans, because they're internal issues and none of our business... but the actual technical mistakes that can be learned from? Those we'll get, eventually.)

I guess, in short, I see Bungie as a group of fundamentally good people, trying their hardest to make games we want to buy from them... as opposed to money-grubbing opportunists trying to capitalize on past success. (I also think those are both endpoints on a spectrum, and you can easily be somewhere in the middle. I'm not saying you think they're scum.)

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There was a huge shift in the culture of the company post Activision. Nearly everything you can say about Bungie before that no longer applies. Yes they want to make cool games, and yes they are talented, but pretty much everything else is now different.

There have been three Bungies: Chicago, MS, and Activision. The first two were pretty similar. The last one not so much.

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There was a huge shift in the culture of the company post Activision. Nearly everything you can say about Bungie before that no longer applies. Yes they want to make cool games, and yes they are talented, but pretty much everything else is now different.

There have been three Bungies: Chicago, MS, and Activision. The first two were pretty similar. The last one not so much.

Says someone on a forum somewhere, as if he knew it to be a certifiable fact. Your pronouncements bug the hell out of me, Cody.

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There was a huge shift in the culture of the company post Activision. Nearly everything you can say about Bungie before that no longer applies. Yes they want to make cool games, and yes they are talented, but pretty much everything else is now different.

There have been three Bungies: Chicago, MS, and Activision. The first two were pretty similar. The last one not so much.

Says someone on a forum somewhere, as if he knew it to be a certifiable fact. Your pronouncements bug the hell out of me, Cody.

I mean, this is just from my perspective. My opinion. But I think it's an informed one.

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There was a huge shift in the culture of the company post Activision. Nearly everything you can say about Bungie before that no longer applies. Yes they want to make cool games, and yes they are talented, but pretty much everything else is now different.

There have been three Bungies: Chicago, MS, and Activision. The first two were pretty similar. The last one not so much.

Says someone on a forum somewhere, as if he knew it to be a certifiable fact. Your pronouncements bug the hell out of me, Cody.

I mean, this is just from my perspective. My opinion. But I think it's an informed one.

By some measurements there have probably been a dozen different Bungies since we've been fans, and so what? Your statements imply that something fundamental is gone, which is precisely the stories ex-employees tend to tell after they're gone--especially if they didn't leave under good circumstances. I'm sure you've been informed by people who have that point of view, and there's probably some truth to it, but what I hate about you pushing this narrative under the guise of someone who has inside information is that you add to the difficulty for those current Bungie employees who might agree with some of our criticisms and may be at this very moment trying to make course corrections.

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There was a huge shift in the culture of the company post Activision. Nearly everything you can say about Bungie before that no longer applies. Yes they want to make cool games, and yes they are talented, but pretty much everything else is now different.

There have been three Bungies: Chicago, MS, and Activision. The first two were pretty similar. The last one not so much.

Says someone on a forum somewhere, as if he knew it to be a certifiable fact. Your pronouncements bug the hell out of me, Cody.

I mean, this is just from my perspective. My opinion. But I think it's an informed one.

By some measurements there have probably been a dozen different Bungies since we've been fans, and so what? Your statements imply that something fundamental is gone, which is precisely the stories ex-employees tend to tell after they're gone--especially if they didn't leave under good circumstances. I'm sure you've been informed by people who have that point of view, and there's probably some truth to it, but what I hate about you pushing this narrative under the guise of someone who has inside information is that you add to the difficulty for those current Bungie employees who might agree with some of our criticisms and may be at this very moment trying to make course corrections.

I made this statement without referencing anyone formerly at Bungie. It has nothing to do with any sort of information I have. All I need to make my statement is out there for everyone, you and me, to see. It's plainly clear if you have been a fan for a long time. I say it is an informed opinion because I have been following Bungie since 1994. Some other fans might not feel that way, but in my opinion it would be pretty hard to justify. Don't confuse this with any project I'm working on right now. I apologize if that's how it came off.

The proof is in the game, the marketing, and the fan engagement. And you're right in one way: who is no longer there is also indirect proof, but not nearly as meaningful given various reasons people might have to part ways.

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I hear what you're saying. My memories of early halo appear to be conflated with some later info, it seems. Your explanation, however, illustrates my overall point all the same: Halo was a 3rd person shooter at one point, and then - before launch - Bungie informed us that it was now an FPS. Something changed and they told us that it had changed before we bought the game.

This simply did not happen with Destiny. Things changed but we were never told they had changed until after Bungie had our money.

That's really the fundamental issue for me. I was led to believe one thing, and I spent money for that thing, and I got something different. And this bait and switch is a brand new experience for me when it comes to Bungie games. Bungie had not misled me before about - near as I can recall - any previous game. Not even Pimps at Sea.

It's not about whether or not Bungie is run by evil people. They obviously aren't. They're just normal people. Who used to communicate in an open and honest way, even if it could impact their sales. And now they're more marketing-savvy, which means they won't say anything that might impact sales, and will stretch the truth or lie by omission if it could improve sales. And I think that's shitty. But that's just me. And just my opinion. If bungie wants to win back my loyalty, they need to apologize for these tactics and change them. If they're happy to lose me, then they don't need to. I'm sure they're making plenty of sweet, sweet microtransaction money to the point where they've realized they make more cash with a slot machine than a video game, so I don't expect any apologies. Bungie doesn't need me. Heck, they may not even *want* me as a customer.

Now, as I say this, it's clear that Bungie has changed their communication since RoI came out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but RoI delivered on everything they said it would, right?

The Dawning was a great event that added real substance to the game, and that was under-advertised. It could have easily been staggered out over several updates because there was so much to do there.

So I'm looking to the future with a little hope, I suppose. Maybe Destiny will just be a small dark smear on an otherwise spotless record. Unfortunately, the only real lens with which we can judge the real quality of their messaging is one of hindsight and proper perspective, and we have neither yet.

Time will tell.

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And to be fair to the current debate, we weren't told how much had changed from the E3 presentation until we got the game.

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And to be fair to the current debate, we weren't told how much had changed from the E3 presentation until we got the game.

It was different stylistically, sure, but am I alone in thinking the E3 presentation is a pretty fair representation of the game, at least as far as features. We got dual-wielding, we got boarding, hell, we even got a cool Elite drop pod moment. I'm generally struggling to think of something from the E3 presentation that wasn't in the final game in some form.

My problem with Destiny isn't the small little shit like seeing ships fly down to drop off Guardians, or the "You see that mountain?" crap. My biggest problem is the repeated assertion that Destiny is totally a game that you can play on your own and have a great time with a fun campaign. Everything else is small change--shit changes during development, who cares that a ship doesn't fly down or we didn't go to Saturn in vanilla Destiny. I was expecting a game that I could play by myself, a game with a campaign that was worth playing, and that just wasn't true. Sure, that's a matter of opinion and taste, but I believe we were led to believe that Destiny would have a Halo style campaign, and that's definitely not the case.

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My problem with Destiny isn't the small little shit like seeing ships fly down to drop off Guardians, or the "You see that mountain?" crap. My biggest problem is the repeated assertion that Destiny is totally a game that you can play on your own and have a great time with a fun campaign. Everything else is small change--shit changes during development, who cares that a ship doesn't fly down or we didn't go to Saturn in vanilla Destiny. I was expecting a game that I could play by myself, a game with a campaign that was worth playing, and that just wasn't true. Sure, that's a matter of opinion and taste, but I believe we were led to believe that Destiny would have a Halo style campaign, and that's definitely not the case.

Totally understand your feelings in that regard, and that's a completely valid opinion to have. Most people who complain about changes had problems with the things you mentioned that you don't care about, which is why I brought up the Halo 2 E3 presentation. I actually think the comparison between the two is pretty valid because neither E3 presentation I think had large stuff change before launch, but people were upset that the feel and style that was presented wasn't 100% representative of the final product.

I also totally had a blast completing the Destiny campaign (and every campaign after that) by myself, and I still do. Is the in-game story fantastic in the original campaign? Not really. But I had a lot of fun. If you didn't then that's fine, I personally don't like onions.

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Totally understand your feelings in that regard, and that's a completely valid opinion to have. Most people who complain about changes had problems with the things you mentioned that you don't care about, which is why I brought up the Halo 2 E3 presentation. I actually think the comparison between the two is pretty valid because neither E3 presentation I think had large stuff change before launch, but people were upset that the feel and style that was presented wasn't 100% representative of the final product.

I can definitely understand the comparison you're making there. I never took issue with the E3 presentation from either game, but, again, I take issue with some of the things they said about Destiny--namely that campaign stuff. And again, sure, they technically didn't lie. You can totally play through the campaign by yourself, but I feel pretty safe in saying that most people wouldn't say it comes close to equaling any Halo campaign, which, although they may not have said it, I feel they definitely implied that's what we were getting.j

I also totally had a blast completing the Destiny campaign (and every campaign after that) by myself, and I still do. Is the in-game story fantastic in the original campaign? Not really. But I had a lot of fun. If you didn't then that's fine.

I had fun, too. Sure, the lack of story bugged me, and still does, but I also don't think the level and encounter design holds up to any Halo game, and that's what bums me out. Where's anything like Assault on the Control Room, where's Delta Halo, where's The Ark? I think a large part of this is that all of my favorite Halo levels have cool vehicle sections, and all the vehicles in Destiny are half-baked at best and downright awful at worst. It still blows my mind that the folks that created the Warthog and the Banshee didn't give us an cool vehicles to play with. But even disregarding vehicles, I don't think there are any encounters that can rival the best Halo had to offer, and it's a shame. With so many different enemy factions, there's a ton of potential for cool encounters, but Destiny just doesn't do anything there (for me). I played through the entire Destiny campaign feeling like it was all set up, and the first amazing encounter was just around the corner, and despite it being longer than any Halo, it was over before it ever felt like it got started and nothing truly cool happened.

Again, I realize that's just a matter of opinion and taste, but I seriously cannot remember more than a handful of specific encounters in Destiny, literally nothing stands out. One of my favorite moments is meeting the Cabal for the first time, and that's not even particularly interesting. The first encounter with the Vex could be cool, but that area is a painful mess to move around in, so that doesn't work.

I feel like a broken record now, but I definitely don't hate Destiny, and I definitely don't begrudge anyone for really loving it. I just don't think it's the game we were led to believe it was, and even over the last two years, I've become less and less interested in what it actually is, and what Bungie seemingly wants it to be. I have next to no interest in an always online game with encounters with random players in the world--I don't feel like sacrificing a good Halo style campaign for that is a good trade off, and I likely never will.

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I feel like a broken record now, but I definitely don't hate Destiny, and I definitely don't begrudge anyone for really loving it. I just don't think it's the game we were led to believe it was, and even over the last two years, I've become less and less interested in what it actually is, and what Bungie seemingly wants it to be. I have next to no interest in an always online game with encounters with random players in the world--I don't feel like sacrificing a good Halo style campaign for that is a good trade off, and I likely never will.

I DO think the part you have problems with will probably improve the most in future games, but if not there are plenty of awesome games by plenty of developers out there. Even for me Destiny is the game I always come back to, but I've played so many good games in the last couple of years with better single player campaigns. The gameplay is rarely as good and that's what brings me back to Destiny, but it's always nice to play an awesome single player game that I can put down afterwards (and maybe play again in a couple years).

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I DO think the part you have problems with will probably improve the most in future games . . .

I certainly hope Destiny 2 improves and changes enough that I'll want to come back. I have no plans of playing any more Destiny until the sequel, at which point I'll evaluate what that game seems to be and either buy it or skip it. The leaked stuff we read about last year sounds promising, but again, it was unverified leak, so who knows what, if any, of that stuff was true. I really like the world of Destiny, I like the moment to moment gameplay of Destiny, even if it's not as strong as Halo in my eyes, but I have real problems with the structure of Destiny.

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Mission structure is one of Destiny's biggest weaknesses. There's actually very little story or scripted events in something like Attack on the Control Room or Two Betrayals. But because they're something like an hour long you can be given an overall objective and happily push and push towards it with only very occasional prompts from Cortana. Plus, because the levels were long, there was time to include neat little moments.

The Marines getting dropped off in AotCR isn't some massive scripted event. It places a Warthog, a Tank, and like six marines. But it means the world to the feel of the level and its works because the level is long enough for them to matter. They only ever say, what, two or three lines of mission dialogue but we ended up protecting them and sheparding them and swapping them out into the right order and reloading if Sarge died.

The first few missions of Destiny were five minutes long, if that. What would I even do with tanks and aircraft and friendly AI units? There were only a couple of levels in vanilla Destiny that had enough meat on them to feel good.

I still love the attack on the House of Winter's Ketch and Kell. It made good use of the volcano section of Venus. You fought your way a good distance from point A to point B similar to a Halo level. You had to enter actual enemy territory like with a lot of Halo levels. And the music that built up in the way spiraling down to the up to the Ketch was amazing. The fight to the Vex Spire being guarded deep within the Cabal base was similarly good. It had us fight through a significant section of Mars. It had multiple successive objectives. It had that fun little moment where the Cabal ambush us by jetpacking right up to us directly after our Ghost speculates it being a trap, and the fight around the Spire could get tough on occasion.

I've always wish Destiny's missions were more like Strikes, and Strikes were more like Raids. Not necessarily in requiring the same fireteam sizes or puzzle solving, but longer missions give more time for story and neat encounters. Base gameplay is fine. Enemy factions are fine. Having missions be three minutes long? That's what needed / needs to be fixed!

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The Marines getting dropped off in AotCR isn't some massive scripted event. It places a Warthog, a Tank, and like six marines. But it means the world to the feel of the level and its works because the level is long enough for them to matter. They only ever say, what, two or three lines of mission dialogue but we ended up protecting them and sheparding them and swapping them out into the right order and reloading if Sarge died.

I can't believe I hadn't though of that. Friendly AI characters are sorely missed, now that I think about it. They add a lot of life to the game. I think I can see how Bungie wanted random encounters with other players and partying up to replace that, but in practice it doesn't work.

I still love the attack on the House of Winter's Ketch and Kell. It made good use of the volcano section of Venus. You fought your way a good distance from point A to point B similar to a Halo level. You had to enter actual enemy territory like with a lot of Halo levels. And the music that built up in the way spiraling down to the up to the Ketch was amazing.

That's actually a good mission that I had forgotten about, too. I think there's probably more good stuff like that buried in Destiny, but that's just it, it's buried. The campaign of Destiny is so segmented and aimless that the good stuff gets forgotten because it's stuck with a bunch of seemingly lazily constructed half missions and it all blends into one long, boring slog.

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Attack on the Control Room

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

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Attack on the Control Room

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

You can't go throwing tables at people, that's battery!

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Attack on the Control Room

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

You can't go throwing tables at people, that's battery!

Only if the table hit them! If not, it's just assault :-p

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Attack on the Control Room

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Oops! My bad. I obviously meant Assassination on the Console Ring.

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I don't like to talk about the red ring of death.

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I'm generally struggling to think of something from the E3 presentation that wasn't in the final game in some form.

Well, melee combos weren't there, but I'm not sure that really changes how you would play the game very much.

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I'm generally struggling to think of something from the E3 presentation that wasn't in the final game in some form.

Well, melee combos weren't there, but I'm not sure that really changes how you would play the game very much.

Also the Jackal shield wedge formation. It's nit-picky, but I was pretty disappointed it wasn't actually in the game.

-Disciple

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Also the Jackal shield wedge formation. It's nit-picky, but I was pretty disappointed it wasn't actually in the game.

-Disciple

I'm glad that it wasn't. The moment I saw them on-screen like that, I knew they were about to all get killed by a grenade or warthog. Jackals have no reason to stand close together, they aren't actually covering each other by doing that and it gets them less coverage of the battlefield. A canned action which serves no purpose but to make them easy to wipe out.

The 2003 E3 demo presented a neat style, but I thought the actual gameplay stuff being demo'd looked very questionable.

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I'm generally struggling to think of something from the E3 presentation that wasn't in the final game in some form.

Well, melee combos weren't there, but I'm not sure that really changes how you would play the game very much.

Also the Jackal shield wedge formation. It's nit-picky, but I was pretty disappointed it wasn't actually in the game.

-Disciple

Speaking of shields, we never saw the Elites' handheld shield outside of the 2000 E3 demo.

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Elites lost their tails, and energy shields. The Assault rifle had it's grenade launcher replaced by a flashlight. The human sword never made it in game. AI flora and Fauna. Driving continuously around the whole halo in one shot.

Just some things that were teased in screen shots and other stuff but never made it.

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Driving continuously around the whole halo in one shot.

I remember telling a roommate how awesome Halo was going to be & citing that as an example. >sigh<

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Also, another Bungie lie: AI units never surrender. Pretty sad from the company that promised us and delivered upon Oni multiplayer... ;)

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Also, another Bungie lie: AI units never surrender. Pretty sad from the company that promised us and delivered upon Oni multiplayer... ;)

And the patch for Marathon 2.

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I'm generally struggling to think of something from the E3 presentation that wasn't in the final game in some form.

Well, melee combos weren't there, but I'm not sure that really changes how you would play the game very much.

Also the Jackal shield wedge formation. It's nit-picky, but I was pretty disappointed it wasn't actually in the game.

-Disciple

IIRC there was a jackal shield-wedge (phalanx formation) during one of the final "drive a warthog against a timer" levels, but you ran them over pretty much the moment you saw them, so it wasn't meaningful in any way. That might have been halo 3 though. it's been a while.

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I just want to say, as a software developer & bungie fan, I absolutely loved that Chris Butcher took the time to share this. I wish there was more Butcher time.

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I just want to say, as a software developer & bungie fan, I absolutely loved that Chris Butcher took the time to share this. I wish there was more Butcher time.

He's fantastic :) If you haven't already, you should check out the old Bungie Podcast that featured him as the special guest. Lots of great insights in that one.

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Asset Systems and Scalability (Destiny)

Cool. Saw this yesterday then forgot about it... Will watch.

TLDW:

Super Facinating!

Super Facinating!

Super Facinating!

Super Facinating!

Super Facinating!

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

I'm never telling you about the near screw ups

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

Agreed 100%

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

One Other Thing...

On a related note...

I have seen it

One Other Thing...

Agreed.

Agreed.

Agreed.

I take offense to your statements

I take offense to your statements

I take offense to your statements

I take offense to your statements

Tell me more about chairs pls.

+1

Tell me more about chairs pls.

Tell me more about chairs pls.

If I must

Bonus points for hitting 2 birds with 1 stone XD

A Stone you say?

Is there any way you can tie this to ScarJo? lol

Well, this got weird

Wasn't she tied to a chair in Avengers?

This research at work is getting sketchy

The best I can do

You're setting a dangerous precident by humouring me ;p

Time for a trip down memory Lane

Cranbrook also has a few museums on its land

chairs.bungie.org

Birds? Le Corbusier aka The Crow

A much better image than Jobs

That chair looks like if someone said to me...

That chair looks like if someone said to me...

+1

DBO: We know more about chairs than you do.

DBO: We know more about chairs than you do.

If I must

I take offense to your statements

I take offense to your statements

I take offense to your statements

RIP Mary Tyler Moore

RIP Mary Tyler Moore

"Everyone I know Goes away in the end"

"Everyone I know Goes away in the end"

This is amazing

This is amazing

Counterpoints in the dark

Counterpoints in the dark