One Other Thing... (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Friday, January 06, 2017, 17:47 (2658 days ago) @ Ragashingo

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.