One Other Thing... (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, January 05, 2017, 16:16 (2878 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by Ragashingo, Thursday, January 05, 2017, 17:00

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...