Is Bungie trapped between a rock and a hard place?

Those of you who are able to traverse the saltwaters of the Destiny Reddit may have already seen this, but for those who haven't (quoted with formatting and all)...

According to Jason Schreier of Kotaku there was a big reboot of the development of Destiny 2 sometime in early 2016

Jason Schreier recently said this on the DTR Podcast. Here is the link to what he said: https://youtu.be/A_Z0RgwFnAc?t=14m53s

Here is the exact quote for people that can't listen to the full podcast:

I think that it (Destiny 2) was made in a relatively short period of time. There was a big reboot of Destiny 2 at some point of early 2016. There had been a previous director who was directing the game before Luke Smith (who's the current director) took over. So that guy was kind of put aside and Luke Smith took over. I believe that was in April of 2016 but I might be misremembering. Don't hold me to that exact line. So if you think about it that way then they didn't really have a ton of time. It had been a 16 months period between the reboot and when the game finally shipped.

He also talked about how Eververse came to existence. He said:

What Bungie decided was we can't do this any more this is too hard for us to do (referring to releasing a DLC every few months) the tools that we're working with are really hard to deal with. it's hard for us to make this much content. it's just hard to make content in general. And they said we're going to do a smaller or drip feed of smaller stuff and we're going to put up the Eververse and make money that way, and Activision said okay. it was a part of their renegotiated deal and they got to a point where they didn't have to be cranking up so much content

This is just unbelievable and it really goes to show that Bungie does not learn for their mistakes.

If rebooting the development of Destiny 1 didn't work out well fot you then why the hell did you guys think that it would be an amazing idea to reboot the development of Destiny 2??

I don't care that they rebooted -AGAIN- because, well, we've had that discussion. We've had our wonderings of what in the world is going on within Bungie. We've criticized and critiqued our thoughts upon this _______ game to sort out our frustrations and concerns with it. Some play, becuse we know deep down that like Vader, there is good in it. Also... shoot, no one has gunplay like Bungie, for better and for worse.

As for Eververse... eh. It only makes me wonder even more then I already have. What was designed because of want, and what was designed because of requirement?

Bungie is contractually obligated to make Destiny for a set amount of time. Furthermore the ambitions, requirements and expectations they set upon themselves did not survive first contact beyond their wildest dreams.

Reading/Listening to all this I find myself asking; Did Bungie trip over it's own ambitions? Is Bungie trapped between a rock and a hard place? Did Bungie bite off more then it could chew, and now it is contractually obligated to swallow?

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To put it simply, I think Bungie wanted to make a 130% game and it turned out to be 80% but fans were expecting a 110% game. Everyone was disappointed but by no means was it a terrible game, especially compared to the majority of other games.

The biggest problem with Destiny is that Bungie has a history of making freaking amazing games.

Oh, also contracts can be great, but also suck sometimes.

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This is pretty good evidence that Bungie did in fact renegotiate their deal with Activision. I would be very curious to know more about that.

I don't think the reboots are bad inherently, but they are probably a big part of the reason why Bungie cannot deliver content at the pace many consumers expect from them.

This is nothing new for Bungie. Halo 2 was rebooted 18 months out from release. Granted, it's not ideal, but it's nothing new.

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I have a theory that RoI was actually content from the "Scrapped" version of D2 which was hurriedly backported to D1 to stall for time.

It certainly goes a fair way towards explaining the weird relationship D2 seems to have with the events of RoI.

That would also explain why they couldn't make it available for PS3 and Xbox 360.

I would have put it at the beginning, but I'd have had Efrideet introduced as part of the actual story, and have her teach your guardian how to use the light "differently" to explain the changed subclasses and abilities. They made all this fuss about her hanging out in the Jovians and learning "New ways" to use her light and then nothing came of it.

Then, after we've blown up the replicator, we cruise on back to the tower just in time for Homecoming to happen, and the rest unfolds pretty much the same way.

It reminds me of the SIVA symbol in some of the concept art, and the way it's mentioned on Nessus, but not really addressed in any way.
It is possible that RoI was intended to be a bridge between the two games while The Red War was being polished and built, but due to the 2016 reboot, it became just another monster-of-the-week DLC, never to be relevant again due to a shift in the game's focus. Four studios working on the game explains the quick reboot for launch (and the surprising oversights, missing content, and regressions). If everything had gone smoothly, those four studios would have been pumping out a steady stream of content, CoD-style...

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One of my larger disappointments of Destiny and Destiny 2 is that the stories haven't taken a lot of advantage of each other across content releases. So, maybe this won't happen at all, but:

Since Destiny 1, we've been every so slowly been introduced to the concept of Warminds via our occasional interactions with Rasputin and his primary data center in the Seraphim Vault in Old Russia.
Rasputin reached out across the solar system in the Last Array mission early in Destiny 1 and infiltrated the network of Clovis Bray's Dust Palace on Mars later in D1.
SIVA, which was original conceived as a super adaptive self-sustaining nanotech construction aid for humanity's Golden Age colonization effort, was designed and perfected by Clovis Bray on Mars.
The Iron Lords who helped establish the beginnings of The City beneath the Traveler heard about SIVA and sought it out only to be destroyed by it (possibly at the behest of Rasputin). Only a few Iron Lords survived.
Some 500 years later the Fallen House of Devils found the SIVA replication chamber in Old Russia and experimented with it enough to make themselves into a real military threat for a short time until the Guardians of the City defeated them.
In Destiny 2, there are a few rumors and references to SIVA, but more importantly, something is up with the Warminds and Rasputin in particular. Ikora speculates that Rasputin is unusually quiet and that perhaps he has been cutoff from much of the Warmind network since the Red War.
Most recently, we learned that Rasputin, Charlemagne (another Warmind from the Golden Age who is believed to be based in the Clovis Bray facility on Mars) and Ana Bray (a Guardian with possible ties to the Bray Family) will be a part of the Gods of Mars expansion.
There have been a few hints and references to Ana Bray in Destiny 2 (a secret scan location in the new Tower, our Ghost telling us that someone with the name Bray scrubbed files from the Warmind vault on Io) that feel somewhat similar to the hints and references to Osiris that also peppered D2 prior to Curse of Osiris.

My hope is that the Gods of Mars expansion will delve back into the stories of Rasputin, SIVA, and possibly even touch a little bit more on the fate of the Iron Lords. And that rather all this being the result of some emergency reboot, this was at least a little bit more of a planned progression.

If nothing else, there were references to Charlemagne on Mars as being part of Destiny 1's mission structure as far back as even the initial Pathways out of Darkness ViDoc way back when. Maybe we're looking at a story thread that was put on hold years ago finally getting to see the light of day?

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I honestly think it's only a matter of time before Jason Jones steps away from Bungie again.

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What is he even doing there right now anyway? I don't mean that in a derisive way. I'm honestly curious. Doesn't he usually develop the "next big thing" and then pretty much hang back while it runs its course, working on the next "next big thing" in the meantime?

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Yes. And word is he’s doing just that right now.

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Yes. And word is he’s doing just that right now.

It would make sense. I mean, it's pretty much known what Destiny is and will be at this point. Well past needing "the idea guy," surely.

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I think the D1->D2 transition had limitations from two different teams working on two different projects.

Recall ROI was made by a separate team then D2, and somewhat concurrently. The innovations in ROI where then limited by engine and technical limitations that they worked around instead of engine development.

D2 seemed to take most of the complaints from D1 pre-ROI and AOT and try to move on from there.
That is where the two groups kind of separated, and this is why most of the innovative things from ROI AND AOT didn't make it into D2 (Strike modifiers, armor embellishments, etc).

D2 also had technical goals for PVP and PVE from D1. The first was to make nightfalls challenging without turning them into hidden camp fests. The time limit is the big example of this. Also note that all of the bosses in D2 have stages. We don't have large bosses that just sit on their stage and shoot all the time, interspersed with mob spawns. There is lots more movement.

The second was to improve PVP. At the time, the PVP scene was dominated by "sweaties" where people progressively banned exotics, OHK grenades and special/heavy ammo. So D2 slowed the abilities, eliminated OHKs, and tempered exotics.

Finally, they made a bunch of long requested QoL improvements like maps, no sprint cool down, individual shaders for everything and eliminating most of the currencies and moving to tokens.

I think the main issue is that D2 didn't take into account all the good work done on the later D1 expansions, and the marketing only sees it in relation to D1 up to TTk. From a gameplay standpoint the new raid is good, the new raid weapon is interesting, but for all the good things added to D2, we lost a number of things from D1, and without that D1 progress people quickly tired of it.

How hard would it have been to include the old maps into D2? To make the old armor perks like extra orbs on headshots or longer range grenade throws into armor mods? To have NPC characters in more that the first mission? To let people keep their stores of Exotics?

Too much of Destiny (and our persistent characters that were supposed to grow over 10 years) seemed to be thrown by the wayside in the move to D2, and that lessened the impact of all the good improvements of D2. Then you add on all the minor annoyances of D2 such as broken RNG, unrewarding token drops in raids, and disappointing lost sectors and you get the current level of salt being spread around.

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I agree with what you've said here. It's a shame that so much was lost in the transition. Also, several of the changes simply didn't pan out, especially the PvP shift. I know the changes were meant to make the PvP better and more fun for both professional and casual players alike, but the end result is an awkward pvp game that is nothing at all like the pvp of D1, doesn't gel nicely with the rest of the game, and feels like a slow and cumbersome squad based tactics game with the occasional absurd OHK of supers. It's not at all balanced, to the point where I've completely abandoned my hunter which I'd mained since day 1 of D1.

That's helped me to stop playing Destiny 2, because I have no connection to my character anymore. This is not the hero I played through the last several years. This is my alt. A warlock who was created purely so I could say I knew firsthand how bad the warlock jump was. Joke's on me, I suppose, as they now own the only blink.

Either way, instead of Becoming Legend, my Hunter Became Garbage. It was not a fun trip, and I regret my purchase. I've also lost faith in Bungie to fix it. It's clear that there are many passionate people who care about games and gamers at Bungie, but I don't think those people are in charge. The incredible art and sound of Destiny is wasted on mediocre, shallow gameplay with a sub-par plot, uninspired, unfunny writing, and a pvp game that would have been compared unfavorably to Tribes 2.

That Bungie made this game stings all the more. The company of Marathon, Halo, Pathways, Myth, and Oni is now a company of microtransactions wagging the dog, all dressed up as a slot machine timesink rather than a fun romp you want to repeat over and over for the sheer joy of it.

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Given how often we seem to get post-facto news about game development being "rebooted" it's probably time to stop automatically assuming it's a huge deal that necessarily rips games asunder. Some games handle it well, some games don't. At this point "there was a reboot of the game during its development" is practically synonymous with "the game was developed."

I remember when news of the Activision contract came out most people here were extremely confident that there would be no negative effects. "Bungie's experience with Microsoft means this isn't their first rodeo, they know what they're doing now, they'll retain 100% creative freedom and license and Activision will just write them a $500 billion check and leave them alone." Now, of course, Activision's influence is blamed for everything from microtransactions to Marty's firing to unfavorable RNG rolls and Bungie is doomed to this Sisyphean fate of grinding out disappointing Destiny installments.

Takeaways:
1. Stop getting bamboozled
2. Don't get bamboozled anymore
3. Emotionally investing yourself in a game company is risky, but if you need to do it, pick one that isn't basically a subsidiary of Activision. I recommend Sega AM2

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A lot of those things aren't directly Activision's fault, though.

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A lot of those things aren't directly Activision's fault, though.

No. From what I have been told, Destiny 1's problems were a combination of two things:

1. Poor tools
2. Jason Jones' indecision.

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Given how often we seem to get post-facto news about game development being "rebooted" it's probably time to stop automatically assuming it's a huge deal that necessarily rips games asunder. Some games handle it well, some games don't. At this point "there was a reboot of the game during its development" is practically synonymous with "the game was developed."

I mean, basically every game is 'rebooted' during the concept stage. Many people consider Bioshock Infinite a success, and that game was infamously rebooted.

The problem is when the reboot isn't a complete one. They weren't throwing stuff out and starting anew. They were using existing things and cobbling them together in a different way, and saving already made stuff for expansions. If you are going to reboot the game, you need TIME. Too bad Bungie can't go back to the days when their release date was "when it's done".

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Many people consider Bioshock Infinite a success, and that game was infamously rebooted.

Many people need to have their brains look at. That game is trash.

Too bad Bungie can't go back to the days when their release date was "when it's done".

I've often wondered about this. I wonder how Bungie feels now about their deal with Activision. They bought themselves back from Microsoft to have the freedom to control their company, and to ostensibly work on games that aren't Halo. It feels like all they did was lock themselves into a different IP with heavier chains on their ankles. Maybe selling Destiny as a trilogy with a ten year plan was too aggressive?

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Every time someone complains about microtransactions or lootcrates, they mention it's OK so long as it's only cosmetic. From what I could tell, Eververse only supplies shaders, ships, ghosts, landspeeders, etc., so why is it so despised?

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I think it's more to do with the way those microtransactions are presented, e.g. The Dawning, which is a huge event that exists pretty much entirely to advertise new MTX to the end user. Gamers don't mind MTX in theory, but they do when they're paraded directly into (and through) their gaming experience. MTX work best when they're kept mostly out of sight from the gamers who do not want to engage with them. Otherwise, gamers feel like they're being denied access to certain items because they don't want to pay up. Whether that's true or not, it's the way gamers feel about it, and the last thing you want as a developer is to leave your customers with a negative feeling about your product.

Loot boxes are another topic entirely. Don't even get me started. The ESRB ought to wake up and crack down on those things before the government steps in and does it for them. Tell me, how is a loot box different from a slot machine, apart from the nature of the reward being offered?

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Yeah I don't want to open a can of worms around lootboxes.

With Eververse, the entirety of my experience with it has been "Oh I have a bright engram, guess I gotta go talk to Claudia Black instead of the cryptarch." I can see where you're coming from though. I'm the kind of guy that played Candy Crush until some ridiculous level without ever being tempted to buy more lives.

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I don't actually mind the Dawning type events, but a lot of people do. It's all about presentation. Fundamentally, those events aren't doing anything different from the status quo, and nothing really changes as a consequence of their existence, but players basically just don't like being led by the hand into the MTX storefront.

I can see how that creates a predicament for Bungie, who have an active and vested interest in bringing as many people into the storefront as possible, but dem's the breaks.

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I think it's more to do with the way those microtransactions are presented, e.g. The Dawning, which is a huge event that exists pretty much entirely to advertise new MTX to the end user.

Wait... what Dawning are you talking about? I've done pretty much everything the dawning has to offer and I've never gotten the feeling like I'm be paraded to Eververse. I honested don't understand what is the big deal. I mean, she has a couple more items that you can get. Heck, I picked up the slippery emote because it was fun. And yes, I picked it up with dust I earned from playing Destiny. I still don't understand what the hate is about it. Yeah, you can hate the MTX, but don't hate the other things that are given away for playing a game that is awesome to play.

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Which is probably a good thing, actually.

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This subreddit is making me thirsty!

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- No text -

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I think it's more to do with the way those microtransactions are presented, e.g. The Dawning, which is a huge event that exists pretty much entirely to advertise new MTX to the end user.

Wait... what Dawning are you talking about? I've done pretty much everything the dawning has to offer and I've never gotten the feeling like I'm be paraded to Eververse.

...I'm not sure how you can say that. I'm not sure how anyone could say that.

The entire end-game level up mechanism has been hijacked into a promotional opportunity for Eververse.

When you earn enough XP for a level, you used to either ding, or get a mote, an in-game currency that could be exchanged either for in-game items or other in-game currency, in a system that was entirely separate from the isolated Eververse economy, that had its own currency and its own items.

Now, every level ding is an engram that requires going to Eververse to decode, reminding everyone that Eververse exists, and there is stuff you can only get there. And if you don't get it by luck, well you can pay to increase your chances (loot boxes).

Illuminated engrams are basically just free loot boxes.

I'm seriously considering sharding all my illuminated engrams rather than going to Eververse... ever again.

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I'm seriously considering sharding all my illuminated engrams rather than going to Eververse... ever again.

Bungie, it takes a lot to break this man and you've gone and does it!

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Well that first sentence got me to understand it. I still don't care, but I understand it. Maybe that's why I don't play Destiny 2 very often.

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Well that first sentence got me to understand it. I still don't care, but I understand it. Maybe that's why I don't play Destiny 2 very often.

I also must admit that it doesn't affect me personally-- I am not tempted to make real purchases. The only things I've ever "bought" from Eververse, either in D1 or D2, are either the freebies like Illuminated Engrams, or stuff you can buy with the leftover virtual currencies-- silver dust and bright dust.

But I object to being routed through the out-of-game "store" to redeem in-game, in-universe items, and I object to being made to feel bad about interacting with Claudia Black. That's just unfair.

I also think it's setting up perverse incentives for Bungie to spend time building the equivalent of horse armor because it's more profitable to do so.

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I also think it's setting up perverse incentives for Bungie to spend time building the equivalent of horse armor because it's more profitable to do so.

Those were good times. Times when people mocked horse armor even though it's exactly the kind of DLC they now say is acceptable.

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I think it's more to do with the way those microtransactions are presented, e.g. The Dawning, which is a huge event that exists pretty much entirely to advertise new MTX to the end user.

Wait... what Dawning are you talking about? I've done pretty much everything the dawning has to offer and I've never gotten the feeling like I'm be paraded to Eververse.

...I'm not sure how you can say that. I'm not sure how anyone could say that.

I say that because what does the dawning have to do with Eververse? I'm honestly curious, because the entirety of the dawning has been mostly spent with Ikora or off on a planet.

The entire end-game level up mechanism has been hijacked into a promotional opportunity for Eververse.

When you earn enough XP for a level, you used to either ding, or get a mote, an in-game currency that could be exchanged either for in-game items or other in-game currency, in a system that was entirely separate from the isolated Eververse economy, that had its own currency and its own items.

Now, every level ding is an engram that requires going to Eververse to decode, reminding everyone that Eververse exists, and there is stuff you can only get there. And if you don't get it by luck, well you can pay to increase your chances (loot boxes).

I understand the coupling of Eververse and an in-game vendor is seen as a step in the wrong directions and MT creep. I get that. To me personally, I have never had a problem with MT's. I'm sure there are others that do. I just think that there is a lot of people saying that Eververse is 100% evil incarnate on Destiny 2. I for one have never touched MT's and use Eververse like every other single vendor in D2 because without the MT's she is identical to every other vendor. I also have never had a problem with the compulsion to acquire every item and thus I haven't felt the need to spend money to get the items I don't have.

Illuminated engrams are basically just free loot boxes.

If you are going that route then you might as well say that every engram is a free loot box. And if you have that mentality then you need to get out of Destiny.

I guess it all depends on willpower. To me, the debate right now is that MT's have gone from a stand alone booth anyone can visit to a booth that has been coupled with an in-game vendor that people visit on a regular basis. I don't care that I visit her more because the other difference is that I can actually purchase the stuff she is selling now with in-game currency and not money.

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I say that because what does the dawning have to do with Eververse? I'm honestly curious, because the entirety of the dawning has been mostly spent with Ikora or off on a planet.

You know what? I hadn't really thought about it, but you might be right on that count, at least as far as being directed to Eververse explicitly. I would say that it is related, in that Dawning items can be purchased at Eververse, but I don't recall anything popping up directing me to actually go there.

I also have never had a problem with the compulsion to acquire every item and thus I haven't felt the need to spend money to get the items I don't have.

Same. I am somewhat interested in getting as many of the exotics as I can, just because I can dismantle those and get them back easily, so I'm not obligated to actually keep them all on hand. But trying to get all the ghosts or sparrows would just be an absurd proposition. I'd never have space for them.

the other difference is that I can actually purchase the stuff she is selling now with in-game currency and not money.

That's true, and it's a difference I hadn't really thought about until you spelled it out. Personally, I only buy things from her that I really think enhance the look I'm going for on a certain build, and I usually have enough bright dust from just playing to be able to afford those occasional items. Never spent a cent of actual money, and yet I've been able to get every Eververse item I've wanted in D2. Including a Dawning chest piece which FINALLY made my Dawnblade setup not look like he was wearing old rags he found in an alley.

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I say that because what does the dawning have to do with Eververse? I'm honestly curious, because the entirety of the dawning has been mostly spent with Ikora or off on a planet.

You know what? I hadn't really thought about it, but you might be right on that count, at least as far as being directed to Eververse explicitly. I would say that it is related, in that Dawning items can be purchased at Eververse, but I don't recall anything popping up directing me to actually go there.

The first thing you have to do is go to her to get a Dawning engram. The Milestone things (the Mayhem Milestone then the Strikes Milestone) that relate to the Dawning reward you with Dawning engrams that require you to go to her. Those engrams are also the only way to get the Dawning armor pieces. Ikora's gifts will only give you ships, sparrows, ghosts, and class items, but not the armor. Additionally, you only get a single Dawning engram per account for each Milestone. You can't get them with all three characters, only the first character to complete the milestone. The rest will just give you the Dawning gift like Ikora's thing.

Unless they make it so that you can't get duplicates from the Dawning engram (I'd be extremely surprised if they did that, given how everything else in the game works), you'd have to be extremely lucky to get all the Dawning armor without buying engrams.

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Unless they make it so that you can't get duplicates from the Dawning engram (I'd be extremely surprised if they did that, given how everything else in the game works), you'd have to be extremely lucky to get all the Dawning armor without buying engrams.

Every piece of Dawning armor has been for sale. A complete set is trivial to obtain. I melt almost everything I get from eververse so I have a massive stack of dust currency or whatever it’s called. Never spent a dime.

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Unless they make it so that you can't get duplicates from the Dawning engram (I'd be extremely surprised if they did that, given how everything else in the game works), you'd have to be extremely lucky to get all the Dawning armor without buying engrams.

Every piece of Dawning armor has been for sale. A complete set is trivial to obtain. I melt almost everything I get from eververse so I have a massive stack of dust currency or whatever it’s called. Never spent a dime.

Sure, I do too. But what if you want the ships AND the armor? You're kinda fucked. You can't keep both. You need the dust. Combine that with the fact that Dawning gifts don't even give you dust to begin with, and players literally can't collect all the things they want without throwing down money. Not to mention that Dawning armor is more expensive than the rest of the armor on offer for dust.

It's not anywhere near as trivial as you're dismissing it as being.

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Unless they make it so that you can't get duplicates from the Dawning engram (I'd be extremely surprised if they did that, given how everything else in the game works), you'd have to be extremely lucky to get all the Dawning armor without buying engrams.

Every piece of Dawning armor has been for sale. A complete set is trivial to obtain. I melt almost everything I get from eververse so I have a massive stack of dust currency or whatever it’s called. Never spent a dime.

Sure, I do too. But what if you want the ships AND the armor? You're kinda fucked. You can't keep both. You need the dust. Combine that with the fact that Dawning gifts don't even give you dust to begin with, and players literally can't collect all the things they want without throwing down money. Not to mention that Dawning armor is more expensive than the rest of the armor on offer for dust.

It's not anywhere near as trivial as you're dismissing it as being.

Wait. People have to choose what they want to pursue? They can only use the arcade tickets they've collected to redeem a few of the items behind the counter rather than all of them? This is insanity!

Sorry, but I cannot get upset about this. You're arguing for a hypothetical user here. I feel like lots of people are doing this. "Think of the poor guy who HAS to collect everything and wont be able to. He's going to HAVE to shell out money for it!" You just told me you are sitting on loads of dust and don't feel tempted. Most people in this thread have said they've never felt the urge to buy from eververse but they argue for that poor other dude who has to have whatever bits and bobbles are available and use him as a rhetorical device to justify this narrative that Bungie is sleazy. It feels really disingenuous. I'm by no means a Bungie apologist, but I really don't get this one.

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Unless they make it so that you can't get duplicates from the Dawning engram (I'd be extremely surprised if they did that, given how everything else in the game works), you'd have to be extremely lucky to get all the Dawning armor without buying engrams.

Every piece of Dawning armor has been for sale. A complete set is trivial to obtain. I melt almost everything I get from eververse so I have a massive stack of dust currency or whatever it’s called. Never spent a dime.

Sure, I do too. But what if you want the ships AND the armor? You're kinda fucked. You can't keep both. You need the dust. Combine that with the fact that Dawning gifts don't even give you dust to begin with, and players literally can't collect all the things they want without throwing down money. Not to mention that Dawning armor is more expensive than the rest of the armor on offer for dust.

It's not anywhere near as trivial as you're dismissing it as being.

Wait. People have to choose what they want to pursue? They can only use the arcade tickets they've collected to redeem a few of the items behind the counter rather than all of them? This is insanity!

Sorry, but I cannot get upset about this. You're arguing for a hypothetical user here. I feel like lots of people are doing this. "Think of the poor guy who HAS to collect everything and wont be able to. He's going to HAVE to shell out money for it!" You just told me you are sitting on loads of dust and don't feel tempted. Most people in this thread have said they've never felt the urge to buy from eververse but they argue for that poor other dude who has to have whatever bits and bobbles are available and use him as a rhetorical device to justify this narrative that Bungie is sleazy. It feels really disingenuous. I'm by no means a Bungie apologist, but I really don't get this one.

Everything you’re saying is totally fair. I would just point out that it is possible to not feel tempted to shell out real money while still being thoroughly turned off by Bungie’s attempts to tempt us. At least, that’s where I land.

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Everything you’re saying is totally fair. I would just point out that it is possible to not feel tempted to shell out real money while still being thoroughly turned off by Bungie’s attempts to tempt us. At least, that’s where I land.

This is fair. I just feel like D2's implementation of Eververse is far superior to the D1 version because I actually have the chance to pick up the occasional thing that catches my fancy. In D1, it was pretty much unobtainable. Sure, it is more in my face, but its also not exclusive to those willing to part with their money.

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Everything you’re saying is totally fair. I would just point out that it is possible to not feel tempted to shell out real money while still being thoroughly turned off by Bungie’s attempts to tempt us. At least, that’s where I land.

This is fair. I just feel like D2's implementation of Eververse is far superior to the D1 version because I actually have the chance to pick up the occasional thing that catches my fancy. In D1, it was pretty much unobtainable. Sure, it is more in my face, but its also not exclusive to those willing to part with their money.

Maybe I'm missing something. But in D1 we had the silver dust vendor kiosk where we could straight up buy pieces we were missing anytime we wanted. Plus once we unlocked items they were removed from the loot pool. How is D2 better? In D1 we had kiosks that unlocked the special ghosts, ships and sparrows we received from those events. I am baffled that you feel D2 has a better system.

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Maybe I'm missing something. But in D1 we had the silver dust vendor kiosk where we could straight up buy pieces we were missing anytime we wanted. Plus once we unlocked items they were removed from the loot pool. How is D2 better? In D1 we had kiosks that unlocked the special ghosts, ships and sparrows we received from those events. I am baffled that you feel D2 has a better system.

We got the Silver Dust Kiosk 3 months after Rise of Iron, and that was still limited to certain items - Exotic Weapon Ornaments and Emotes. Otherwise you used Silver Dust to get old armor out of engrams at Cosmetic Power drops. And only certain items were removed from the Loot Pool - those that had a Kiosk slot.

Totally in favor of bringing back more Kiosks and Collections, but the rotating selection of Bright Dust items is more robust than what we got in D1.

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Everything you’re saying is totally fair. I would just point out that it is possible to not feel tempted to shell out real money while still being thoroughly turned off by Bungie’s attempts to tempt us. At least, that’s where I land.

This is fair. I just feel like D2's implementation of Eververse is far superior to the D1 version because I actually have the chance to pick up the occasional thing that catches my fancy. In D1, it was pretty much unobtainable. Sure, it is more in my face, but its also not exclusive to those willing to part with their money.

Maybe I'm missing something. But in D1 we had the silver dust vendor kiosk where we could straight up buy pieces we were missing anytime we wanted. Plus once we unlocked items they were removed from the loot pool. How is D2 better? In D1 we had kiosks that unlocked the special ghosts, ships and sparrows we received from those events. I am baffled that you feel D2 has a better system.

This is totally off the cuff with nothing factual to back it up, but I might guess that the D2 Eververse has so much more stuff in it, that it’s less obvious to any single one of us how much stuff we’re missing/haven’t got yet.

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This is totally off the cuff with nothing factual to back it up, but I might guess that the D2 Eververse has so much more stuff in it, that it’s less obvious to any single one of us how much stuff we’re missing/haven’t got yet.

I'm sure you are 100% right on this. There's TONS of Eververse stuff. I'm just baffled that we don't have kiosks to unlock items we've earned already. I really feel that Bungie forgot everything that they learned past TTK for D2.

I received a duplicate of a Dawning sparrow today. The weird thing is that this one was a 150 speed, my first one was 160 speed. That's just straight up dumb.

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I received a duplicate of a Dawning sparrow today. The weird thing is that this one was a 150 speed, my first one was 160 speed. That's just straight up dumb.

I think these random perks on specific sparrows (and ghosts) is probably why we don't have kiosks for stuff. I dismantled a bunch of dupes last night - but they weren't really dupes. They were all the same sparrows/ghosts, but they had different perks. There's no easy way to put those into a kiosk, unless you 1) have lots of variants (pain for storage), or 2) allow some sort of customization when you pull it back out (seems SUPER-unlikely).

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“Pullqble” loot (Festival of the Lost Ghosts) in D1 had a material cost and pulled a random roll. Same thing with the items you could repull from the books, like Iron Lord armor.

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This is fair. I just feel like D2's implementation of Eververse is far superior to the D1 version because I actually have the chance to pick up the occasional thing that catches my fancy. In D1, it was pretty much unobtainable. Sure, it is more in my face, but its also not exclusive to those willing to part with their money.

Maybe I'm missing something. But in D1 we had the silver dust vendor kiosk where we could straight up buy pieces we were missing anytime we wanted. Plus once we unlocked items they were removed from the loot pool. How is D2 better? In D1 we had kiosks that unlocked the special ghosts, ships and sparrows we received from those events. I am baffled that you feel D2 has a better system.

This is totally off the cuff with nothing factual to back it up, but I might guess that the D2 Eververse has so much more stuff in it, that it’s less obvious to any single one of us how much stuff we’re missing/haven’t got yet.

Would it be worthwhile to get factual? Or analyze data?

I was hoping that we might find out more about the upcoming vault solution today, in a THAB. I'm hoping for some real details about that. Even if today had just been as simple as a rough target date (please, give us something...anything) and the rest of the specific detail comes next week when everyone is back in the office? I'm hoping the date is rather soon and not far off into the future or pushed out until the next DLC drop.

I'd love it if the vault solution involves Kiosks like we received around Rise of Iron. The Silver Dust store and kiosks were so helpful that it is easy to forget that we didn't have them for quite a bit of the life of Destiny 1.

Getting back to the topic, has anyone come by a listing of all of the Season Locked items yet?
Prior to Season 1 ending, I transcribed all of the items enclosed in the Season 1 Bright Engram to text. I've also done the Season 2 and Dawning Engrams/gifts.
Would it be at all helpful to post these lists to the forum? We could analyze our claims about the huge loot pool and get accurate counts?
(I won't post them unless there is interest. They are kind of difficult to look at and poorly formatted - the nested nature and categorization of them in game with image thumbnails and such is sure easier on the eyes)

I'm hoping that whatever vault solution is coming will be great enough that having a backed up list of Season items or analyzing the number of items will be totally and entirely moot.

---Edit---
Even further, if there was even just one single iota of hope given that there will eventually be a Season of Triumph when all is said and done with Destiny 2, then many of these ongoing Eververse issues and growing pains will be rendered irrelevant. (remember at the end of Rise of Iron when Bungie uncorked Eververse and was "Pretty Frickin' Generous™" giving out free loot boxes weekly? I sure have not forgotten and I'm still appreciative.)

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But it is no more an act of tempting consumers than any other endeavor under capitalism. A lot of people treat this as exceptionally bad while accepting various systems in their daily lives as not predatory (which is not possible under capitalism) even when they do the same, or possibly more or worse, things to try to get you to spend on them.

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But it is no more an act of tempting consumers than any other endeavor under capitalism. A lot of people treat this as exceptionally bad while accepting various systems in their daily lives as not predatory (which is not possible under capitalism) even when they do the same, or possibly more or worse, things to try to get you to spend on them.

My response to this is the same my as response to Kermit’s post earlier; some people play videogames for escapism. They want to get away from the norms of day to day life. Speaking for myself, I don’t find Eververse greatly offensive or anything like that. It doesn’t upset me. It just makes me roll my eyes a bit. I find it tacky and inelegant, and I do find it detracts from any chance of immersion in the world whenever I encounter it. And I don’t like the fact that every few months, the Eververse is becoming a larger portion of anything “new” that gets added to the game.

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I’m not tempted because of the stupid fucking way they’ve implemented the system. It’s called principle. I want the armor more than I want Ghosts and Sparrows, so I dismantle those to have dust to buy the things I want. I’m not arguing for some hypothetical person. I’m telling you how I feel.

Keep in mind, I don’t actually care that much. I largely just use dust to buy the things I want when I can. I can do that why also thinking it’s bullshit and wishing we just earned loot from doing activities directly like we used to.

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Keep in mind, I don’t actually care that much. I largely just use dust to buy the things I want when I can. I can do that why also thinking it’s bullshit and wishing we just earned loot from doing activities directly like we used to.

Here’s the thing though. You do get those things from doing activities just like you used to. Bright engrams rain down constantly. In D1, you had zero control over whether you got those New Monarchy pants from the engram you just earned. In D2, you can melt stuff you don’t want and actually buy things you do want directly. Without spending any money. This is true iof all vendors. The other big difference is that people who don’t spend money aren’t excluded from the prizes.

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Keep in mind, I don’t actually care that much. I largely just use dust to buy the things I want when I can. I can do that why also thinking it’s bullshit and wishing we just earned loot from doing activities directly like we used to.

Here’s the thing though. You do get those things from doing activities just like you used to. Bright engrams rain down constantly. In D1, you had zero control over whether you got those New Monarchy pants from the engram you just earned. In D2, you can melt stuff you don’t want and actually buy things you do want directly. Without spending any money. This is true iof all vendors. The other big difference is that people who don’t spend money aren’t excluded from the prizes.

I'm specifically talking about Sparrows, Ships, and Ghosts. Those all used to be in the real loot tables, and were often specific to activities or destinations. That's entirely more interesting that basically just having one giant loot table for the whole game like Bright Engrams. I think the Eververse actively made the game worse in terms of how it implements rewards and loot.

There's also the fact that I think microtransactions and paid loot boxes are bullshit to begin with. That's neither here nor there, I guess.

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Keep in mind, I don’t actually care that much. I largely just use dust to buy the things I want when I can. I can do that why also thinking it’s bullshit and wishing we just earned loot from doing activities directly like we used to.

Here’s the thing though. You do get those things from doing activities just like you used to. Bright engrams rain down constantly. In D1, you had zero control over whether you got those New Monarchy pants from the engram you just earned. In D2, you can melt stuff you don’t want and actually buy things you do want directly. Without spending any money. This is true iof all vendors. The other big difference is that people who don’t spend money aren’t excluded from the prizes.

I'm specifically talking about Sparrows, Ships, and Ghosts. Those all used to be in the real loot tables, and were often specific to activities or destinations. That's entirely more interesting that basically just having one giant loot table for the whole game like Bright Engrams. I think the Eververse actively made the game worse in terms of how it implements rewards and loot.

There's also the fact that I think microtransactions and paid loot boxes are bullshit to begin with. That's neither here nor there, I guess.

That's fair. I'm not sure having to grind one activity specifically for something is better than playing how you want to get it, but I see what you're saying.

For the record, I think I would be happier if Eververse did not exist in Destiny. My main quibble is the sense that D2 eververse is worse than D1 Eververse. My experience is that it is significantly better. If I have to have Eververse around (and it appears I do), I want D2's implementation.

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That's fair. I'm not sure having to grind one activity specifically for something is better than playing how you want to get it, but I see what you're saying.

I said in another post somewhere that I can definitely see the argument for the current way being better. I just don't think it feels as good. I pointed to the Black Spindle mission for the ship. That feels like a cool reward for a cool activity. Now it's just a bunch of activities that all feel the same for a bunch of random crap that all feels pretty much the same.

For the record, I think I would be happier if Eververse did not exist in Destiny. My main quibble is the sense that D2 eververse is worse than D1 Eververse. My experience is that it is significantly better. If I have to have Eververse around (and it appears I do), I want D2's implementation.

I honestly can't compare. I visited the D1 Eververse all of like two times. If anything, it was safely ignorable, which makes it better in my opinion. All of the cool customization items weren't tied to it.

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I'm not sure having to grind one activity specifically for something is better than playing how you want to get it, but I see what you're saying.

It most definitely isn't for me, and others like me, who don't like PvP.

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Never spent a cent of actual money, and yet I've been able to get every Eververse item I've wanted in D2. Including a Dawning chest piece which FINALLY made my Dawnblade setup not look like he was wearing old rags he found in an alley.

Amen. There’s been a severe shortage of decent looking warlock robes. This was the first I got excited about. If there is any criticism to be made of Eververse, it is that occasionally they have better looking armor than the other vendors and the base game buyers are getting second tier artistry. On the other hand, most Eververse armor looks terrible IMHO but your mileage may vary.

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I think it's more to do with the way those microtransactions are presented, e.g. The Dawning, which is a huge event that exists pretty much entirely to advertise new MTX to the end user.

Wait... what Dawning are you talking about? I've done pretty much everything the dawning has to offer and I've never gotten the feeling like I'm be paraded to Eververse.

...I'm not sure how you can say that. I'm not sure how anyone could say that.

I say that because what does the dawning have to do with Eververse? I'm honestly curious, because the entirety of the dawning has been mostly spent with Ikora or off on a planet.

New content means two things-- new (or modified) activities, and new (or modified) items.

The activities go through Ikora. The items are getting associated with Eververse because everything is random-- there's no route you can go through to get a specific thing you want, it's just more loot boxes.

If you are going that route then you might as well say that every engram is a free loot box. And if you have that mentality then you need to get out of Destiny.

Engrams now ARE loot boxes, and it has nothing to do with my mentality. The difference is that they used to be exclusively in-game, in-universe loot boxes, where game activities would give you a random chance of in-game rewards. Now there's a split storefront and most of the activity is deliberately shunted through the interface that gives you random stuff and then teases the ability to get other stuff by making a purchase.

I guess it all depends on willpower. To me, the debate right now is that MT's have gone from a stand alone booth anyone can visit to a booth that has been coupled with an in-game vendor that people visit on a regular basis. I don't care that I visit her more because the other difference is that I can actually purchase the stuff she is selling now with in-game currency and not money.

No, it really doesn't. I do not feel tempted in the least to give Bungie any more money than I am giving them by buying full priced games and DLC packs. I am dismayed, annoyed, and disappointed that they are trying to monetize the rest of the experience because I think it victimizes certain portions of the playerbase and sets up bad incentives that encourage developers to spend more time on low effort cosmetic content and less on everything else.

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And people were taking a dump on The Dawning. I had just played some and it was a lot of fun. Me and Narc and Blackstar played hockey and it was good. So, I was surprised.

I asked why, got heavily downvoted, and people explained it's because so much stuff was expensive in Eververse.

I am repeatedly told here that I don't get the problems because I have no temptation to spend real money and I'm not some kind of fiendish collector that I just don't understand the problem with it.

Unfortunately, I don't understand the problem with it.

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I understand it, but I don't agree with it.

Basically, players don't like being reminded of the MTX storefront. They want it to be a thing that exists in the background, as an option but not a, ahem, "requirement" (don't worry, I'll come back to that), and they feel that events like The Dawning push it too close to their faces. The logic goes that, in a loot-based game like Destiny, locking rewards behind a paywall diminishes the legitimacy and fun factor of the game. They feel that the odds of acquiring certain Eververse content are so low that you're forced to buy them with real-world money if you want to have them. This would be easier to tolerate if the storefront was kept out of sight and out of mind, but events like The Dawning just remind them of all the goodies they can't have because they don't want to spend money on them.

To an extent, they're right. Like all MTX systems, Eververse is designed to make you want to spend money on it. That's the whole point. Part of that involves placing certain rewards behind paywalls with astronomical odds of earning them through gameplay, and events like The Dawning are definitely designed to function as glorified advertisements for the storefront. These things are, in my view, self-evident.

But that doesn't mean they're bad in and of themselves.

The point of divergence lies in how much value a player places on Eververse items in the first place. As long as they remain cosmetic, I place no value on them at all, and so the existence of Eververse and events like The Dawning doesn't bother me at all. However, there are a large number of players who feel that it destroys the "collect-a-thon" hamster wheel gameplay loop of Destiny because they have to spend money to get everything the game has to offer, and while I don't agree with them, it would be unfair of me to discard their opinion simply because I do not share it. When a portion of your customer base feels like they are required to spend money to get their money's worth, even if they're wrong and the "problem" is on their end, you have a failure of communication.

Ultimately, Bungie will need to analyze their data and make a decision about whether Eververse is worth their time. It rakes in truckloads of cash, but some argue (usually without data, but I digress) that the departure of players who leave the game because they don't like it offsets that revenue in the form of lost DLC sales and, potentially, lost sales of future titles in the franchise.

In any event, going to the subreddit and expecting to receive anything less than a full-on circlejerk of salty whiners who are more interested in being heard than having a discussion is a mistake.

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I think it's fine as long as there are other collectables that are locked behind higher skilled activities, or even just low probability RNG like strike exclusives. Destiny 2 doesn't seem to have as much of that, so the feeling of being pushed toward the store is stronger.

There are items in the Eververse pool, such as Saint 14's ship, that I think would have been more meaningful as a quest or special mission reward, like the ship you got from the Black Spindle secret mission in D1.

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The only issue I have with Eververse is the presence of loot boxes. I don't mind MTX when they take the form of a clearly-defined "purchase X item for X dollars" price tag, but loot boxes function more like slot machines, and I do not think gambling has any place in the video game industry. Particularly not in a video game that targets teenagers. We do not need to be exposing young people to that.

I know, I know, this is a variation of the dreaded "think of the children" argument, but sometimes that argument has merit, and I think this is one of those times.

It's obviously not just Bungie doing this. It's an industry-wide problem.

Shit, I tried really hard not to go off on a rant about loot boxes... Bah!

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Ultimately, Bungie will need to analyze their data and make a decision about whether Eververse is worth their time. It rakes in truckloads of cash, but some argue (usually without data, but I digress) that the departure of players who leave the game because they don't like it offsets that revenue in the form of lost DLC sales and, potentially, lost sales of future titles in the franchise.

Ultimately I doubt that's Bungie's call at this point.

If someone else can point to a AAA game where the dev, rather than the publisher, pulled the plug on an MTX storefront, without agreement from the publisher, I'd love to see it.

The most recent example, Battlefront II, seems to be the reverse of that.

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Bingle did it all on their own anyway, and it wasn't an Activision thing. Maybe they would be able to pull the plug on their own.

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Bingle did it all on their own anyway, and it wasn't an Activision thing. Maybe they would be able to pull the plug on their own.

I do recall Bungie / Activision specifically denying the claim that a slip to 2018 meant Activision got a bunch of Bungie stock. Not sure why that's being being said in all this.

But Jason corrected this fact in his Article when the denial happened.

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Bingle did it all on their own anyway, and it wasn't an Activision thing. Maybe they would be able to pull the plug on their own.

I don't see how a single person can consider that plausible.

Not that I don't think it possible that Bungie or someone there could and would devise the notion of supplementing studio income with MTX.

What is not plausible is that they did it BEFORE someone at Activision thought of it, or before a lawyer inserted language into agreements between Activision and Bungie about who would control any such revenue.

From what I understand, and I'm absolutely open to being severely corrected here, is that like most other things, the lion's share of MTX income generally goes to publishers and is shared with developers according to contractual agreements, and not the other way around.

Most dev deals amount to getting up-front payments to cover operating expenses while you develop a game, in return for giving up control over the revenue stream. So the publisher gets paid directly by sales, the developer gets paid directly by the publisher, and then incentives and other revenue shares are doled out according to the agreement as milestones are hit, including sales targets and things like metacritic scores.

I do not believe for one second that Bungie can, at this point, unilaterally close the Eververse.

If the problem truly is that Bungie's toolchain is still so broken that they can't hit DLC release targets and need MTX to make up the difference, they should pour every dollar they get from Eververse into fixing the damn toolchain and then shutter it immediately. The goodwill they would earn by this is invaluable.

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What they really should have done in my opinion is:

1) Develop Destiny 2.
2) Outsource every DLC to an outside developer. Ideally one per developer to maximize quality.
3) Spend the internal resources that would normally go toward the development of DLC on making tools that aren't shit.

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What if they tried to but no one would agree to do the DLCs because the tools were shit? :P

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Fixing the tools would resolve so many of Bungie's problems, throughout the future of the franchise, and would be worth the extra penny spent.

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Every time someone complains about microtransactions or lootcrates, they mention it's OK so long as it's only cosmetic. From what I could tell, Eververse only supplies shaders, ships, ghosts, landspeeders, etc., so why is it so despised?

A) 1 thing some people take issue with in a big way is the sheer amount of total “new content” being added to the game through eververse. Specifically, if you look at all the “new” items added to the game with the latest expansion, about 60% of them are Eververse items. This makes people feel like the MTX storefront is taking up a larger and larger portion of their game.

B) I think the other main issue is the way Bungie has been subtly weaving tendrils between the MTX economy and the rest of the game’s progression system, such that they are not so clearly distinct from each other. There’s the “XP throttling” issue, the ability to buy Mods through eververse, etc. And the tendrils have grown deeper and more complex over time, feeding into the “slippery slope” concerns. Some people (Cody, for example) take issue with having the game direct players to the eververse to pick up XP rewards, because it acts as a constant reminder that there’s a real-money store right there in the tower, when some people would rather do their best to forget it exists.

C) Finally, there’s the RNG loot-box issue built into the bright engrams themselves, which is essentially just a big slot machine.

There’s a huge range of feelings towards these issues throughout the player bass, but I think those are the 3 primary elements that cause most of the controversy.

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My biggest issue is the integration of loot and rewards.

I can see the argument that the current set up is actually more player-friendly. You earn XP for literally everything, which will give you bright engrams, which you turn in for loot. Cool, cool, I can see why people like that.

I'm of the mind that in makes all of that cool shit feel less cool. It takes the joke of "your gear will tell your story" and makes it even less true. Now it literally doesn't matter what you do, everyone's getting the same shit from doing whatever random stuff they want.

Again, I can see the argument for that being a good thing. But I also see why it makes people think the actual activities you do feel superfluous. I'm the big proponent of "play for fun, see loot as a bonus," but I'm starting to really miss the way D1 worked in a lot of ways. I liked doing the Black Spindle mission for both the gun and the ship. Those were two things I could look at and feel good about accomplishing something cool. The closest thing to that in D2 was the Nightfall tier Arms Dealer strike for that exotic shotgun. That's honestly still the most fun I've had in D2. Korny, kupkake, and I ran that thing like five times, getting better every single run until we finally beat it with a bunch of time left on the clock. It's a shame I hate that shotgun (and I havne't finished the rest of the quest), but that still feels like a real reward for doing something fun and cool.

And it doesn't even have to be on that scale. I've talked about this particular example a few times before, but I still like the emblem you get in the Taken King for activating the two terminals in the Cabal ship and fighting the Ultra Knight in the room that opens up. That was a neat little secret with a fun little challenge that rewards you with an emblem. That's way more fun that getting random cosmetics from Bright Engrams, or even from Cayde's chests, which honestly has to be the lamest "activity" to ever be in Destiny so far.

I play Destiny for fun, and neat rewards will never make me play if I'm not having fun. Bu they go a long way towards pushing me towards specific activities and make me look back more fondly on the time I spend playing, at least in some instances.

The Eververse almost completely negates that side of the game for me. I don't hate it, and I won't quit playing over it, but I still think it sucks.

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A) 1 thing some people take issue with in a big way is the sheer amount of total “new content” being added to the game through eververse. Specifically, if you look at all the “new” items added to the game with the latest expansion, about 60% of them are Eververse items. This makes people feel like the MTX storefront is taking up a larger and larger portion of their game.

So the problem I have with this argument is that the vast majority of those things are stuff you don't know about until you receive it in an engram (purchased or earned) - unless you're poring over the mined loot tables.

Eververse (the Eververse most of us see) sells what... about 10 things at a time? THAT is what's "in my face" when I visit Tess. All those sparrows and ships and shaders and ghosts I'm getting every time I earn an engram? Those are freebies, things I'd never heard of until they appeared in my inventory.

I can't really get behind the '60%' number because I can't BUY those things (except in loot boxes, maybe, if my RNG luck is good enough). My personal experience with Eververse is that I've EARNED about 80 things, and BEEN GIVEN THE OPTION TO BUY another 30 more (with a little bit of overlap), in the past 3 weeks. I cannot, for the life of me, see how this is Bungie (or Activision, or whoever) forcing me to pay money for stuff.

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A) 1 thing some people take issue with in a big way is the sheer amount of total “new content” being added to the game through eververse. Specifically, if you look at all the “new” items added to the game with the latest expansion, about 60% of them are Eververse items. This makes people feel like the MTX storefront is taking up a larger and larger portion of their game.

So the problem I have with this argument is that the vast majority of those things are stuff you don't know about until you receive it in an engram (purchased or earned) - unless you're poring over the mined loot tables.

Eververse (the Eververse most of us see) sells what... about 10 things at a time? THAT is what's "in my face" when I visit Tess. All those sparrows and ships and shaders and ghosts I'm getting every time I earn an engram? Those are freebies, things I'd never heard of until they appeared in my inventory.

I can't really get behind the '60%' number because I can't BUY those things (except in loot boxes, maybe, if my RNG luck is good enough). My personal experience with Eververse is that I've EARNED about 80 things, and BEEN GIVEN THE OPTION TO BUY another 30 more (with a little bit of overlap), in the past 3 weeks. I cannot, for the life of me, see how this is Bungie (or Activision, or whoever) forcing me to pay money for stuff.

Personally, my take on it is very similar to yours. I’m just collecting more loot from another character in the tower.

I think that some people make the (possibly misguided?) mental calculation to look at the “opportunity cost” of the whole thing. In other words, they look at the total number of new items being added to the game, and they think “hey how about a few less emotes to pad out the MTX store and a few more new guns that will actually make the game more fun”.

I don’t know if that’s a fair leap to make... it probably isn’t. But I do think there is a fair complaint behind that train of thought, which is that there’s a scarcity of fun gear in the game, most of the “new” exotics are nerfed returns of D1 exotics, and yet my shader inventory keeps filling up faster than I can use or delete the stupid things. It does seem like the prioritization around which items are being added to the game could use some tuning.

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So the problem I have with this argument is that the vast majority of those things are stuff you don't know about until you receive it in an engram (purchased or earned) - unless you're poring over the mined loot tables.

If you hit preview on the bright engram (Y on Xbox), you can see the entire loot table. No need to look for mined data. That works for all vendors. That was the first thing I checked when the DLC dropped.

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So the problem I have with this argument is that the vast majority of those things are stuff you don't know about until you receive it in an engram (purchased or earned) - unless you're poring over the mined loot tables.

If you hit preview on the bright engram (Y on Xbox), you can see the entire loot table. No need to look for mined data. That works for all vendors. That was the first thing I checked when the DLC dropped.

Huh. You learn something new every day.

Okay - so I get a bunch of pictures, right? No stats? (Or is the interface good enough that once the full list is up, I can preview each item and see its perks and such? I'd be surprised if that were the case.)

So I can see a bunch of thumbnails of sparrows, and a few pieces of armor - cool. Doesn't really tell me anything, though. I still need an actual (probably mined) loot table to see which things are things I actually WANT.

And, with stuff like Ghosts and Sparrows, the perks are random, rolled when you receive the item - even LESS useful to look over ahead of time.

Eh. Doesn't really change my mind very much. And certainly doesn't change the numbers I listed later in the post you answered.

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Pretty sure you can see stats. I always preview new stuff to see if there’s anything worth chasing aesthetically.

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Yeah you can click on each section and do a full preview of each item. It's not very intuitive at first.

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Yeah you can click on each section and do a full preview of each item. It's not very intuitive at first.

Finally did this last night, for the first time. Pretty amazing.

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Eververse (the Eververse most of us see) sells what... about 10 things at a time? THAT is what's "in my face" when I visit Tess. All those sparrows and ships and shaders and ghosts I'm getting every time I earn an engram? Those are freebies, things I'd never heard of until they appeared in my inventory.

Which you now earn twice as slowly since Bungie can't throttle you anymore. This has the consequence of making your character level up twice as slow, which has a huge effect should you want to start a new character.

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The actual level up doesn't feel markedly worse after the changes. I ran a Hunter from 1-25 after the whole XP hubbub with the release of CoO. I was hitting the same plateaus during The Red War as I did on my other 5 runs through it.

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Eververse (the Eververse most of us see) sells what... about 10 things at a time? THAT is what's "in my face" when I visit Tess. All those sparrows and ships and shaders and ghosts I'm getting every time I earn an engram? Those are freebies, things I'd never heard of until they appeared in my inventory.

Which you now earn twice as slowly since Bungie can't throttle you anymore. This has the consequence of making your character level up twice as slow, which has a huge effect should you want to start a new character.

The next new character I make will probably be in D1.

I'm starting to miss that content already. Once it was revealed that D2 would be an entirely new animal and not just a really large expansion, I was afraid that day would come-- and too soon.

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Eververse (the Eververse most of us see) sells what... about 10 things at a time? THAT is what's "in my face" when I visit Tess. All those sparrows and ships and shaders and ghosts I'm getting every time I earn an engram? Those are freebies, things I'd never heard of until they appeared in my inventory.

Which you now earn twice as slowly since Bungie can't throttle you anymore. This has the consequence of making your character level up twice as slow, which has a huge effect should you want to start a new character.

The next new character I make will probably be in D1.

I'm starting to miss that content already. Once it was revealed that D2 would be an entirely new animal and not just a really large expansion, I was afraid that day would come-- and too soon.

I find myself thinking about this quite a bit, too. If they made substantial engine changes and fixed the engine stuff in regards to content creation being a pain, then I can see how it was worth it to move on.

But more and more I find myself wishing we just had Destiny, a singular product with all content in one package. I'd love to be able to go back to Old Russia, the Moon, Venus, etc, without having to launch an entirely different game and feel like I'm wasting my time (in terms of character progression).

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Bungie should use any Eververse revenue to bring D1 content forward.

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Bungie should use any Eververse revenue to bring D1 content forward.

And sell it through Eververse. </evil mustache twirl>

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

The only thing that really bothers me is that EV is right beside the postmaster. I love Claudia Black, but I get sick of hearing about her uncle.

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

No, and this is in no way analogous, which I think you know.

What it is analogous to is having a homeowners' association vote to mandatorily place a vending machine in your living room after you've paid for the house.

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

No, and this is in no way analogous, which I think you know.

What it is analogous to is having a homeowners' association vote to mandatorily place a vending machine in your living room after you've paid for the house.

And the only reason I care about that is if it took up space I needed or if it looked ugly, both of which have nothing to do with this conversation :P

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

No, and this is in no way analogous, which I think you know.

What it is analogous to is having a homeowners' association vote to mandatorily place a vending machine in your living room after you've paid for the house.

And the only reason I care about that is if it took up space I needed or if it looked ugly, both of which have nothing to do with this conversation :P

Cool!

Have some space in your living room you're not using?

The vending machine will arrive on Monday. I'll let you know where to send the money.

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

No, and this is in no way analogous, which I think you know.

What it is analogous to is having a homeowners' association vote to mandatorily place a vending machine in your living room after you've paid for the house.

And the only reason I care about that is if it took up space I needed or if it looked ugly, both of which have nothing to do with this conversation :P

Cool!

Have some space in your living room you're not using?

The vending machine will arrive on Monday. I'll let you know where to send the money.

You're saying this machine cost additional? I'm pretty sure I bought the machine with the house. Everything in the machine costs more money. Oh, and also the machine pops out random stuff every so often for free! I would love to have one of those in my living room.

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

No, and this is in no way analogous, which I think you know.

What it is analogous to is having a homeowners' association vote to mandatorily place a vending machine in your living room after you've paid for the house.

That might be a slight exaggeration, Narc.

How about the vending machine is installed in your condo lobby, in prominent view, after you bought in? That seems closer to what we're faced with here. I don't live in the tower, I don't relax in the tower, I spend the vast majority of my time in other places and visit the tower when I need to get stuff.

That vending machine is tacky, sure, and maybe it annoys you every time you enter or leave the building, for a second... but it's not in your living room.

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That might be a slight exaggeration, Narc.

How about the vending machine is installed in your condo lobby, in prominent view, after you bought in? That seems closer to what we're faced with here. I don't live in the tower, I don't relax in the tower, I spend the vast majority of my time in other places and visit the tower when I need to get stuff.

That vending machine is tacky, sure, and maybe it annoys you every time you enter or leave the building, for a second... but it's not in your living room.

You forgot the part about being forced to visit the vending machine if you want your mail.

A package for you! Just pick it up at the vending machine!

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That might be a slight exaggeration, Narc.

How about the vending machine is installed in your condo lobby, in prominent view, after you bought in? That seems closer to what we're faced with here. I don't live in the tower, I don't relax in the tower, I spend the vast majority of my time in other places and visit the tower when I need to get stuff.

That vending machine is tacky, sure, and maybe it annoys you every time you enter or leave the building, for a second... but it's not in your living room.

You forgot the part about being forced to visit the vending machine if you want your mail.

A package for you! Just pick it up at the vending machine!

So you are saying my mail is at the vending machine and not outside on street level? Awesome! even more convenient!

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

No, and this is in no way analogous, which I think you know.

What it is analogous to is having a homeowners' association vote to mandatorily place a vending machine in your living room after you've paid for the house.

That might be a slight exaggeration, Narc.

How about the vending machine is installed in your condo lobby, in prominent view, after you bought in? That seems closer to what we're faced with here. I don't live in the tower, I don't relax in the tower, I spend the vast majority of my time in other places and visit the tower when I need to get stuff.

I'm not mapping the real world space of my apartment to the Tower because they're analogous.

I'm mapping my house to the Tower because like my house, I bought Destiny at what is currently considered full price. And yet someone else has a storefront in it.

If they want Destiny to be a freemium game, hey, that's fine. If they want a storefront in their full price game, I think that's also OK.

What's not OK is making sure everybody has to walk by that storefront in the ordinary run of play.

And a vending machine in my apartment lobby I would also not be OK with-- not unless the homeowner'ss association is getting a cut of it.

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And a vending machine in my apartment lobby I would also not be OK with-- not unless the homeowner'ss association is getting a cut of it.

Yes, because the HoA is going to use that money to fix the pool. Not.

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And a vending machine in my apartment lobby I would also not be OK with-- not unless the homeowner'ss association is getting a cut of it.

Yes, because the HoA is going to use that money to fix the pool. Not.

Well, you know what they say. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice.

In practice, there is.

If there was a body analogous to an HoA in this case, we could argue about whether what it is doing is effective or correct.

There isn't, though. We've paid real money for virtual real estate, and those who sold it to us have also put in vending machines so they can sell us housewares. Sure, we COULD ignore it, but that isn't really the point.

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

No, and this is in no way analogous, which I think you know.

What it is analogous to is having a homeowners' association vote to mandatorily place a vending machine in your living room after you've paid for the house.

Maybe it's more like a restaurant. Not a super fancy one, but like a Red Robin, where you go to chill with your friends to eat near the airport while you wait to pick them up. As you eat, you can see the dessert menu in front of you. You already paid for your meal, but it's there, in your face. Now, once you're done eating, the server asks if you've saved any room for dessert? Sure, you probably would have asked for dessert if you were interested, but he/she just threw it in your face. Most people recognize that the dessert isn't really that good and is just a way for the restaurant to make some extra money. On the other hand, maybe you're really craving that milk shake. Most people just say no thank you and move on with their lives. Something drastically different happens on the internet.

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Maybe it's more like a restaurant. Not a super fancy one, but like a Red Robin, where you go to chill with your friends to eat near the airport while you wait to pick them up. As you eat, you can see the dessert menu in front of you. You already paid for your meal, but it's there, in your face.

Now, once you're done eating, the server asks if you've saved any room for dessert? Sure, you probably would have asked for dessert if you were interested, but he/she just threw it in your face. Most people recognize that the dessert isn't really that good and is just a way for the restaurant to make some extra money. On the other hand, maybe you're really craving that milk shake. Most people just say no thank you and move on with their lives. Something drastically different happens on the internet.

Paying for a meal in a restaurant is a time and space limited transaction in a way a game purchase really isn't (or didn't used to be).

It's understood that a restaurant serves many things, and we are only ordering a specific portion, agreed upon in advance.

It's understood that we will occupy space in the restaurant only, generally speaking, as long as is necessary to consume the portion we have purchased.

It's understood as part of the experience that additional purchases are always possible, and indeed encouraged!

But nothing about the menu interferes with you eating what you've bought. The menu is on the table-- it isn't stapled to your steak when it comes. Salt and pepper are available for use-- they aren't an upsell opportunity. Every time you lift your fork to your face, there's not a reminder written there that you could be eating more, or eating something else, or a mention of what the special of the day will be tomorrow.

Destiny isn't a $5 burger and fries off an extensive menu. It's a full price, $60 (or more!) game, with $40 DLC. The only obstacles between the player and the consumption of that content is supposed to be their own time and skill. It is now being considered acceptable to have a bunch of content in the game that is expressly gated behind grindy behaviors, in order to attract the portion of your clientele you can consider "whales" to buy past those gates.

I'm just agreeing with those who say this is a bit crass and not much fun to interact with, and is not an experience one expects after paying full price. It's the experience you expect from a F2P game.

Your example is far more polite than what is actually going on in Destiny right now with the Eververse, and the restaurant example is one far more conducive to what is going on in Destiny than one that I would accept. I didn't rent Destiny, and I didn't opt for a Destiny experience that contains only a portion of what it offers. I bought the whole thing, for full price. Whether I consume all or part of it should surely be up to me, and I shouldn't be continually nagged while I play about the stuff I'm missing out on because I don't have enough time to do everything and hey why not just buy your way past that?

This proposal doesn't tempt me at all, but that isn't the point.

It makes me think less of Bungie for making it, is all.

$60 every 3 years from every Halo fan used to be enough to make the Halo games.

Now, somehow, after launching on 2 additional platforms and adding $40 a year of DLC, somehow that's not enough to make Destiny without also adding MTX, while at the same time the general opinion seems to be that while Destiny offers more hours of play, it actually offers less content than the Halo games did-- the additional hours are taken up by repetitive tasks designed to place barriers between players and items or other activities.

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Maybe it's more like a restaurant. Not a super fancy one, but like a Red Robin, where you go to chill with your friends to eat near the airport while you wait to pick them up. As you eat, you can see the dessert menu in front of you. You already paid for your meal, but it's there, in your face.

Now, once you're done eating, the server asks if you've saved any room for dessert? Sure, you probably would have asked for dessert if you were interested, but he/she just threw it in your face. Most people recognize that the dessert isn't really that good and is just a way for the restaurant to make some extra money. On the other hand, maybe you're really craving that milk shake. Most people just say no thank you and move on with their lives. Something drastically different happens on the internet.

Paying for a meal in a restaurant is a time and space limited transaction in a way a game purchase really isn't (or didn't used to be).

It's understood that a restaurant serves many things, and we are only ordering a specific portion, agreed upon in advance.

It's understood that we will occupy space in the restaurant only, generally speaking, as long as is necessary to consume the portion we have purchased.

It's understood as part of the experience that additional purchases are always possible, and indeed encouraged!

But nothing about the menu interferes with you eating what you've bought. The menu is on the table-- it isn't stapled to your steak when it comes. Salt and pepper are available for use-- they aren't an upsell opportunity. Every time you lift your fork to your face, there's not a reminder written there that you could be eating more, or eating something else, or a mention of what the special of the day will be tomorrow.

Destiny isn't a $5 burger and fries off an extensive menu. It's a full price, $60 (or more!) game, with $40 DLC. The only obstacles between the player and the consumption of that content is supposed to be their own time and skill. It is now being considered acceptable to have a bunch of content in the game that is expressly gated behind grindy behaviors, in order to attract the portion of your clientele you can consider "whales" to buy past those gates.

I'm just agreeing with those who say this is a bit crass and not much fun to interact with, and is not an experience one expects after paying full price. It's the experience you expect from a F2P game.

Your example is far more polite than what is actually going on in Destiny right now with the Eververse, and the restaurant example is one far more conducive to what is going on in Destiny than one that I would accept. I didn't rent Destiny, and I didn't opt for a Destiny experience that contains only a portion of what it offers. I bought the whole thing, for full price. Whether I consume all or part of it should surely be up to me, and I shouldn't be continually nagged while I play about the stuff I'm missing out on because I don't have enough time to do everything and hey why not just buy your way past that?

This proposal doesn't tempt me at all, but that isn't the point.

It makes me think less of Bungie for making it, is all.

$60 every 3 years from every Halo fan used to be enough to make the Halo games.

Now, somehow, after launching on 2 additional platforms and adding $40 a year of DLC, somehow that's not enough to make Destiny without also adding MTX, while at the same time the general opinion seems to be that while Destiny offers more hours of play, it actually offers less content than the Halo games did-- the additional hours are taken up by repetitive tasks designed to place barriers between players and items or other activities.

Remember back when Skill Up was discussing Bungie's mistake with CoO, and he made a restaurant analogy that cheapLEY didn't quite understand?

Polygon put up an article a few days ago about a developer doing right by customers when they made a mistake with Microtransactions, by pretty much following Skill Up's restaurant analogy to the letter.

Back when DE introduced optional "pets" into Warframe, they added cosmetic hair (well, fur) dyes to go along with them. There were a bunch, and you could use real money to buy them. The only problem was that the color/pattern you were going to get was random.

Paying real money for a randomly-rolled cosmetic item. Sounds familiar, huh?

For a small amount of platinum, you could pull a lever and get a random color for your Kubrow if you wanted to change its cosmetic appearance. One player pulled that lever a ridiculous number of times, and fans began to complain about the random aspect of the system.

“We weren’t trying to make a lottery,” Crookes said, looking back on the situation. “That wasn’t the kind of system we wanted in there. We had that out within a day or two. As fast as possible.” They also said they refunded the players the money spent on the random coloring. [Emphasis mine]

The restaurant acknowledged their mistake, took the problematic food out, gave players the food they wanted in the first place while refunding the money that they had spent, and gave them a complementary dessert by letting them keep the skins that they had bought.

So here's where Bungie's patented "We're Listening"™ really bugs me, even though I don't dislike Eververse. They acknowledged, before Eververse was released, that it would not have a negative impact on the game. That it would be an optional market on the side. That it would just be for people who wanted to help fund the Live team, and would give us cosmetic items for the sake of expression.

But they frog-in-potted players long enough that they've all but gone back on that initial promise, by integrating Everse deeply into the game's loot foundation.

Fans didn't like that, fans complained, and what did we get? Bungie said "We're listening", then had even more of the game's content getting locked into Eververse, and we had to pay for the new meal on top of that. Players have erupted in anger, and Bungie's response so far is... "We're listening".

DE had that problem prioritized and resolved in a matter of days, and it was an optional cosmetic for an optional pet.

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So here's where Bungie's patented "We're Listening"™ really bugs me, even though I don't dislike Eververse. They acknowledged, before Eververse was released, that it would not have a negative impact on the game. That it would be an optional market on the side. That it would just be for people who wanted to help fund the Live team, and would give us cosmetic items for the sake of expression.

But they frog-in-potted players long enough that they've all but gone back on that initial promise, by integrating Everse deeply into the game's loot foundation.

I feel like we really need to separate Eververs and MTX. Because they are not the same thing. MTX's are sold by Eververse but that is also not all she sells. With that in mind let me continue.

So Bungie acknowledged 3 things about Eververse:
1. It would not be a negative impact on the game
I for one can say that is really hard to quantify. That is purely based on how people feel about the game apart from MTX's. I personally consider MTX's a negative impact if when other people buy MTX's that it impacts my playing of the game. In this case it does not. In fact, with the boons that you can buy, it actually makes it more positive if I'm playing with someone who has one on! Also, the other loot she has is also not a negative.

2. That it would be an optional market on the side.
Still true. I'm by no means required to use it to keep up or progress through the game.

3. That it would just be for people who wanted to help fund the Live team, and would give us cosmetic items for the sake of expression.
Also true.

Fans didn't like that, fans complained, and what did we get? Bungie said "We're listening", then had even more of the game's content getting locked into Eververse, and we had to pay for the new meal on top of that. Players have erupted in anger, and Bungie's response so far is... "We're listening".

wait wait wait, why do people keep saying that items from Eververse are "locked"? they are no more locked than any other item in destiny to my knowledge. In fact, I would argue that they are even easier to get because you can buy some of the stuff via dust instead of random drops. The only difference is that there is a bigger loot table, so when you random stuff you have less chance of getting the exact item you want.

DE had that problem prioritized and resolved in a matter of days, and it was an optional cosmetic for an optional pet.

Listening doesn't always mean doing something. Because there are times Bungie has blindly listened to the community and done things I don't necessarily approve of.

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But they frog-in-potted players long enough that they've all but gone back on that initial promise, by integrating Everse deeply into the game's loot foundation.

I feel like we really need to separate Eververs and MTX. Because they are not the same thing. MTX's are sold by Eververse but that is also not all she sells. With that in mind let me continue.

True, but they fall within the same economy. An economy that did not initially exist in Destiny in any way, was added to be supplementary, and is now, numbers-wise, the core of Destiny's loot pool.
There's enough stuff post-patch that you can get from other factions, and for the moment, it's still for the most part pretty much cosmetic, so I don't have an issue with it being there, but the principles that Bungie started out with have gone out the window.

So Bungie acknowledged 3 things about Eververse:
1. It would not be a negative impact on the game
I for one can say that is really hard to quantify. That is purely based on how people feel about the game apart from MTX's. I personally consider MTX's a negative impact if when other people buy MTX's that it impacts my playing of the game. In this case it does not. In fact, with the boons that you can buy, it actually makes it more positive if I'm playing with someone who has one on! Also, the other loot she has is also not a negative.

And that's all true, but it's not how the vocal part of the community sees it, from the sensible folks who are frustrated by stuff like XP throttling, to the Spinfoil Hat-wearing people who cry about "slippery slopes" (and who seem less and less crazy as time goes on, though I don't believe they'll ever be right as far as Destiny is concerned), they all see Eververse as having a negative impact on the game, and it's not just because you can buy stuff with money, but because the reward system heavily skews towards Eververse, rather than in-game activities.

2. That it would be an optional market on the side.
Still true. I'm by no means required to use it to keep up or progress through the game.

Like I said, it was supposed to be supplementary. Now, it's a signiificant part of the experience, without much that outwardly noticeable to justify the original claims. Sure, ideals change over time, and we shouldn't be "your exact words were" with business models, but still, when an official statement is made, it's kind of frustrating when they exploit it to wedge things in that people wouldn't have been okay with originally.

3. That it would just be for people who wanted to help fund the Live team, and would give us cosmetic items for the sake of expression.
Also true.

It's not, though. The armors are initially cosmetic, but they don't integrate the stats of what you infuse into them, they have their own. Mods are fairly insignificant, but they technically are not cosmetic. Ghosts have practical applications, and if you dropped money on Eververse when you first got the game (like I did), then you could get a Sparrow before anyone else, saving you a lot of time, and helping you progress faster than other players.

And we have no quantifiable information about what the MTX money has helped fund so far. The Dawning? and... what?

Fans didn't like that, fans complained, and what did we get? Bungie said "We're listening", then had even more of the game's content getting locked into Eververse, and we had to pay for the new meal on top of that. Players have erupted in anger, and Bungie's response so far is... "We're listening".

wait wait wait, why do people keep saying that items from Eververse are "locked"? they are no more locked than any other item in destiny to my knowledge. In fact, I would argue that they are even easier to get because you can buy some of the stuff via dust instead of random drops. The only difference is that there is a bigger loot table, so when you random stuff you have less chance of getting the exact item you want.

I meant DLC-locked. There are CoO cosmetics that are in Eververse, so if you didn't buy the DLC, you're probably locked-out of new Eververse content, though a lot of the patch-reversals might have fixed the issue.

DE had that problem prioritized and resolved in a matter of days, and it was an optional cosmetic for an optional pet.

Listening doesn't always mean doing something. Because there are times Bungie has blindly listened to the community and done things I don't necessarily approve of.

But there's been months and months of it, with absolutely nothing communicated about what's being done (though recent tweets do show that they plan to communicate about it soon).

There's another quote right after the one I posted (the whole article is worth a read for those wanting a behind-the-scenes look into how a failing studio grew into one of the most successful on Steam, BTW), that also shows how DE handles communication, content-delivery, implementation, feedback, and iteration far, far better than Bungie, despite being a much smaller developer:

There’s a workflow they’ve established with the community where everyone knows what to expect, and on about what timeframe.

“Our PC audience knows that in the first couple of days, the first week when we release something, they’re the testbed to see if it’s going to work, and we’re just gobbling up their feedback, processing it and trying our best to alter, change, adjust values and balance it better,” Carter stated. “Once the console guys get it, they’re getting something that’s been thoroughly tested by our PC base, and our PC base knows that after a week we’re, generally speaking, having it in a place that they love it and we love it. ... Generally speaking, in that time we’ve ironed out those things that have offended them or we’ve made mistakes on. If we miss, we hotfix those things as quickly as possible.”

So yeah, while game development is complicated, and there are countless factors that go into even the smallest tweaks that we don't know, there's a clear precedent. There's a smaller studio handling what is a deeper and more complex game with far more communication, honesty, and results.
It only serves to make Destiny 2 more frustrating, IMO.

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Think about it at a basic level why there would be randomness in purchases anyway. Fundamentally, such systems make players feel ok about accidentally buying something they don’t want.

That is basically evil. There is no benefit to the player at all.

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Oh, Cody. Isn't "evil" a tiny bit hyperbolic in this context?

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This is very presumptive and definitely far from universally accurate. Even just given some of the contexts provided in this thread.

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This is very presumptive and definitely far from universally accurate. Even just given some of the contexts provided in this thread.

Explain to me then how I am wrong. Break down the situation of buying a loot box for me. What's the benefit to the buyer of not knowing what they will be getting until after they pay?

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It's not so much about the lack of benefit to the customer as it is about remembering to apply Hanlon's razor.

Namely: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

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It's not so much about the lack of benefit to the customer as it is about remembering to apply Hanlon's razor.

Namely: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

OKay, but upon realizing the core of what they are doing is, namely getting people to be okay spending money on things they don't want, if you don't ask yourself why are we still doing this? then you have moved into the area of malice.

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It's possible that they see it from a different perspective. Maybe they believe loot boxes create a positive adrenaline rush and feeling of accomplishment when they drop good loot, and maybe they believe that experience justifies the existence of the entire system.

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It's possible that they see it from a different perspective. Maybe they believe that loot boxes create a positive adrenaline rush and feeling of accomplishment when they drop good loot, and maybe they believe that experience justifies the existence of the entire system.

Most importantly, the customer chooses whether they want to pay or not. They still have alternate ways to acquire the loot.

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To elaborate:

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It's possible that they see it from a different perspective. Maybe they believe that loot boxes create a positive adrenaline rush and feeling of accomplishment when they drop good loot, and maybe they believe that experience justifies the existence of the entire system.

Most importantly, the customer chooses whether they want to pay or not. They still have alternate ways to acquire the loot.

Show me anybody who has earned every dawning thing without spending any money.

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Anticipation and the act of “opening” offers sufficient benefit to many folk.

I accept that most people won’t acknowledge or believe that is a substantially important distinction.

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Anticipation and the act of “opening” offers sufficient benefit to many folk.

I accept that most people won’t acknowledge or believe that is a substantially important distinction.

Balanced, or more likely outweighed, by the disappointment of getting something you don't want.

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Every time you lift your fork to your face, there's not a reminder written there that you could be eating more, or eating something else, or a mention of what the special of the day will be tomorrow.

Have you ever been to a Red Robin?

I don’t think most of the analogies in this thread work, but that assessment is not accurate.

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But nothing about the menu interferes with you eating what you've bought. The menu is on the table-- it isn't stapled to your steak when it comes. Salt and pepper are available for use-- they aren't an upsell opportunity.

In the US, it's common (though not universal) that bread is put on the table - you can eat it, or not. It's part of the service.

In many countries around the world, they bring bread - but if you eat it, they charge you. If you don't, they don't.

Americans are often disappointed (even angry) when they discover this, at the end of the meal.

So maybe all of this angst is coming from expectations, and not the actual situation?

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But nothing about the menu interferes with you eating what you've bought. The menu is on the table-- it isn't stapled to your steak when it comes. Salt and pepper are available for use-- they aren't an upsell opportunity.

In the US, it's common (though not universal) that bread is put on the table - you can eat it, or not. It's part of the service.

In many countries around the world, they bring bread - but if you eat it, they charge you. If you don't, they don't.

Americans are often disappointed (even angry) when they discover this, at the end of the meal.

So maybe all of this angst is coming from expectations, and not the actual situation?

Expectations are part of the situation.

And yeah, overseas I am that guy-- asking the waitperson to take the bread away because I didn't ask for it.

However, in the US, I think I'm just a guy who grew up playing videogames, same as many others. I don't have a cultural barrier to understanding why it isn't ok for my full price product to contain a built-in store designed to sell me extra stuff, that I'm expected to visit in the normal run of play.

Expectations may very well be changing. Certainly the industry is hoping to change them. Change isn't always good, however, and I think this change is worth resisting.

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$60 every 3 years from every Halo fan used to be enough to make the Halo games.

Now, somehow, after launching on 2 additional platforms and adding $40 a year of DLC, somehow that's not enough to make Destiny without also adding MTX, while at the same time the general opinion seems to be that while Destiny offers more hours of play, it actually offers less content than the Halo games did-- the additional hours are taken up by repetitive tasks designed to place barriers between players and items or other activities.

That's ignoring quite a bit though. For instance:

In the Halos, bug fixes were extremely rare. Balance changes even more so. The ongoing support that a Destiny 1 player received, even just for his initial $60 purchase, was vastly larger than the amount of support any Halo player received. We got everything from badly needed economy reworks to kiosks and quest tracking all for free.
In Bungie's Halos, each single player campaign was what it was and it was all you got for three years. With Destiny, even players that only paid the $60 initial purchase received some new events and areas to explore. And those who paid for DLC got new story missions and Raids and Destinations. Quality of Destiny's missions is a legitimate point of debate, but we sure got a ton of new cool things to do and places to explore at a rate well beyond that of the three year Halo development cycles.
Likewise, in the Halos, the weapons were by and large baked into the game, while in Destiny even your initial $60 purchase saw five or six distinct rotations of Tower vendor weapons and armor as well as several new Exotics and reworks of existing Exotics.
In the Halos, new multiplayer maps were fairly rare and usually came in paid packs that split the player base. In Destiny, new multiplayer maps were added more regularly and though they tended to start out as a part of the paid DLC releases, many of them later became free thus helping keep the player base together.

Yes, there are all sorts of caveats to the list above.

Destiny had a lot more bugs over its life than any Halo ever did.
Its fairly easy to argue that the Halos had better missions and set pieces that Destiny did.
Loot, and loot economy issues were mostly non-existent in Bungie's Halos.
Etc.

But even so, I personally think the idea that a Halo game lines up anywhere near one to one with Destiny 1 on a cost basis is silly in the extreme. Yes, Destiny certainly cost more over its 3-ish year life time, but I think that cost is easily justified by the bug fixes and core game and UI additions, the ongoing flow of new single player and multiplayer content, and the ever changing and expanding weapon and armor options we received over Destiny's lifetime.

And, so far, I think we are seeing this trend continue with Destiny 2. Sure, in many ways I wish Destiny and Destiny 2 were more Halo-like, but it typically took me less than a day to complete the single player of a Halo and three years before Bungie delivered its next campaign. In that regard, I like the Destiny model much much better.

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But even so, I personally think the idea that a Halo game lines up anywhere near one to one with Destiny 1 on a cost basis is silly in the extreme. Yes, Destiny certainly cost more over its 3-ish year life time, but I think that cost is easily justified by the bug fixes and core game and UI additions, the ongoing flow of new single player and multiplayer content, and the ever changing and expanding weapon and armor options we received over Destiny's lifetime.

I just don’t honestly think any of that is relevant. Bungie are the ones that decided to make a game that is drastically more expensive to support. If they can’t do that on the price of a $60 game plus paid DLC, maybe they should re-evaluate the type of game they’re making instead of cramming in some bullshit paid lootboxes.

This is the “games are expensive to make” argument that I just think is complete trash.

And, so far, I think we are seeing this trend continue with Destiny 2. Sure, in many ways I wish Destiny and Destiny 2 were more Halo-like, but it typically took me less than a day to complete the single player of a Halo and three years before Bungie delivered its next campaign. In that regard, I like the Destiny model much much better.

I can respect that, and I’d agree with you if the content we got in Destiny was even as close to as good as we got in Halo. Needless to say, I don’t think it is.

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I just don’t honestly think any of that is relevant. Bungie are the ones that decided to make a game that is drastically more expensive to support. If they can’t do that on the price of a $60 game plus paid DLC, maybe they should re-evaluate the type of game they’re making instead of cramming in some bullshit paid lootboxes.

This is ridiculous to me. You're telling Bungie they should NOT make the game THEY want to make because a less than majority of players hate one aspect of it. If they had wanted to make another Halo they would have, but they didn't, because they wanted to make a game that's different. As with all products if it's a failure THEN you are justified in saying they should re-evaluate, but as of right now Destiny is a huge success, even with the vocal minority complaining about Eververse. Yes you can dislike it or even hate it and anything else, but trying to say that Bungie should try something different just because you don't like it is bullshit.

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I just don’t honestly think any of that is relevant. Bungie are the ones that decided to make a game that is drastically more expensive to support. If they can’t do that on the price of a $60 game plus paid DLC, maybe they should re-evaluate the type of game they’re making instead of cramming in some bullshit paid lootboxes.

This is ridiculous to me. You're telling Bungie they should NOT make the game THEY want to make because a less than majority of players hate one aspect of it. If they had wanted to make another Halo they would have, but they didn't, because they wanted to make a game that's different. As with all products if it's a failure THEN you are justified in saying they should re-evaluate, but as of right now Destiny is a huge success, even with the vocal minority complaining about Eververse. Yes you can dislike it or even hate it and anything else, but trying to say that Bungie should try something different just because you don't like it is bullshit.

That’s not even remotely what I said. I’m saying the games are expensive to make and support is a bullshit excuse. If you can’t make and support a game without including a system that is undeniably unfriendly to consumers and almost as inarguably preying on them, then yeah, maybe you should rethink the game you’re making.

My point is that I just don’t think that’s true. I think developers and publishers get away with these shitty systems because they’ve convinced people that they just can’t possibly make games without doing so, even though there are countless examples of very successful games that don’t include those bullshit lootbox based stores.

As far as I know, Bungie has never used that excuse, but their fans sure are eager to make it for them.

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I just don’t honestly think any of that is relevant. Bungie are the ones that decided to make a game that is drastically more expensive to support. If they can’t do that on the price of a $60 game plus paid DLC, maybe they should re-evaluate the type of game they’re making instead of cramming in some bullshit paid lootboxes.

This is ridiculous to me. You're telling Bungie they should NOT make the game THEY want to make because a less than majority of players hate one aspect of it. If they had wanted to make another Halo they would have, but they didn't, because they wanted to make a game that's different. As with all products if it's a failure THEN you are justified in saying they should re-evaluate, but as of right now Destiny is a huge success, even with the vocal minority complaining about Eververse. Yes you can dislike it or even hate it and anything else, but trying to say that Bungie should try something different just because you don't like it is bullshit.

That’s not even remotely what I said. I’m saying the games are expensive to make and support is a bullshit excuse. If you can’t make and support a game without including a system that is undeniably unfriendly to consumers and almost as inarguably preying on them, then yeah, maybe you should rethink the game you’re making.

My point is that I just don’t think that’s true. I think developers and publishers get away with these shitty systems because they’ve convinced people that they just can’t possibly make games without doing so, even though there are countless examples of very successful games that don’t include those bullshit lootbox based stores.

As far as I know, Bungie has never used that excuse, but their fans sure are eager to make it for them.

Maybe I’m the source of confusion here. My response above was intended to be strictly limited to the cost of Destiny 1 and its various expansions. I did not mean to include or imply that that micro transactions were in any way necessary. In fact, I meant to do the opposite and specifically call into question their necessity in regards to the development of Destiny and Destiny 2. Somehow that got lost along the way.

The rest of my point was really in response to this idea:

$60 every 3 years from every Halo fan used to be enough to make the Halo games.

Yeah, that statement is true, but as I outlined, Destiny received much more support and updates and content over its lifespan than any of the Bungie Halos did. And that I think the total cost for Destiny 1 + its expansions was very much justified by the amount of new single player and multiplayer content and UI additions and new features we got over that period. (And that, again, I do think micro transactions had much to do with all that.)

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Yeah, that statement is true, but as I outlined, Destiny received much more support and updates and content over its lifespan than any of the Bungie Halos did. And that I think the total cost for Destiny 1 + its expansions was very much justified by the amount of new single player and multiplayer content and UI additions and new features we got over that period. (And that, again, I do think micro transactions had much to do with all that.)

Halo came out on one platform. Destiny came out on 4.

I hate to break it to you, but a company like Blizzard made more content FOR FREE for a game like Diablo 2 than Bungie ever did with Destiny. If you want to look at a modern AAA example, look no further than Witcher 3.

We paid money for that vast majority of the new stuff in Destiny. But that stuff was spread out into multiple releases because of that, instead of being tightly integrated into a bigger whole.

It's time to just raise the price of the base game, and give us the bigger package all at once. Games are the cheapest they have ever been in history. You paid about 50% more for an NES game back in the day than you do for an AAA game now (figuring inflation). Isn't that bonkers?! And you could make an NES game in like 4 months. Games now take much more time, skill, and talent to make.

Why aren't we being charged what it's actually worth?

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(And that, again, I do think micro transactions had much to do with all that.)

Did they? Microtransactions didn’t come into play until the first Festival of the Lost right? I can’t see that they added much to the game, but that’s hard to say without knowing where that money went.

Other than SRL which was an actually new activity, so far it seems like the events that supposedly came from funding from the Eververse really only seem to exist to try to get people to spend money on microtransactions.

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Ah. Fair enough then.

I think Destiny 1’s content all justified it’s price. I think CoO does too, but that’s largely on the back of the raid lair.

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I think Destiny 1’s content all justified it’s price. I think CoO does too, but that’s largely on the back of the raid lair.

I agree as well, but people said the same thing about the Crota Raid as well. And even I would admit without the end game content for all Destiny DLC it wouldn't be worth the price to me.

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I think Destiny 1’s content all justified it’s price. I think CoO does too, but that’s largely on the back of the raid lair.

I agree as well, but people said the same thing about the Crota Raid as well. And even I would admit without the end game content for all Destiny DLC it wouldn't be worth the price to me.

I think that’s a somewhat common sentiment towards Destiny in general, no? I certainly get the impression that there’s a substantial portion of the fan base who play the game almost strictly for Raids, nightfalls, Trials & IB. I doubt it’s a majority or anything close to that, but it’s certainly a common sentiment.

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A combination of highly vocal minority of players and the perspective presented by content creators (because advanced/end game content is usually the biggest viewer draw) makes an obvious skew to that style of game content being front-and-center.

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I think Destiny 1’s content all justified it’s price. I think CoO does too, but that’s largely on the back of the raid lair.

I agree as well, but people said the same thing about the Crota Raid as well. And even I would admit without the end game content for all Destiny DLC it wouldn't be worth the price to me.

That's honestly a little hard for me to judge. I played the demo version of D1 for a few weeks, until I finally upgraded shortly before House of Wolves came out. I bought the deluxe version of whatever that just came with the expansion pass. So I basically started playing with Vanilla + Dark Below + House of Wolves as one big package. I know which content is which, but I didn't necessarily experience it that way, so it's a bit harder for me to judge the value of those packages independently.

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

Advertising is violence.

The only thing that really bothers me is that EV is right beside the postmaster. I love Claudia Black, but I get sick of hearing about her uncle.

"I keep telling everyone he wasn't my uncle! He wasn't!"

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

I mean, the big difference here is the escapism factor. When we’re out in the real world, things cost money. Many people jump into a videogame (that they’ve already paid for) to escape from the day-to-day realities of life. I can totally understand why it grates on people so much to have their escapist-fantasy-downtime activity infiltrated by a real-money storefront.

The only thing that really bothers me is that EV is right beside the postmaster. I love Claudia Black, but I get sick of hearing about her uncle.

If I hear 1 more damn word about Fenchurch... >:-[

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If I hear 1 more damn word about Fenchurch... >:-[

The thing that makes me the maddest is when she says something like "The Red Legion was getting so bad that I almost picked up a gun myself, but then they left. Lucky them."

So, while our only city was being bombed and our leaders were being tortured and our Guardians were being slaughtered and our sun and solar system was under threat of complete destruction, Tess Everis was just about reaching the point of deciding to help fight...

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If I hear 1 more damn word about Fenchurch... >:-[

The thing that makes me the maddest is when she says something like "The Red Legion was getting so bad that I almost picked up a gun myself, but then they left. Lucky them."

So, while our only city was being bombed and our leaders were being tortured and our Guardians were being slaughtered and our sun and solar system was under threat of complete destruction, Tess Everis was just about reaching the point of deciding to help fight...

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If I hear 1 more damn word about Fenchurch... >:-[

The thing that makes me the maddest is when she says something like "The Red Legion was getting so bad that I almost picked up a gun myself, but then they left. Lucky them."

So, while our only city was being bombed and our leaders were being tortured and our Guardians were being slaughtered and our sun and solar system was under threat of complete destruction, Tess Everis was just about reaching the point of deciding to help fight...

Don't forget that she humped it all the way to The Farm in the EDZ to set up her shitty tent and sell us bullshit, though!

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I guess I get the discomfort with being able to buy a chance to get something that gives you some kind of buff, but otherwise I can't relate. Do the people bothered by this live in a city? When they walk past shop windows and see things that they COULD BUY (if they chose to), is that traumatic for them?

I mean, the big difference here is the escapism factor. When we’re out in the real world, things cost money. Many people jump into a videogame (that they’ve already paid for) to escape from the day-to-day realities of life. I can totally understand why it grates on people so much to have their escapist-fantasy-downtime activity infiltrated by a real-money storefront.

Except it's not a real-money storefront or at least the content that can be bought with silver (still an abstraction but closer to real money) are loot boxes. The items that really tempt can be bought with currency earned in-game.

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Every time someone complains about microtransactions or lootcrates, they mention it's OK so long as it's only cosmetic. From what I could tell, Eververse only supplies shaders, ships, ghosts, landspeeders, etc., so why is it so despised?

The ghost shells breach the divide between "purely cosmetic" and "provide an unfair advantage." The exotic ghost shells work on all worlds and most also provide unique abilities which make acquiring other items easier. They are vastly more powerful, useful, and better looking than their non-exotic counterparts.

Personally, I think there's a second egregious transgression in microtrans land, which is the slot-machine gambling nature of some of the purchase options. This isn't a Bungie problem so much as it is, in my esteem, and entire game industry problem. I'm more willing to accept it in a free to play game than I am in a full price AAA game. Furthermore, with Bungie's exp throttling coming to light, it means grinding for gambling has been made more difficult than it seems, which makes me wonder where else Bungie has their finger on the scales in order to make paying actual money more attractive to players than actually playing the game to earn rewards.

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I’ll say up front that I do love Destiny, and I think Bungie has a lot to be proud of with this franchise. I feel the need to say so here, because this topic turns my focus towards the areas where I find Destiny lacking, so everything from here on out may sound disproportionately negative. Just couch everything I’m about to say within that framework :)

I find the current state of Destiny somewhat inexplicable. I’m sure there are perfectly valid reasons for every misstep along the way, but I also can’t escape the feeling that there is a healthy dose of bad decisions and lack of quality work thrown in as well (along side certain aspects of the game which show loads of quality work).

The story behind vanilla Destiny is well known at this point. Tools that were a nightmare to use, late-development reboot, that whole thing. Given that scenario, the game that shipped in Sep 2014 makes perfect sense. It’s everything after that confuses me.

The first 2 expansions were essentially just “more of the same D1”. New story missions and strikes of the same style and quality as D1. Most of that content failed to add anything meaningful, because it was just more mediocre content. Destiny was already full of that. There were a few standouts; The Crota raid, year 1 Trials, some quality of life improvements. But the biggest problems with Destiny still stood: most of the content in the game did not live up to the standards set by Bungie’s past work, the best content in Destiny, or the work being done by other contemporary studios.

Then things started to change. TTK took the basic D1 formula and shook it up in substantial ways. The campaign missions were better, more diverse, more replayable. The storytelling was better. The flow of the game (campaign -> Patrols -> quests and strikes -> raid) felt beautifully tuned, natural, kept things moving and exciting, and made the player feel like there was always plenty to do.

It was right around this time that we first heard about the introduction of Eververse, the Live Team, and some of the behind the scenes stuff that Jason Schreier has spoken about. The supposed story being that Bungie’s tools were too crappy to develop new content at the pace they’d hoped to, so the Live Team would act as a sort of stop-gap, producing a steady trickle of minor updates and funding itself through EV. At the time, it all sounded good to me. TTK has shown that Bungie had stepped up their game and could produce great Destiny content. I thought to myself “if we get a major TTK-sized expansion every year, with a trickle of new missions or quests from the live team between major releases, that could work out quite well”.

But my hopes were dashed rather quickly. I apologize for being so harsh, but I can only describe the content output from the Live Team as dramatically sub-par. Cash-grab events, a Team Doubles playlist dressed up to look like a big deal, a joke of a quest in that “April update”. SRL was the only remotely cool output, and it’s around for like 10 days each year (and even then, it’s not great... just a silly change of pace).

I can already hear some people saying “what do you want... it was all free!”

Yes, it was free if you didn’t buy anything from Eververse. But my answer is simple: I want GOOD content in Destiny. Free or paid, large or small, I want the content in the game to show the same standards of quality that made me love Bungie in the first place. The brilliant mechanics, combat, and encounter design that made each of their Halo games so damn incredible. Not more sub-par content just for the sake of adding to the already bloated list of “things to do” in Destiny. People make the same complaints now that they’ve been making since D1 shipped: “there’s nothing to do!”. These complaints are missing the mark, because there’s actually plenty to do... most of it is just poorly designed busy work with crappy storytelling bolted on, so it all blurs together. But I’m getting sidetracked...

So Eververse proved to be a big letdown. But then Rise of Iron cake out. Not nearly as good as TTK, but it had some decent story missions and a great raid. Between that and the final Live Team update (that brought all the raids up to max level), D1 was left in a great place and I was optimistic about D2.

Here’s where things get really confusing. D2 also went through a late-development shuffle (possibly not as late or as major as what D1 went through, but still significant). The game, made by the same leads who were at the helm of TTK, is missing many of the elements that made TTK so great. The mission design took a step back (playing the campaign once was fun, my 2nd and 3rd playthroughs were mostly a complete chore). The strikes and side quests were not woven in to the experience in any natural, organic, or compelling way. They feel utterly bolted on. Especially the strikes... I can’t even tell how many there are, because there’s no way to know if you’ve done them all or not. It’s just a playlist that throws you into a random strike, often the same one multiple times in a row. The story in D2 was at least comprehensible, mostly. But the writing was just bad, and none of the potential weight of the early narrative was carried through.

So a couple months after D2 has shipped, the community is raging over the complete lack of a compelling end game. D2 is looking like a rushed shell of a game in some ways. The improvements in the overall quality of the content that we saw with TTK are still there in some places, but not so much in others. It’s all feeling strangely familiar.

And then, we get Curse of Osiris. Aside from that free Live-Team update that added a Quest, CoO feels like the most utterly undercooked, padded, and poorly developed piece of Destiny content to date. The Infinite Forrest is so far below the standards of FPS design that Bungie used to be known for, I’m actually shocked that it shipped as is. And it’s made worse by the fact that you have to run back through it like 9 times over the course of a 2-3 hour campaign. I feel similarly about the Patrol space. If I’d tried to imagine the absolute bare-minimum that Bungie would ever try to pass off as a patrol Destination, I would have pictured something 3 times the size of the Mercury destination. They’ve packed it full of a bunch of stuff happening all the time to try and make up for it’s pathetic lack of scale, but it still feels repetitive AF after about 30 minutes. And the story... well the story is just terrible. Bungie thoroughly wasted an opportunity to make good on some of the most fascinating background lore and world building from D1. The dialogue is so dumb, it’s shocking. Osiris tells us he re-simulated the Vex mind we’d already killed because he “thought he could control it”, and later in the same strike he says “nobody can hope to control a Vex mind!” [face-desk].

So now, I’m at a bit of a loss. I don’t know how the quality of Bungie’s content could slide so far back down. Is it lack of time? I thought the Live Team was supposed to free up the rest of the studio so they’d have more time to focus on making better content! And if the Live Team isn’t helping, then WHY would Bungie commit to an expansion/DLC schedule so similar to what they went through in Year 1, when they’d supposedly already decided they couldn’t produce quality content in that time frame? How is it that we are in the 4th year of this franchise, and the game is still suffering from so many of the same problems that it launched with? Most of all, at what point do I just come to expect mediocre content from Bungie, with a few bright, shining, brilliant exceptions (like the raids). Is it just time for me to decide that my favourite FPS developer doesn’t usually know how to make great FPS missions and stories anymore?

Again, I thoroughly enjoy Destiny. This post is laser-focused on my gripes with the game, which gives it a negative tone, but that doesn’t encapsulate my complete feelings on it.

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Yes, it was free if you didn’t buy anything from Eververse. But my answer is simple: I want GOOD content in Destiny. Free or paid, large or small, I want the content in the game to show the same standards of quality that made me love Bungie in the first place. The brilliant mechanics, combat, and encounter design that made each of their Halo games so damn incredible.

That's not really going to happen.

You have games that were developed over the course of years, with relatively few campaign missions that were given lots of attention. The Halo games were a large package, where everything was integrated well with everything else. Nothing was 'standalone'. The entire focus of the Halo games was a great single player experience. If Destiny 3 can ship with the equivalent of 10 raid lairs right out the gate, then yeah. You can get quality missions like Halo.

You also have to think about what sprint and the movement abilities do to combat. Halo was always a game of territory - taking and holding positions, pushing against enemies. Perhaps this worked so well because you were so much slower than other FPS games. You couldn't really run circles around your enemies or get from place to place in a flash. They say sprint has no place in Halo - yet you are longing for a game like that, but which has sprint and crazy movement speed and abilities. Try sprinting through as much of the game as you can… you can literally run through most of Destiny and Des2ny.

Think about the fact that they can't even ship a raid with each new expansion. Quality content just takes a long time to make. Halo worked because they spent a long time making the game, the dropped it on you all at once.

For what you want to work, there needs to be:

1. Much larger, more infrequent releases. Perhaps no DLC at all, but rather just sequels every 3 years.
2. No more focus on grinding and replayability of missions. This makes them boring and short.

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How would one remove grinding from Destiny's mission design? There's no way you can get away with that in a game like this. Grinding is the bread and butter of a loot based, progression driven experience.

IMO, the story missions should be designed with quality encounters in mind and just have dedicated variants designed for replayability.

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How would one remove grinding from Destiny's mission design? There's no way you can get away with that in a game like this. Grinding is the bread and butter of a loot based, progression driven experience.

IMO, the story missions should be designed with quality encounters in mind and just have dedicated variants designed for replayability.

The ironic part is that the Halo missions were far more “grindable” than any Destiny mission, because they were so damn fun to replay. The combat was so dynamic and varied that the same encounter could play out differently 10 times in a row. That just doesn’t happen in Destiny. The AI is too static, the encounters too stiff. Theoretically, the variety should come from the different classes and weapons that we choose. But none of that adds as much variety as it could or should. Playing with Scout Rifles requires you to keep your distance a tiny bit more than using an auto rifle, but the difference isn’t that impactful. All the unique and diverse weapons are now crammed into a single category (power), so a lot of potential variety gets flushed down the tubes there too. And the different subclasses look more different than they play in most ways.
You sort of have to go far out of your way to create combat variety in Destiny, where other games (Halo, Titanfall, Battlefield) build the variety into the core combat mechanics in ways that are almost impossible to avoid.

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How would one remove grinding from Destiny's mission design? There's no way you can get away with that in a game like this. Grinding is the bread and butter of a loot based, progression driven experience.

IMO, the story missions should be designed with quality encounters in mind and just have dedicated variants designed for replayability.

The ironic part is that the Halo missions were far more “grindable” than any Destiny mission, because they were so damn fun to replay. The combat was so dynamic and varied that the same encounter could play out differently 10 times in a row. That just doesn’t happen in Destiny. The AI is too static, the encounters too stiff. Theoretically, the variety should come from the different classes and weapons that we choose. But none of that adds as much variety as it could or should. Playing with Scout Rifles requires you to keep your distance a tiny bit more than using an auto rifle, but the difference isn’t that impactful. All the unique and diverse weapons are now crammed into a single category (power), so a lot of potential variety gets flushed down the tubes there too. And the different subclasses look more different than they play in most ways.
You sort of have to go far out of your way to create combat variety in Destiny, where other games (Halo, Titanfall, Battlefield) build the variety into the core combat mechanics in ways that are almost impossible to avoid.

This is correct. One of the biggest challenges is weapon access. We can bring any weapon we want to a fight. Mission designers has a lot more control over how an encounter could play out when you only had access to certain guns. It became a fun thing to try and break the game by finding ways to bring vehicles and weapons into the sandbox that weren't intended to be there. Now, we can steamroll anything at any range so we get bullet sponges.

I wish there was a system where we could only pick up certain types of weapons in the campaign. For instance, an SMG or a grenade launcher would be an option to pick up, but it would be your MIDI Minitool or Wicked Sister if you'd unlocked those options. If the designer wanted to give you something special, they'd give you a particular exotic to pick up. I think this would allow the designers to go deeper into how areas feel in terms of pacing and combat. Right now, combat is largely same-y outside of raid encounters.

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I wish there was a system where we could only pick up certain types of weapons in the campaign. For instance, an SMG or a grenade launcher would be an option to pick up, but it would be your MIDI Minitool or Wicked Sister if you'd unlocked those options. If the designer wanted to give you something special, they'd give you a particular exotic to pick up. I think this would allow the designers to go deeper into how areas feel in terms of pacing and combat. Right now, combat is largely same-y outside of raid encounters.

Or some system where you couldn't just switch weapons at will. I'm not saying this is the solution, but if every activity was locked loadout, you'd have to think a little more with your weapon selection. You could steamroll one part, but then be at a disadvantage in the next.

I feel like this isn't even possible though because of the double primary thing. You're always going to have something for the proper range on hand.

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I wish there was a system where we could only pick up certain types of weapons in the campaign. For instance, an SMG or a grenade launcher would be an option to pick up, but it would be your MIDI Minitool or Wicked Sister if you'd unlocked those options. If the designer wanted to give you something special, they'd give you a particular exotic to pick up. I think this would allow the designers to go deeper into how areas feel in terms of pacing and combat. Right now, combat is largely same-y outside of raid encounters.

Or some system where you couldn't just switch weapons at will. I'm not saying this is the solution, but if every activity was locked loadout, you'd have to think a little more with your weapon selection. You could steamroll one part, but then be at a disadvantage in the next.

I feel like this isn't even possible though because of the double primary thing. You're always going to have something for the proper range on hand.

My Xbox playthrough of D2 was close to this, because I powered through so quickly that I had very few weapons in my loadout. I’d play through several missions stuck with a sidearm and an smg as my primary/secondary combo. Strangely enough, it made the campaign a lot more fun, because I didn’t always have the ideal tools for the job.

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I wish there was a system where we could only pick up certain types of weapons in the campaign. For instance, an SMG or a grenade launcher would be an option to pick up, but it would be your MIDI Minitool or Wicked Sister if you'd unlocked those options. If the designer wanted to give you something special, they'd give you a particular exotic to pick up. I think this would allow the designers to go deeper into how areas feel in terms of pacing and combat. Right now, combat is largely same-y outside of raid encounters.

Or some system where you couldn't just switch weapons at will. I'm not saying this is the solution, but if every activity was locked loadout, you'd have to think a little more with your weapon selection. You could steamroll one part, but then be at a disadvantage in the next.

I feel like this isn't even possible though because of the double primary thing. You're always going to have something for the proper range on hand.

My Xbox playthrough of D2 was close to this, because I powered through so quickly that I had very few weapons in my loadout. I’d play through several missions stuck with a sidearm and an smg as my primary/secondary combo. Strangely enough, it made the campaign a lot more fun, because I didn’t always have the ideal tools for the job.

Well, there is no difficulty selector, and the campaign is very easy no matter what you use.

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I wish there was a system where we could only pick up certain types of weapons in the campaign. For instance, an SMG or a grenade launcher would be an option to pick up, but it would be your MIDI Minitool or Wicked Sister if you'd unlocked those options. If the designer wanted to give you something special, they'd give you a particular exotic to pick up. I think this would allow the designers to go deeper into how areas feel in terms of pacing and combat. Right now, combat is largely same-y outside of raid encounters.

Or some system where you couldn't just switch weapons at will. I'm not saying this is the solution, but if every activity was locked loadout, you'd have to think a little more with your weapon selection. You could steamroll one part, but then be at a disadvantage in the next.

I feel like this isn't even possible though because of the double primary thing. You're always going to have something for the proper range on hand.

My Xbox playthrough of D2 was close to this, because I powered through so quickly that I had very few weapons in my loadout. I’d play through several missions stuck with a sidearm and an smg as my primary/secondary combo. Strangely enough, it made the campaign a lot more fun, because I didn’t always have the ideal tools for the job.

I miss games where you entered the battlefield with "these" weapons and if you depleted their ammo you would have to come across a resupply drop or pick up enemy weapons. It's getting pretty boring doing everything with the same scout rifle all the time. (It's time to eliminate "loadouts.") Halo missions had great replayability because of this. It always changed and you would have to adapt new tactics on the fly based on the situation. Destiny missions are identical every time. I would say that the CoO Heroic missions changed things up but they are all always "active", except for sometimes "The Runner" is available. It's the only heroic mission I've played and I'm yet to understand any type of modifier. That mission is so annoying.

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I wish there was a system where we could only pick up certain types of weapons in the campaign. For instance, an SMG or a grenade launcher would be an option to pick up, but it would be your MIDI Minitool or Wicked Sister if you'd unlocked those options. If the designer wanted to give you something special, they'd give you a particular exotic to pick up. I think this would allow the designers to go deeper into how areas feel in terms of pacing and combat. Right now, combat is largely same-y outside of raid encounters.

Or some system where you couldn't just switch weapons at will. I'm not saying this is the solution, but if every activity was locked loadout, you'd have to think a little more with your weapon selection. You could steamroll one part, but then be at a disadvantage in the next.

I feel like this isn't even possible though because of the double primary thing. You're always going to have something for the proper range on hand.

My Xbox playthrough of D2 was close to this, because I powered through so quickly that I had very few weapons in my loadout. I’d play through several missions stuck with a sidearm and an smg as my primary/secondary combo. Strangely enough, it made the campaign a lot more fun, because I didn’t always have the ideal tools for the job.

I miss games where you entered the battlefield with "these" weapons and if you depleted their ammo you would have to come across a resupply drop or pick up enemy weapons. It's getting pretty boring doing everything with the same scout rifle all the time. (It's time to eliminate "loadouts.") Halo missions had great replayability because of this. It always changed and you would have to adapt new tactics on the fly based on the situation. Destiny missions are identical every time. I would say that the CoO Heroic missions changed things up but they are all always "active", except for sometimes "The Runner" is available. It's the only heroic mission I've played and I'm yet to understand any type of modifier. That mission is so annoying.

Heh - I know exactly where you're coming from. I've begun to use whatever is equipped on my character when I log in each time - I might finish a night playing Crucible, so I pull a MasterWorlks handcannon off a character to play that night, and then the next day I log back in on the character that it had been moved FROM, and DIM has equipped some random gun that had been in my inventory. I've started to just play with these random guns. Sometimes it's a lot of fun, sometimes it's terrible... but it's ALWAYS more interesting than using the same 2 guns all the time. ;)

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It's the only heroic mission I've played and I'm yet to understand any type of modifier. That mission is so annoying.

Have you tried hitting your Ghost button while in the mission? The modifiers are named and described in the same area where you'd see patrol or strike challenges. It's the same way you'd check for skull modifiers in a D1 nightfall. And they're not always the same per mission - they rotate periodically. So if you've done The Runner multiple times, there's a solid chance that you've actually done more than one combination of modifiers.

It can be really helpful to know what they are. There's one modifier that slows down health/shield regen to an extreme degree, and the only way to get normal regen is to pick up pools of light left by dead enemies. However, a Path of Hunger Voidwalker stomps all over that idea as long as you can keep getting kills.

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/stabbim/video/42028242

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It's the only heroic mission I've played and I'm yet to understand any type of modifier. That mission is so annoying.

Have you tried hitting your Ghost button while in the mission? The modifiers are named and described in the same area where you'd see patrol or strike challenges.

I don't think I have. Previously people told me the modifiers were down on the bottom left where buffs show up...but I never saw anything. I'll check with Ghost next time.

Thanks :)

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How would one remove grinding from Destiny's mission design? There's no way you can get away with that in a game like this. Grinding is the bread and butter of a loot based, progression driven experience.

IMO, the story missions should be designed with quality encounters in mind and just have dedicated variants designed for replayability.

So much this!

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How would one remove grinding from Destiny's mission design? There's no way you can get away with that in a game like this. Grinding is the bread and butter of a loot based, progression driven experience.

Exactly.

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IMO, the story missions should be designed with quality encounters in mind and just have dedicated variants designed for replayability.

So do for story missions like they do with strikes? I mean, they can't be as open with how they do it because it still has to fit within the context of the story line.

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Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

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Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

So you are saying, beat the campaign like everyone else in the same style but them open them up to be replayed with different variations? Because I'm pretty sure that exactly describes the strikes that were incorporated into the main mission :D

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Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

So you are saying, beat the campaign like everyone else in the same style but them open them up to be replayed with different variations? Because I'm pretty sure that exactly describes the strikes that were incorporated into the main mission :D

I’m not at all a fan of the “strikes as story missions” thing done in CoO. I actually thought the way the strikes were implemented in Vanilla Destiny (pre-Questification) worked well; complete a series of story missions in a given region, and cap off that area with a 3-player strike that acts as a sort of local boss fight. It had a great rhythm. The CoO thing just felt like trying to stretch as little content as possible out into a full expansion.

Besides, I think what is being suggested is not a merging of strikes and story missions. I think the idea is to have story missions built with little variants or encounter modifiers thrown in, so that they’re slightly different each time you replay them. Similar to what has been done with Strikes in the past.

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Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

So you are saying, beat the campaign like everyone else in the same style but them open them up to be replayed with different variations? Because I'm pretty sure that exactly describes the strikes that were incorporated into the main mission :D

I’m not at all a fan of the “strikes as story missions” thing done in CoO. I actually thought the way the strikes were implemented in Vanilla Destiny (pre-Questification) worked well; complete a series of story missions in a given region, and cap off that area with a 3-player strike that acts as a sort of local boss fight. It had a great rhythm. The CoO thing just felt like trying to stretch as little content as possible out into a full expansion.

I'm actually okay with both. I think they did a great job with the VO in them to imply you had already beaten the bad guy but that he is back.

Besides, I think what is being suggested is not a merging of strikes and story missions. I think the idea is to have story missions built with little variants or encounter modifiers thrown in, so that they’re slightly different each time you replay them. Similar to what has been done with Strikes in the past.

I agree that that would be great. In a previous post I mentioned that they would also be constrained even more than the variations of strikes because of the nature of the story line. It can totally be done and it would also make the story have more flavor.

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I'm actually okay with both. I think they did a great job with the VO in them to imply you had already beaten the bad guy but that he is back.

Well that's one positive thing you have to give the Infinite Forest credit for - at least it makes some kind of story sense that they COULD be back.

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Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

So you are saying, beat the campaign like everyone else in the same style but them open them up to be replayed with different variations? Because I'm pretty sure that exactly describes the strikes that were incorporated into the main mission :D

I’m not at all a fan of the “strikes as story missions” thing done in CoO. I actually thought the way the strikes were implemented in Vanilla Destiny (pre-Questification) worked well; complete a series of story missions in a given region, and cap off that area with a 3-player strike that acts as a sort of local boss fight. It had a great rhythm. The CoO thing just felt like trying to stretch as little content as possible out into a full expansion.

I'm actually okay with both. I think they did a great job with the VO in them to imply you had already beaten the bad guy but that he is back.

As I mentioned in my massive rant above, the dialog didn’t really work for me. At best, it was ok. But some of the dialogue was so thoughtless and stupid that it made the characters look moronic.

Besides, I think what is being suggested is not a merging of strikes and story missions. I think the idea is to have story missions built with little variants or encounter modifiers thrown in, so that they’re slightly different each time you replay them. Similar to what has been done with Strikes in the past.

I agree that that would be great. In a previous post I mentioned that they would also be constrained even more than the variations of strikes because of the nature of the story line. It can totally be done and it would also make the story have more flavor.

For story missions, they wouldn’t necessarily need new dialogue. Maybe just a few different variations of the enemy encounters?

Ideally, this wouldn’t be necessary at all. It would be amazing if the missions were designed in ways that presented the player with options (like “do I take the tank, the warthog, the chopper, or do I go on foot?”). Options like that create inherent replayability.

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I agree that that would be great. In a previous post I mentioned that they would also be constrained even more than the variations of strikes because of the nature of the story line. It can totally be done and it would also make the story have more flavor.

For story missions, they wouldn’t necessarily need new dialogue. Maybe just a few different variations of the enemy encounters?

Ideally, this wouldn’t be necessary at all. It would be amazing if the missions were designed in ways that presented the player with options (like “do I take the tank, the warthog, the chopper, or do I go on foot?”). Options like that create inherent replayability.

Yeah, it doesn't help that we, as Guardians, are a tank, warthog and chopper mixed into one :P

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Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

So you are saying, beat the campaign like everyone else in the same style but them open them up to be replayed with different variations? Because I'm pretty sure that exactly describes the strikes that were incorporated into the main mission :D

I’m not at all a fan of the “strikes as story missions” thing done in CoO. I actually thought the way the strikes were implemented in Vanilla Destiny (pre-Questification) worked well; complete a series of story missions in a given region, and cap off that area with a 3-player strike that acts as a sort of local boss fight. It had a great rhythm. The CoO thing just felt like trying to stretch as little content as possible out into a full expansion.

Besides, I think what is being suggested is not a merging of strikes and story missions. I think the idea is to have story missions built with little variants or encounter modifiers thrown in, so that they’re slightly different each time you replay them. Similar to what has been done with Strikes in the past.

I really liked the Strikes as missions. If I had to hazard a guess, your issue is more about the filling content part than anything else. Would you mind so much if every mission had the length and complexity (but not necessarily the ending boss fight) of a Strike?

I never really liked the way Strikes were done in D1 because while they did tend to usually unlock as you neared the end of a Destination, they were rarely well integrated in the story. There were more like random side quests instead of key story moments.

I'd want a combination. Have as many missions as Destiny had, but have each mission be long and complex. And then let me go into a random mission playlist or replay individual missions whenever I want...

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See, I like the bite-sized story mission paradigm because it differentiates them from strikes.

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I never really liked the way Strikes were done in D1 because while they did tend to usually unlock as you neared the end of a Destination, they were rarely well integrated in the story. There were more like random side quests instead of key story moments.

The Taken Kong strikes were much better about that, and I still think that time period is the best Destiny has ever been. D2 is even worse about making strikes feel integrated into the story.

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The Taken Kong

Is it bad that I want this now?

[image]

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But with CoO it was great. The Strikes were the story and it worked wonderfully. Yes, there needs to be more content as well, but the integration was nearly perfect. To the point that multiple hardcore Destiny players that you know from DBO did not realize they'd even played the Strikes after they beat the CoO storyline.

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But with CoO it was great. The Strikes were the story and it worked wonderfully. Yes, there needs to be more content as well, but the integration was nearly perfect. To the point that multiple hardcore Destiny players that you know from DBO did not realize they'd even played the Strikes after they beat the CoO storyline.

That’s because they were just story missions that got reused as Strikes. It was a lazy trick and it doesn’t work well at all. You don’t realize you “just played a strike” when you first go through them because they’re labeled as story missions and you go through them Solo. Why would it ever occur to anyone to think “hey, did I just play a Strike?”

Then, when you jump into the strike playlist, you get Osiris saying “oh, hey... that thing you already did? Yeah, I need you to do it again... for science...” and then you play through the exact same mission, but with 2 other guardians along for the ride.

I’m sorry, that is not good narrative integration. That is lazy re-use of content with barely any attempt to disguise the fact that Bungie was willfully misleading with their advertising of CoO. You (Bungie... not YOU, Raga) don’t get to say “X new story missions and Y new strikes” when the missions and strikes ARE THE SAME MISSIONS. I’ve had plenty of criticisms of Destiny over the years, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to being legitimately angry at Bungie, because at this point they’re just being insulting. No, Bungie... you actually cant just copy and paste the same missions into different activities and try to pass it off as more new content. It’s total BS.

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I understand the backlash that overlapping content brings. Everyone remembers all the hubbub with Reach having MP maps "pulled from Campaign" even those they pretty much all felt like MP maps. The core designs of the two Strikes are very obviously Strikes. Given their structure related to standard story missions and their length and pacing to the same.

Say whatever you will about advertising numbers of activities. I don't personally care about that. But I do consider it disingenuous to act like the Strikes weren't built as Strikes first.

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I understand the backlash that overlapping content brings. Everyone remembers all the hubbub with Reach having MP maps "pulled from Campaign" even those they pretty much all felt like MP maps. The core designs of the two Strikes are very obviously Strikes. Given their structure related to standard story missions and their length and pacing to the same.

Say whatever you will about advertising numbers of activities. I don't personally care about that. But I do consider it disingenuous to act like the Strikes weren't built as Strikes first.

It doesn’t matter to me which they were “built as first”. They could have been built as strikes and then porter over and re-used as story missions. They could have been built from the ground up with both story mission and strike equally in mind. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s the exact same content being passed of as 2 different activities.

Maybe, possibly, if these strikes/missions were jaw-droppingingly awesome and showed more work and care than the usual strikes or missions, I could almost see myself being ok with it. But they aren’t even average, as far as I’m concerned. Like most things in CoO, they’re middling-at-Best.

And I don’t bring negativity with me to anything in Destiny. Far from it. I just have standards, based on my impression of what Bungie is capable of, and based on what I feel is fair practice for a AAA studio charging $20 for an expansion. I’m concerned, as a Bungie fan of over 15 years, that this sort of thing is what Bungie now thinks is “good enough”.

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I understand the backlash that overlapping content brings. Everyone remembers all the hubbub with Reach having MP maps "pulled from Campaign" even those they pretty much all felt like MP maps. The core designs of the two Strikes are very obviously Strikes. Given their structure related to standard story missions and their length and pacing to the same.

Destiny 1 did this, too, they just didn't call them strikes. The Eye of the Gate Lord mission is basically a Strike. So was the Scourge of Winter mission (the one with Draksis at the end). Granted, maybe both are a little on the short side for a Strike, but not drastically so.

The MP maps thing was dumb. I don't know what people expected, because they delivered exactly what they said, which was maps that were designed first and foremost as MP maps, then placed in the campaign where they made since. And I still loved it, because it gave context to a lot of the multiplayer maps.

Say whatever you will about advertising numbers of activities. I don't personally care about that. But I do consider it disingenuous to act like the Strikes weren't built as Strikes first.

And I feel it's disingenuous to advertise a set number of features, but then have those things be counted twice. For what it's worth, I think it's a neat implementation, and I don't mind it. I don't think you get to say they're two distinct activities, though, especially when they're almost literally the only new content in the game. Excluded those two missions from the story, and you're left with a few shorter runs through the Infinite Forest, and a mission that is basically just an old strike thrown into this campaign for some reason, and a mission that randomly takes place on Nessus which doesn't really have any new content either.

I enjoyed Curse of Osiris for what it is, but it's almost shamelessly stretching almost no content for as far as possible. I honestly have to wonder if all the time it took to design the new Mercury destination was worth it. Seems like those resources could have been better spent designing an actually good campaign with unique play spaces and missions on the existing Destinations. As it is, we got a bunch of missions that are repeated areas we've seen before, and what feels like a half baked Destination.

It's the story of the development of Destiny in one tiny package. It lacks focused, so instead of delivering anything really, really good, it delivers a bunch of mediocre content. Quantity over quality.

The only caveat to that is the Raid Lair, which is excellent, but it is also much shorter than any other raid, so even that feels a little half-baked compared to previous outings.

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And I feel it's disingenuous to advertise a set number of features, but then have those things be counted twice.

So this is @Cruel above, too.

As the only stuff I remember seeing/hearing mention of that were specific were number of Crucible maps, 2 Strikes, and one Raid Lair. And I think that was in interviews? It's marketed as being:

Features:
- Explore Mercury and its mysterious "Infinite Forest"
- New story missions and adventures
- New themed weapons, armor, and gear to earn
- New cooperative activities
- New competitive multiplayer arenas
- And more...

I don't feel I understand where people were sold on something that they weren't getting with Curse of Osiris - disappointed in the result or not.

I honestly have to wonder if all the time it took to design the new Mercury destination was worth it.

I had a pretty defined take on how I feel this didn't deliver on their potential with content right here and still feel, like basically everything, it didn't live up to what it could be.

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But with CoO it was great. The Strikes were the story and it worked wonderfully. Yes, there needs to be more content as well, but the integration was nearly perfect. To the point that multiple hardcore Destiny players that you know from DBO did not realize they'd even played the Strikes after they beat the CoO storyline.

That’s because they were just story missions that got reused as Strikes. It was a lazy trick and it doesn’t work well at all. You don’t realize you “just played a strike” when you first go through them because they’re labeled as story missions and you go through them Solo. Why would it ever occur to anyone to think “hey, did I just play a Strike?”

Then, when you jump into the strike playlist, you get Osiris saying “oh, hey... that thing you already did? Yeah, I need you to do it again... for science...” and then you play through the exact same mission, but with 2 other guardians along for the ride.

I’m sorry, that is not good narrative integration. That is lazy re-use of content with barely any attempt to disguise the fact that Bungie was willfully misleading with their advertising of CoO. You (Bungie... not YOU, Raga) don’t get to say “X new story missions and Y new strikes” when the missions and strikes ARE THE SAME MISSIONS. I’ve had plenty of criticisms of Destiny over the years, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to being legitimately angry at Bungie, because at this point they’re just being insulting.

Willfully misleading. No. That is 100% wrong. We were told in advance that the two new Strikes were also directly integrated as part of the story. At the very least Bungie did this in one of the livestreams. I can’t imagine there wasn’t also reporting of this fact far and wide after that. Even if someone didn’t know about the integration when they played the campaign, the accusation that Bungie even came anywhere close to trying to mislead is, at best, a misinformed, disrespectful fit of unfounded name calling.

I also completely disagree on your characterization of the reuse. I thought the Strikes were extremely well used within the campaign and the reuse in the Strike playlist with beefed up encounters and alternate dialogue that fit the characters and fit the story was Destiny at its best. I prefer the variant of that Strike where a new Vex Mind managed to restart the simulation on its own. Yeah, Osiris sometimes tinkers too far and gets in over his head, but the totally in game Lore makes is completely clear that without his constant meddling in the Infinite Forest the Vex will rediscover the right sequence of actions that leads to their ultimate victory. Really, it goes further than that. Not just they might or will rediscover it, but they in fact have rediscovered it since our Guaridan helped Osiris and that Osiris evidently destroyed that knowledge yet again without our help.

I thought similarly about the reuse of Strikes in Destiny 1. Omnigul repeatedly undoing her death. Sepiks Prime coming back as Sepiks Perfected, the Nexus on Venus being turned into a mini VoG Templar battle, the multiple variants of the Undying Mind, and the Shadow Theif being reanimated Frankenstein style via SIVA were all terrific reuses of content in a way that made sense. I think they all would have been better if they’d actually been a part of the campaigns, like Destiny 2 did with CoO, but I thought the reuse with new dialogue and encounters was, again, terrific. Having villains such as Omnigul, Sepiks, and now the Vex who can reappear and be redefeated without becoming a story contradiction is, to me, a wonderfully clever use of dialogue and reuse of content.

In the end, I think you are extremely off the mark with this one, and that the integration we saw in Curse of Osiris is something that should be encouraged instead of something anyone gets angry over.

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But with CoO it was great. The Strikes were the story and it worked wonderfully. Yes, there needs to be more content as well, but the integration was nearly perfect. To the point that multiple hardcore Destiny players that you know from DBO did not realize they'd even played the Strikes after they beat the CoO storyline.

That’s because they were just story missions that got reused as Strikes. It was a lazy trick and it doesn’t work well at all. You don’t realize you “just played a strike” when you first go through them because they’re labeled as story missions and you go through them Solo. Why would it ever occur to anyone to think “hey, did I just play a Strike?”

Then, when you jump into the strike playlist, you get Osiris saying “oh, hey... that thing you already did? Yeah, I need you to do it again... for science...” and then you play through the exact same mission, but with 2 other guardians along for the ride.

I’m sorry, that is not good narrative integration. That is lazy re-use of content with barely any attempt to disguise the fact that Bungie was willfully misleading with their advertising of CoO. You (Bungie... not YOU, Raga) don’t get to say “X new story missions and Y new strikes” when the missions and strikes ARE THE SAME MISSIONS. I’ve had plenty of criticisms of Destiny over the years, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to being legitimately angry at Bungie, because at this point they’re just being insulting.

Willfully misleading. No. That is 100% wrong. We were told in advance that the two new Strikes were also directly integrated as part of the story. At the very least Bungie did this in one of the livestreams. I can’t imagine there wasn’t also reporting of this fact far and wide after that. Even if someone didn’t know about the integration when they played the campaign, the accusation that Bungie even came anywhere close to trying to mislead is, at best, a misinformed, disrespectful fit of unfounded name calling.

I didn’t watch the livestreams. I saw the bullet lists that said “A new campaign, 2 new strikes”, etc. And besides that, “integrated as part of the story” would imply to me that we’d play some story missions, then get matched into a fire team to do a strike that was part of that same plot thread. Having watched the live stream, you already knew what to expect. But try to set that aside for a minute. If you just played the campaign, which was already inexcusably repetitive, then jumped into the strike playlist only to discover that you’d already played the strikes by yourself... can you not see how thoroughly disappointing that might be?

I also completely disagree on your characterization of the reuse. I thought the Strikes were extremely well used within the campaign and the reuse in the Strike playlist with beefed up encounters and alternate dialogue that fit the characters and fit the story was Destiny at its best. I prefer the variant of that Strike where a new Vex Mind managed to restart the simulation on its own. Yeah, Osiris sometimes tinkers too far and gets in over his head, but the totally in game Lore makes is completely clear that without his constant meddling in the Infinite Forest the Vex will rediscover the right sequence of actions that leads to their ultimate victory. Really, it goes further than that. Not just they might or will rediscover it, but they in fact have rediscovered it since our Guaridan helped Osiris and that Osiris evidently destroyed that knowledge yet again without our help.

No disrespect intended to you here (because I know how invested you are in the lore) but none of any of this matters to me because Bungie’s storytelling is so ham-fisted and clumsy, the dialog so bad, that it is simply impossible for me to give a crap about what the Vex are up to. To me, it all looks like Bungie trying to find an in-universe way to justify reuse of content. And in a certain scenario, I’m totally cool with that. But not when the recycling is this agregious.

I thought similarly about the reuse of Strikes in Destiny 1. Omnigul repeatedly undoing her death. Sepiks Prime coming back as Sepiks Perfected, the Nexus on Venus being turned into a mini VoG Templar battle, the multiple variants of the Undying Mind, and the Shadow Theif being reanimated Frankenstein style via SIVA were all terrific reuses of content in a way that made sense. I think they all would have been better if they’d actually been a part of the campaigns, like Destiny 2 did with CoO, but I thought the reuse with new dialogue and encounters was, again, terrific. Having villains such as Omnigul, Sepiks, and now the Vex who can reappear and be redefeated without becoming a story contradiction is, to me, a wonderfully clever use of dialogue and reuse of content.

The difference is that every D1 example you’ve mentioned was markedly different from the original version. The CoO mission and strike variants are so close to identical that I can’t actually think of any differences other than the dialogue and perhaps a couple extra ads during some of the encounters.

In the end, I think you are extremely off the mark with this one, and that the integration we saw in Curse of Osiris is something that should be encouraged instead of something anyone gets angry over.

Couldn’t disagree more. I’m glad you enjoyed it, truly :) But for me, Bungie is *this close* to loosing me as a customer. I’ve made many criticisms towards Destiny, but I’ve always been the first one to rush to Bungie’s defence and sing Destiny’s praise when it came down to it. But CoO is, in my estimation, flagrantly insulting to us as customers. I’ve already paid for the next expansion, so I’m along for the ride for the time being. But if we get more of this quality level of content releases in the near future, I’m done :(

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Couldn’t disagree more. I’m glad you enjoyed it, truly :) But for me, Bungie is *this close* to loosing me as a customer. I’ve made many criticisms towards Destiny, but I’ve always been the first one to rush to Bungie’s defence and sing Destiny’s praise when it came down to it. But CoO is, in my estimation, flagrantly insulting to us as customers. I’ve already paid for the next expansion, so I’m along for the ride for the time being. But if we get more of this quality level of content releases in the near future, I’m done :(

Nah, I think you’ve been done for a good while now. Totally not trying to be insulting or anything, but from the things you’ve said and have been saying I think you’re here because of friendships(?) and inertia. Not because of anything Bungie has done. From story, to characters, to gameplay, you’ve been so negative and even preemptively negative on so many parts of Destiny 2 that you’re either kidding us or kidding yourself about Bungie losing you as a customer. They’ve lost you already, you just happen to still have a preorder for another batch of content you aren’t going to like. :(

Either that, or you’re making idle threats. Not like we haven’t see those around here. ..

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Couldn’t disagree more. I’m glad you enjoyed it, truly :) But for me, Bungie is *this close* to loosing me as a customer. I’ve made many criticisms towards Destiny, but I’ve always been the first one to rush to Bungie’s defence and sing Destiny’s praise when it came down to it. But CoO is, in my estimation, flagrantly insulting to us as customers. I’ve already paid for the next expansion, so I’m along for the ride for the time being. But if we get more of this quality level of content releases in the near future, I’m done :(

Nah, I think you’ve been done for a good while now. Totally not trying to be insulting or anything, but from the things you’ve said and have been saying I think you’re here because of friendships(?) and inertia. Not because of anything Bungie has done. From story, to characters, to gameplay, you’ve been so negative and even preemptively negative on so many parts of Destiny 2 that you’re either kidding us or kidding yourself about Bungie losing you as a customer. They’ve lost you already, you just happen to still have a preorder for another batch of content you aren’t going to like. :(

Either that, or you’re making idle threats. Not like we haven’t see those around here. ..

That seems incredibly unfair. Cruel has pretty staunchly defended Bungie for what they do right, and it's not his fault he remains optimistic that they might one day actually live up the reputation they've built for themselves but have failed to come close to since Reach.

I think Curse of Osiris is just fine for what it is (The Raid Lair goes a long way towards making it worth the money for me), but it's hard for me to see it as anything other than half-baked, even bordering on lazy (and I think calling developers lazy is really unfair--I don't think Bungie is anything approaching lazy). But goddamn it, it's hard for me to care when it seems painfully obvious that Bungie doesn't. If they did we wouldn't even be having this debate. Curse of Osiris is exactly the type of content we wouldn't have seen out of Bungie pre-Destiny. I'm all for working smarter, not harder, but I have a hard time believing many people working there said "Yeah, let's just record some new dialogue and stuff it into the Pyrmidion strike and put that in the campaign, that'd be really cool!" rather than just knowing they needed something to pad out the laughable campaign they were putting together, or that anyone though it was super awesome to add a few new lines of dialogue to a mission then throw it in the Strikes playlist and call it a fucking day.

More and more, I get the impression that Bungie is struggling to stay ahead of the curve. They've signed some ridiculous deal with little to no leeway for delaying content, lest Activision get to take total control of the IP, so they're just scrambling to throw stuff together. Maybe that's completely off-base and Curse of Osiris is exactly the thing they wanted to make, but I'd be really depressed if that was true.

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Couldn’t disagree more. I’m glad you enjoyed it, truly :) But for me, Bungie is *this close* to loosing me as a customer. I’ve made many criticisms towards Destiny, but I’ve always been the first one to rush to Bungie’s defence and sing Destiny’s praise when it came down to it. But CoO is, in my estimation, flagrantly insulting to us as customers. I’ve already paid for the next expansion, so I’m along for the ride for the time being. But if we get more of this quality level of content releases in the near future, I’m done :(

Nah, I think you’ve been done for a good while now. Totally not trying to be insulting or anything, but from the things you’ve said and have been saying I think you’re here because of friendships(?) and inertia.

Untrue. I loved Destiny 2 when it came out, and said so many times. I’ve also expressed why I don’t think Destiny 2 is as much fun to play on a regular basis for weeks and weeks after launch, while also stating that I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Not because of anything Bungie has done. From story, to characters, to gameplay, you’ve been so negative and even preemptively negative on so many parts of Destiny 2 that you’re either kidding us or kidding yourself about Bungie losing you as a customer.

I’ve gotta challenge you on the “preemptively negative” part. I’ve talked about my likes and dislikes, parts of the game I’ve enjoyed and the parts I haven’t. But I cannot remember a single time when I’ve been preemptively negative about something... certainly not without due cause (I think it is 100% reasonable to say, at this point today, that the chances of the story being great in the next expansion are slim. But I would also express my HOPE that Bungie turns that trend around).

They’ve lost you already, you just happen to still have a preorder for another batch of content you aren’t going to like. :(

Before CoO, I was 100% on board with Destiny 2. I have a very casual relationship with the game at the moment, and that works great for me. I love the time I spend with it.

There are elements of the game that I don’t like so much, but that’s totally fine and cool. CoO is the first time I’ve ever felt like Bungie has ripped me off.

Either that, or you’re making idle threats. Not like we haven’t see those around here. ..

Not from me.

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Not because of anything Bungie has done. From story, to characters, to gameplay, you’ve been so negative and even preemptively negative on so many parts of Destiny 2 that you’re either kidding us or kidding yourself about Bungie losing you as a customer.

I’ve gotta challenge you on the “preemptively negative” part. I’ve talked about my likes and dislikes, parts of the game I’ve enjoyed and the parts I haven’t. But I cannot remember a single time when I’ve been preemptively negative about something... certainly not without due cause (I think it is 100% reasonable to say, at this point today, that the chances of the story being great in the next expansion are slim. But I would also express my HOPE that Bungie turns that trend around).

Heh. Ok...

Let me say up front that my reaction to this is purely theoretical, and I of course will do my best to keep an open mind when I actually play the game. That said...

I thought the little intro story featuring Zavala was good... exactly the kind of thing we needed in D1. I only have 1 problem with it, and that's Zavala. I don't like him. Or Ikora, or Cayde, or Amanda... all the characters from D1 are just paper-cutouts in my mind. Skin-deep caricatures. The idea of spending more time with these characters is a turn off for me.

I found myself wishing I was watching a cast of new characters in these cutscenes. I would have no preexisting attachment to new characters, but in the case of Destiny's cast, D2 is actually starting at a negative.

I'm just wondering out loud: would a new cast of characters help me jump into Des2ny without bringing as much baggage from D1 with me.

As a Destiny player, I have totally made peace with what Destiny is (and what it isn't). As I already said, I no longer expect any form of satisfaction from Destiny's story or characters. And I'm ok with the that.

I think it’s pretty fair to say you were preemptively negative on story and characters, at least. But, fair is fair, so in the continuing interest of fairness, you also posted this:

I won't say anything with regards to plot or gameplay specifics, but I just wanted to jump in real quick and say how much I loved the campaign. Fantastic in its own right, and a huge step above anything that from D1 or the expansions IMO. Lots of diversity in terms of gameplay set pieces, environments, and objectives. Without giving anything away, they do some stuff with some of the missions that feels like it should have been there all along.
Felt like the perfect overall length for me, too (about 9-10 hours). I didn't "power through", but split my time between story missions and patrol activities. I haven't done any strikes or PvP yet, and I still have plenty more to do on patrol. Most importantly, the game feels vibrant and full of stuff to do in a way that D1 never quite managed.
Oh, and it might be tied for my favourite Bungie soundtrack. I put it right up there with ODST. The music is absolutely spectacular.

Story wise, it is definitely a huge step above D1. I still struggled to care much about it, but that's largely because I have such a firmly planted dislike for all of Destiny's characters. But that's not so much the fault of D2, and to the game's credit, they use the characters far better than they've been used previously.

All in all, I really love it. Can't wait to get some co-op action happening :)

~~So... consider your challenge both partially accepted and met, but also my reasoning, at least about your not liking the gameplay, retracted. :)~~

Eh... the above sentence never quite read like it was suppose to and I’m tired of trying to tweak it to get the intended friendly tone to shine through. Here’s what it meant.

1. I stand by my claim that you have been preemptively negative about Destiny 2. You were very down the Vanguard to be sure and stated multiple times you were going to let your feelings about them in D1 affect how you felt about D2.
2. That said, I was wrong about your negativity towards gameplay specifically, and also more generally I overreached in my characterization of your negativity.

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Not because of anything Bungie has done. From story, to characters, to gameplay, you’ve been so negative and even preemptively negative on so many parts of Destiny 2 that you’re either kidding us or kidding yourself about Bungie losing you as a customer.

I’ve gotta challenge you on the “preemptively negative” part. I’ve talked about my likes and dislikes, parts of the game I’ve enjoyed and the parts I haven’t. But I cannot remember a single time when I’ve been preemptively negative about something... certainly not without due cause (I think it is 100% reasonable to say, at this point today, that the chances of the story being great in the next expansion are slim. But I would also express my HOPE that Bungie turns that trend around).

Heh. Ok...

Let me say up front that my reaction to this is purely theoretical, and I of course will do my best to keep an open mind when I actually play the game. That said...

I thought the little intro story featuring Zavala was good... exactly the kind of thing we needed in D1. I only have 1 problem with it, and that's Zavala. I don't like him. Or Ikora, or Cayde, or Amanda... all the characters from D1 are just paper-cutouts in my mind. Skin-deep caricatures. The idea of spending more time with these characters is a turn off for me.

I found myself wishing I was watching a cast of new characters in these cutscenes. I would have no preexisting attachment to new characters, but in the case of Destiny's cast, D2 is actually starting at a negative.

I'm just wondering out loud: would a new cast of characters help me jump into Des2ny without bringing as much baggage from D1 with me.

As a Destiny player, I have totally made peace with what Destiny is (and what it isn't). As I already said, I no longer expect any form of satisfaction from Destiny's story or characters. And I'm ok with the that.

I think it’s pretty fair to say you were preemptively negative on story and characters, at least. But, fair is fair, so in the continuing interest of fairness, you also posted this:

I won't say anything with regards to plot or gameplay specifics, but I just wanted to jump in real quick and say how much I loved the campaign. Fantastic in its own right, and a huge step above anything that from D1 or the expansions IMO. Lots of diversity in terms of gameplay set pieces, environments, and objectives. Without giving anything away, they do some stuff with some of the missions that feels like it should have been there all along.
Felt like the perfect overall length for me, too (about 9-10 hours). I didn't "power through", but split my time between story missions and patrol activities. I haven't done any strikes or PvP yet, and I still have plenty more to do on patrol. Most importantly, the game feels vibrant and full of stuff to do in a way that D1 never quite managed.
Oh, and it might be tied for my favourite Bungie soundtrack. I put it right up there with ODST. The music is absolutely spectacular.

Story wise, it is definitely a huge step above D1. I still struggled to care much about it, but that's largely because I have such a firmly planted dislike for all of Destiny's characters. But that's not so much the fault of D2, and to the game's credit, they use the characters far better than they've been used previously.

All in all, I really love it. Can't wait to get some co-op action happening :)

~~So... consider your challenge both partially accepted and met, but also my reasoning, at least about your not liking the gameplay, retracted. :)~~

Eh... the above sentence never quite read like it was suppose to and I’m tired of trying to tweak it to get the intended friendly tone to shine through. Here’s what it meant.

1. I stand by my claim that you have been preemptively negative about Destiny 2. You were very down the Vanguard to be sure and stated multiple times you were going to let your feelings about them in D1 affect how you felt about D2.
2. That said, I was wrong about your negativity towards gameplay specifically, and also more generally I overreached in my characterization of your negativity.

I can always count on you to do your homework ;)

So I must ask; given what you define as “preemptively negative” (within the context of my quotes that you referenced), is that any different than simply calibrating my own expectations? I know that for me, the storytelling in Destiny has ranged from abysmal to fair across the 2 main games and several expansions. If I went into any future content expecting anything better in the storytelling department, wouldn’t that be foolish of me? Wouldn’t that just be another case of allowing unrealistic expectations to taint my experience with future content? I’m not being baselessly negative, I just know what I like and what I don’t like, and I try to calibrate my expectations towards Destiny accordingly.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t expect Destiny to suddenly succeed in an area where it has failed every. single. time... but I am also happy to enjoy the game nonetheless, because there are other elements of the game that I greatly enjoy. And I’ve made that very clear all along, or so I thought. Which is why CoO is such a blow to the game for me. It failed (for me) in several areas where Destiny normally succeeds, without improving the areas I already found lacking. The ground has shifted, so to speak. And the state of the game *right now* is such that I question whether or not I can continue to expect the things I usually enjoy from Destiny.

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No disrespect intended to you here (because I know how invested you are in the lore) but none of any of this matters to me because Bungie’s storytelling is so ham-fisted and clumsy, the dialog so bad, that it is simply impossible for me to give a crap about what the Vex are up to. To me, it all looks like Bungie trying to find an in-universe way to justify reuse of content.

When I heard whatever line it was about Osiris dicking around and recreating the Vex Mind that we literally just killed like forty five minutes ago, I literally said, "Oh, fuck you!" out loud.

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In that same context, whenever I get the line of Sagira saying I miss her and Ghost gets salty I have to agree with Sagira.

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That’s because they were just story missions that got reused as Strikes. It was a lazy trick and it doesn’t work well at all. You don’t realize you “just played a strike” when you first go through them because they’re labeled as story missions and you go through them Solo. Why would it ever occur to anyone to think “hey, did I just play a Strike?”

Then, when you jump into the strike playlist, you get Osiris saying “oh, hey... that thing you already did? Yeah, I need you to do it again... for science...” and then you play through the exact same mission, but with 2 other guardians along for the ride.

I’m sorry, that is not good narrative integration. That is lazy re-use of content with barely any attempt to disguise the fact that Bungie was willfully misleading with their advertising of CoO. You (Bungie... not YOU, Raga) don’t get to say “X new story missions and Y new strikes” when the missions and strikes ARE THE SAME MISSIONS. I’ve had plenty of criticisms of Destiny over the years, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to being legitimately angry at Bungie, because at this point they’re just being insulting. No, Bungie... you actually cant just copy and paste the same missions into different activities and try to pass it off as more new content. It’s total BS.

I don't necessarily disagree totally with anything you are saying. And I don't necessarily agree totally with how Bungie framed them up, but here is how Bungie framed up Story Strikes for Curse of Osiris, in their own words:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/203198197?t=35m47s
Curse of Osiris Reveal #2 – November 21st, 2017
Participants:
Deej: King of Awesome
Dan Miller: Game Director - Curse of Osiris
Dave Matthews: Art Director - Curse of Osiris

(I'm not attempting to mis-quote anybody. I transcribed and left out some un-necessary face to face conversational cues, tones, and mannerisms so that it would flow better by text)

Timestamp ~ 36:47
Deej: “...So as I enjoy the campaign, If I’m a solo player who enjoys experiencing a campaign all by myself I don’t need to trouble with other people, I don’t need to worry about someone going away from their controller and not participating. I can enjoy that Strike all by myself as a lone gun man. And then later on, let’s say I experience that Strike as a matchmade activity, then it will be scaled to accommodate the cooperative experience? Is that what you are telling me?

D Miller: Yes, Yeah,

Deej: And uh, am I going to feel like I’ve been deprived of 2 additional story missions?

Dave Matthews: Not at all. No. I think one of the great things about this is that every Strike has always had a story that it told. And by bringing those and making those part of Osiris’s story allows us to, I think, enrichen the overall narrative that is Osiris’s history and everything we want to talk about.

Deej: Give people more a sense of context of those Strikes. They’ve always felt slightly separate from the other story that was told, like you’ve finished your campaign now go back in and fight some other additional bosses or something like that.

D Miller: And when you buy the expansion, it’s really nice, because you can immediately see and play through these experiences without having to do the random Matchmaking thing . And you’ll right away get to see: “oh, these are the Strikes that come with it”, and then later on as you’re playing the matchmaking they will be there as well.

…

Deej: … wanted to give people a sense of how Destiny 2 would be changing. You know some of the different new ways to play. While story Strikes are a step in that direction we are not going to play one today, we are going to save that for players to experience as part of the campaign in the Curse of Osiris Campaign.

Dave Matthews: In 2 weeks!

Deej: In 2 weeks

In a way, part of the reasoning for Story Strikes seems to be sort of an anti-griefing methodology?
Personally, I do have to say I enjoyed being able to play the Strikes for the first time at my own pace, without having random player 'XxXxBroFacexXxX' sprinting through the thing at drunken speed-run pace teleporting me through the checkpoints missing the story elements.
Over the years, this has been a complaint by some regarding matchmade Strikes.
It was also nice not having to worry about freeloaders or AFK'ers not pulling their weight in the fight.

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Deej: And uh, am I going to feel like I’ve been deprived of 2 additional story missions?

That's sort of how I feel, honestly. I'm trying to recall how the story actually goes. We get a mission on the EDZ in a new area, one on Nessus, the Pyrmidion strike, a foray into the Infinite Forest which culminates in nothing and then we get to run back out, the two missions that are strikes, and then the final encounter.

The mission on the EDZ is the only mission that's actually unique content, given that the two middle missions are reused as strikes, and the rest are just randomly running through the Infinite Forest. Even the Adventures just reuse the Infinite Forest, although at leas their final encounters are mostly fun and interesting.

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That’s because they were just story missions that got reused as Strikes. It was a lazy trick and it doesn’t work well at all. You don’t realize you “just played a strike” when you first go through them because they’re labeled as story missions and you go through them Solo. Why would it ever occur to anyone to think “hey, did I just play a Strike?”

Then, when you jump into the strike playlist, you get Osiris saying “oh, hey... that thing you already did? Yeah, I need you to do it again... for science...” and then you play through the exact same mission, but with 2 other guardians along for the ride.

I’m sorry, that is not good narrative integration. That is lazy re-use of content with barely any attempt to disguise the fact that Bungie was willfully misleading with their advertising of CoO. You (Bungie... not YOU, Raga) don’t get to say “X new story missions and Y new strikes” when the missions and strikes ARE THE SAME MISSIONS. I’ve had plenty of criticisms of Destiny over the years, but this is the closest I’ve ever come to being legitimately angry at Bungie, because at this point they’re just being insulting. No, Bungie... you actually cant just copy and paste the same missions into different activities and try to pass it off as more new content. It’s total BS.

I don't necessarily disagree totally with anything you are saying. And I don't necessarily agree totally with how Bungie framed them up, but here is how Bungie framed up Story Strikes for Curse of Osiris, in their own words:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/203198197?t=35m47s
Curse of Osiris Reveal #2 – November 21st, 2017
Participants:
Deej: King of Awesome
Dan Miller: Game Director - Curse of Osiris
Dave Matthews: Art Director - Curse of Osiris

(I'm not attempting to mis-quote anybody. I transcribed and left out some un-necessary face to face conversational cues, tones, and mannerisms so that it would flow better by text)

Timestamp ~ 36:47
Deej: “...So as I enjoy the campaign, If I’m a solo player who enjoys experiencing a campaign all by myself I don’t need to trouble with other people, I don’t need to worry about someone going away from their controller and not participating. I can enjoy that Strike all by myself as a lone gun man. And then later on, let’s say I experience that Strike as a matchmade activity, then it will be scaled to accommodate the cooperative experience? Is that what you are telling me?

D Miller: Yes, Yeah,

Deej: And uh, am I going to feel like I’ve been deprived of 2 additional story missions?

Dave Matthews: Not at all. No. I think one of the great things about this is that every Strike has always had a story that it told. And by bringing those and making those part of Osiris’s story allows us to, I think, enrichen the overall narrative that is Osiris’s history and everything we want to talk about.

Deej: Give people more a sense of context of those Strikes. They’ve always felt slightly separate from the other story that was told, like you’ve finished your campaign now go back in and fight some other additional bosses or something like that.

D Miller: And when you buy the expansion, it’s really nice, because you can immediately see and play through these experiences without having to do the random Matchmaking thing . And you’ll right away get to see: “oh, these are the Strikes that come with it”, and then later on as you’re playing the matchmaking they will be there as well.

…

Deej: … wanted to give people a sense of how Destiny 2 would be changing. You know some of the different new ways to play. While story Strikes are a step in that direction we are not going to play one today, we are going to save that for players to experience as part of the campaign in the Curse of Osiris Campaign.

Dave Matthews: In 2 weeks!

Deej: In 2 weeks

In a way, part of the reasoning for Story Strikes seems to be sort of an anti-griefing methodology?
Personally, I do have to say I enjoyed being able to play the Strikes for the first time at my own pace, without having random player 'XxXxBroFacexXxX' sprinting through the thing at drunken speed-run pace teleporting me through the checkpoints missing the story elements.
Over the years, this has been a complaint by some regarding matchmade Strikes.
It was also nice not having to worry about freeloaders or AFK'ers not pulling their weight in the fight.

I can totally appreciate the wanting to give players the ability to experience Strikes solo. To me, the obvious solution is to add the option! Maybe they couldn’t simply do that, for some technical reason. That still doesn’t change how CoO stands. If we take those 2 strikes out of the campaign, then there’s barely any campaign left at all, and what there is either repeats itself or uses existing locations. Neither of those points is something I have a problem with in theory. But when the entire expansion appears to be pushing the boundaries of the definition of “bare minimum”, it makes me ask: “What exactly happened here, Bungie? Did you run out of time AGAIN? Or do you truly believe that this is a piece of content that lives up to the Bungie name?”

If the answer is the former, then Bungie knowingly shipped a substandard product. If the answer is the latter, then my idea of what makes a good game and bungie’s idea of what makes a good game are so far apart that I can no longer trust that I’ll enjoy what they release next.

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Does it? I wouldn't mind if they took some liberties for the sake of gameplay. Modifiers, dynamic encounters that change depending on the situation, etc...

These would be ephemeral "challenge" variants of the main story missions that come and go as needed.

So you are saying, beat the campaign like everyone else in the same style but them open them up to be replayed with different variations? Because I'm pretty sure that exactly describes the strikes that were incorporated into the main mission :D

I’m not at all a fan of the “strikes as story missions” thing done in CoO. I actually thought the way the strikes were implemented in Vanilla Destiny (pre-Questification) worked well; complete a series of story missions in a given region, and cap off that area with a 3-player strike that acts as a sort of local boss fight. It had a great rhythm. The CoO thing just felt like trying to stretch as little content as possible out into a full expansion.

Besides, I think what is being suggested is not a merging of strikes and story missions. I think the idea is to have story missions built with little variants or encounter modifiers thrown in, so that they’re slightly different each time you replay them. Similar to what has been done with Strikes in the past.

I really liked the Strikes as missions. If I had to hazard a guess, your issue is more about the filling content part than anything else. Would you mind so much if every mission had the length and complexity (but not necessarily the ending boss fight) of a Strike?

I never really liked the way Strikes were done in D1 because while they did tend to usually unlock as you neared the end of a Destination, they were rarely well integrated in the story. There were more like random side quests instead of key story moments.

I'd want a combination. Have as many missions as Destiny had, but have each mission be long and complex. And then let me go into a random mission playlist or replay individual missions whenever I want...

The CoO implementation was certainly hurt by the fact that it felt like an obvious reusing of content just to pad out the expansion, but even if that weren’t the case, I like Strikes and Story Missions being distinct from each other for several reasons.

To me, part of the issue is that I don’t think single-player combat in Destiny is particularly fun or exciting. For me, Destiny’s combat doesn’t really click until you get 3 Guardians working together against complex combinations of enemies and bosses. But the single-player-focused combat in most Destiny story missions has never gotten my blood pumping. Not once.

So if it were completely up to me, I’d keep the story missions on the short side, and have them mostly focused on exploration, plot and character development, with some light combat here and there to keep things moving. Then, the Strikes would be where the serious action takes place, with longer missions and large-scale objectives and set pieces, more challenging combat, and lots more of it. The strikes could be used as crescendos to the story-mission plot lines that lead up to them, so they’d feel directly tied in to the narrative without being bogged down by exposition.

For this to work, the game would need far more strikes than Destiny 2 currently has.

I do sometimes wonder how it would work out if the Adventures were given their own 3-player playlist, along with the strikes? Or if the adventures could simply be added in to the strike playlist? That’s sort of an aside, but there is a sizeable chunk of good content there that is barely getting touched right now.

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Kind of, but strikes should still be their own separate thing.

I just mean the daily / weekly missions should be dedicated variants rather than the exact same things you played in the campaign.

We should also be able to replay the campaign missions (the "canon" variants) on demand, but that's a different point.

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I just mean the daily / weekly missions should be dedicated variants rather than the exact same things you played in the campaign.

Like Queen's Wrath in D1? I enjoyed that and was bummed that it was a limited-time thing.

I guess it's worth noting that Vance's heroic missions are pretty much exactly that. I mean, they're not necessarily structured too differently (although I could swear I ran into a Cabal Colossus in one of them who hadn't been there in the vanilla mission), but the modifiers at least make it play differently. It's too bad it only applies to the CoO missions, though.

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Definitely like Queen's Wrath.

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I might just suck at this game nowadays, but the heroic adventures on mercury seem obviously tuned for a fireteam even though you can do them solo. I think it's an interesting experiment that has failed for whatever demographic I'm in -- I've only done those a few times due to the marked increase in difficulty (my warlock's damage output and damage absorption capability being drastically different than elsewhere).

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I might just suck at this game nowadays, but the heroic adventures on mercury seem obviously tuned for a fireteam even though you can do them solo. I think it's an interesting experiment that has failed for whatever demographic I'm in -- I've only done those a few times due to the marked increase in difficulty (my warlock's damage output and damage absorption capability being drastically different than elsewhere).

No, they were definitely difficult, but then again when I did them I wasn't much higher in light level than I was before CoO. 306ish. I'm not as familiar with how light level effects things in Des2ny, so maybe someone else would know if that matters.

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I may be an idiot, but I couldn't seem to locate the light level requirement for the heroic adventures. I think the nightfall's around 270, so I expect the heroic adventures aren't terribly high either, but I'm not sure.

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They suggest 300. But yeah, what exactly that means is not well documented.

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They suggest 300. But yeah, what exactly that means is not well documented.

They also felt tuned to a fireteam, rather than solo play, at least in my estimation (just like the way a nightfall is rated 270, but that doesn’t mean it is intended for a solo 270 player)

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It's course and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere.

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This mini-thread made my day.

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How long should you wait in a relationship before you talk about sand?

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Until she dies in child birth of a broken heart.

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Until she dies in child birth of a broken heart.

I was going to say “that kind of thing goes right in your Tinder profile”, but you had to go and get dark ;p XD

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You described my feelings almost perfectly.

I quite enjoy Destiny for what it is, but I still get bummed when I think about what it could be. Or maybe just what I wanted it to be.

Here's to hoping Borderlands 3 is good, I guess.

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Here's to hoping Borderlands 3 is good, I guess.

It's impossible for it not to be.

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Here's to hoping Borderlands 3 is good, I guess.

It's impossible for it not to be.

I feel like I’m missing the gene that most people have that makes them enjoy Borderlands, and it makes me sad. Every time I hear people talking about it, they sound like they’re having the time of their lives with it. But I try it and it does nothing for me. I feel like I’m missing out, lol.

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Here's to hoping Borderlands 3 is good, I guess.

It's impossible for it not to be.

I feel like I’m missing the gene that most people have that makes them enjoy Borderlands, and it makes me sad. Every time I hear people talking about it, they sound like they’re having the time of their lives with it. But I try it and it does nothing for me. I feel like I’m missing out, lol.

Yeah, I played it w/ 3 other guys (my bro-in-law & 2 of his friends) & it was just kindof... meh. It had the fun of playing a co-op FPS, but it wasn't as cool of an experience to me as playing Destiny w/ a others. (maybe that's because I didn't know 2 of the guys that well? I dunno).

Edit: Also, the loot being shared was awkward & not fun. I don't like having to be careful about what I pickup & robbing a buddy of a gun he could benefit from, also trying to weigh who needs it more. Yeah, I know people have written apps to handle drops & make them 'fair', but seriously, that shouldn't be necessary.

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Yeah, I played it w/ 3 other guys (my bro-in-law & 2 of his friends) & it was just kindof... meh. It had the fun of playing a co-op FPS, but it wasn't as cool of an experience to me as playing Destiny w/ a others. (maybe that's because I didn't know 2 of the guys that well? I dunno).

Edit: Also, the loot being shared was awkward & not fun. I don't like having to be careful about what I pickup & robbing a buddy of a gun he could benefit from, also trying to weigh who needs it more. Yeah, I know people have written apps to handle drops & make them 'fair', but seriously, that shouldn't be necessary.

TBH, I think those things are directly related. I had a group I used to play BL2 with, and I don't remember feeling weird about anything. Having played enough together helps a lot, not just because it's less tense arguing over a drop, but because there's often no need to. We all had our preferred characters, and certain things just make sense for certain characters and builds, and we had all played enough to know those things. So, often, there was consensus on who should get what without any discussion. We definitely would never have resorted to an app, and it kind of weirds me out that such a thing exists.

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Here's to hoping Borderlands 3 is good, I guess.

It's impossible for it not to be.

I feel like I’m missing the gene that most people have that makes them enjoy Borderlands, and it makes me sad. Every time I hear people talking about it, they sound like they’re having the time of their lives with it. But I try it and it does nothing for me. I feel like I’m missing out, lol.

I like it because it's just dumb fun.

It's a game that fundamentally doesn't seem to care about "balance". It just has dumb, wacky guns. There's a whole line of guns that instead of reloading, you just throw the gun and it blows up. Guns that yell at you and make stupid mouth noises for shooting sounds. And most of the base guns are just completely random. They created a bunch of gun parts, each with it's own unique perk, and then the game just randomly rolls them into a gun.

People shit talk on the writing and humor, but I guess I'm just a giant twelve year old because I thought it was hilarious.

And unlike Destiny, it has what feels like a fleshed out world that I can explore, talk to NPCs and learn about things, a fun car to drive around. I honestly care much more about the world and story in Borderlands than the one in Destiny, because, unlike with Destiny, it feels like the developers actually give a shit about it too, even when it's sort of stupid.

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I like it because it's just dumb fun.

That last word is the key.

It's a game that fundamentally doesn't seem to care about "balance". It just has dumb, wacky guns. There's a whole line of guns that instead of reloading, you just throw the gun and it blows up. Guns that yell at you and make stupid mouth noises for shooting sounds. And most of the base guns are just completely random. They created a bunch of gun parts, each with it's own unique perk, and then the game just randomly rolls them into a gun.

Yep. They will fix something if it's utterly breaking the game, but beyond that it's pretty much "meh." Borderlands follows the rule of awesome more than possibly anything else I've ever played.

People shit talk on the writing and humor

Who the fuck is doing that? And that's not just me talking, every bit of game criticism/review I ever saw about BL2 praised the comedy, and rightly so.

but I guess I'm just a giant twelve year old because I thought it was hilarious.

You don't have to be a kid to appreciate the subtle genius of the pretzels line, which is pretty much your intro to Handsome Jack, aka the funniest video game character I personally have ever experienced:

And unlike Destiny, it has what feels like a fleshed out world that I can explore, talk to NPCs and learn about things, a fun car to drive around. I honestly care much more about the world and story in Borderlands than the one in Destiny, because, unlike with Destiny, it feels like the developers actually give a shit about it too, even when it's sort of stupid.

This is completely true. I have way more attachment to Scooter or Mad Moxxi than any character in Destiny.

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You don't have to be a kid to appreciate the subtle genius of the pretzels line, which is pretty much your intro to Handsome Jack, aka the funniest video game character I personally have ever experienced:

Funny thing about this scene. I later learned that that entire pretzel scene was ad libbed by the voice actor. He was just eating pretzels and he did the line and they kept it.

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I feel like I’m missing the gene that most people have that makes them enjoy Borderlands, and it makes me sad. Every time I hear people talking about it, they sound like they’re having the time of their lives with it. But I try it and it does nothing for me. I feel like I’m missing out, lol.

Which one did you try? Borderlands 2 is significantly funnier and more engaging than Borderlands 1, and the guns/abilities feel better for the most part.

Oddly, I've never actually played the pre-sequel, so I have no idea on that one. If memory serves, it was a combination of money being tight when it came out, plus the people I used to play BL2 with were off doing other things.

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I feel like I’m missing the gene that most people have that makes them enjoy Borderlands, and it makes me sad. Every time I hear people talking about it, they sound like they’re having the time of their lives with it. But I try it and it does nothing for me. I feel like I’m missing out, lol.

Which one did you try? Borderlands 2 is significantly funnier and more engaging than Borderlands 1, and the guns/abilities feel better for the most part.

Oddly, I've never actually played the pre-sequel, so I have no idea on that one. If memory serves, it was a combination of money being tight when it came out, plus the people I used to play BL2 with were off doing other things.

The pre-sequel was basically B2 with the exact same engine, a new gun element, environment effect and worse story line. So no bad, but by no means better.

Borderlands 2 is the best Borderlands.

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Yep.. Now I view it as the charity donation I made to the games industry.

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Here's to hoping Borderlands 3 is good, I guess.

It's impossible for it not to be.

I feel like I’m missing the gene that most people have that makes them enjoy Borderlands, and it makes me sad. Every time I hear people talking about it, they sound like they’re having the time of their lives with it. But I try it and it does nothing for me. I feel like I’m missing out, lol.

Probably because the gameplay was meh, and Destiny came along and completely wrecked our standards, and the pacing in the first couple of hours is super sluggish, and the snowy environment is such a chore to traverse while having nothing interesting to look at (Borderlands 1 also had a similar issue).

What Borderlands does great is that-

Storywise:
The story goes somewhere, characters are continuously developed, and the devs/writers actually have things to say, often mixing/balancing serious elements with over-the-top humor. Sure, the humor is pretty hit-or-miss, but when you actually start caring about characters, you grow to accept it, since much of the writing is still good, and occasionally clever. Also, lots of puns in the UI.

Gameplaywise:
There are lots of guns, but more importantly, every exotic does genuinely neat things that makes each one stand out. From a shotgun that you throw at enemies, which continues to fire as it homes in on them, to a grenade that spawns homing MIRVs... which track down the person who threw the grenade. Everything is neat, and there are tons, and tons, and tons of exotics. One of my favorites is a rocket launcher called "The Bunny", which merrily skips along the ground, pooping grenades randomly.

Also, unlike Destiny, where a Suros is marginally different from a Veist or Vanguard weapon, every manufacturer in Borderlands has very distinct weaponry:
Jakobs will always hit hard and have a western aesthetic.
Tediore all have a neat carbon-fiber look, and you reload them by throwing them at enemies (they explode) and digistructing (basically 3D-printing) a new one into your hands.
Anything that comes out of a Torgue weapon will explode. That Torgue shotgun that fires a Sword? The sword explodes... into smaller swords... Which then also explode. Explosions.

And then there are variants of every foundry, such as Bandit or E-tech versions, which throw significant twists into the weapon's traits, while retaining the original manufacturer's Identity.

Co-op:
Every character has a single ability, similar to Destiny, but their skill trees are diverse enough that you can have four people playing the same exact character, but with completely different playstyles.

The Siren, for example, could be a Healer, a fleet-footed CC Stun-locker, pure walking death, or a combination of all three, just to name one of the six playable characters, which all have actual personalities.

Content:
Borderlands 2 has tons of quests, sidequests, challenges, upgrades, loot... It's just packed with actual stuff to do. And that's just in the main game. Each DLC includes an entire mini-campaign (even the smallest is bigger than CoO by a long shot) that develops the characters and tells a complete story. And then there are comet-esque mini-mini campaigns which focus more on raid bosses and usually-holiday-themed events. It's completely loaded to the point where you're likely to get completely drained long before you explore it all... Then again, Sammy and I have put more time replaying the Torgue campaign than we've put into some entire games...

So yeh, if you only know the initial slow hours, you'll never reach the point where you remember your first gun and go "heh".

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just to name one of the six playable characters, which all have actual personalities.

Krieg has at least 2!

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I kinda way play Borderlands 2 again. Is that remaster thing on PS4 good?

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As for Eververse... eh. It only makes me wonder even more then I already have. What was designed because of want, and what was designed because of requirement?

I took this bigg'n photo of an empty Eververse, for when the Vanguard decide to fire her and send her off to join Fenchurch...

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I'll only point out two things:

1) For better or worse, just about every Bungie game has been rebooted during development.

2) Almost every single video game you have played was rebooted in some fashion during development. Almost no games makes it from dinner napkin to the screen the way it started out.

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I'll only point out two things:

1) For better or worse, just about every Bungie game has been rebooted during development.

Gnop: No
Minotaur: No
Desert Storm: No
PiD: No
Marathon: Yes
M2: No
M∞: No
Myth: No
Myth II: No but close
Oni: Yes
Halo: Yes
Halo 2: Yes
Halo 3: No
ODST: No
Reach: No
Destiny: Yes
Des2ny: Yes

That's less than half that were rebooted. I am defining reboot as throwing away large chunks of the game already completed and starting completely fresh.

Notice the stretch from Halo to Des2ny. Who famously left the company for the time period between Halo 3 and Reach, and had nothing to do with those games? Makes you wonder…

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Heh... I thought so. But I’d never actually heard anything about Jason leaving. In fact, I specifically remember Joe Tung on an old episode of the Bungie podcast talking about doing some Halo 3 co-op playtests with Jason Jones, so he was certainly around through most of Halo 3’s development (unless my memory is just completely 100% wrong... which is possible ;p).

So I googled it, and the only things I could find about Jones leaving Bungie were forum threads about Joe Staten leaving in 2013, and the writer of the thread getting their names confused lol

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He didn't leave technically, but he took an extended sabbatical and didn't get too involved in the company's business or creative decisions for a while.

I think that big "The True Oral History of Halo" piece - which is fantastic, by the way - covered this. After Halo 2, Jones was in poor health as a result of working under insane amounts of stress for multiple years in a row, and he took a sabbatical to recover and recharge.

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I think that big "The True Oral History of Halo" piece - which is fantastic, by the way - covered this. After Halo 2, Jones was in poor health as a result of working under insane amounts of stress for multiple years in a row, and he took a sabbatical to recover and recharge.

What they didn't tell you is the lengths Bungie had to go to get him back.

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Care to shed any light?

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Yeah, in 14 years, when he publishes his book.

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Heh... I thought so. But I’d never actually heard anything about Jason leaving. In fact, I specifically remember Joe Tung on an old episode of the Bungie podcast talking about doing some Halo 3 co-op playtests with Jason Jones, so he was certainly around through most of Halo 3’s development (unless my memory is just completely 100% wrong... which is possible ;p).

So I googled it, and the only things I could find about Jones leaving Bungie were forum threads about Joe Staten leaving in 2013, and the writer of the thread getting their names confused lol

There are a lot of good quotes from that"Untold Oral History of Halo" from Waypoint that help make it clear when Jason had checked out or even left. Just as telling probably are the portions where Jason isn't even mentioned.

Here is just one of the more direct quotes from Joe:

Jason vaporized at the end of Halo 2. He went on his long sabbatical out of the blue, and it was left to us to figure out who was going to lead the Halo team. At that point Bungie as a group was really rudderless, if not quite leaderless, really.

Edit: here is another choice excerpt:

JAIME GRIESEMER
We didn’t see Jason for a while after Halo 2 shipped. We had a cut-out of him printed out on cardboard, and we put it in the corner of the room.

MARTY O’DONNELL
We would just stand that up in meetings.

JAIME GRIESEMER
Jason came back toward the end of Halo 3, but wasn’t super involved.

MARTY O’DONNELL
Jason for the most part had very little to do with Halo 3, almost nothing to do with ODST and very little to do with Reach. He was starting work on Destiny because we convinced him to. He was thinking about what else he wanted to do, and travelling a lot. All the while, he was still a Bungie employee. Because, you know, we had convinced everybody that all the magic sauce came from Jason.

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Heh, I was confused for a moment when you mentioned Waypoint. I thought “How did I miss something like that getting posted on Halo Waypoint?”. I felt guilty for a moment (given all the work and time I spent on that site) before I remembered the other “Waypoint” :)

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Heh, I was confused for a moment when you mentioned Waypoint. I thought “How did I miss something like that getting posted on Halo Waypoint?”. I felt guilty for a moment (given all the work and time I spent on that site) before I remembered the other “Waypoint” :)

It actually really annoys me that Vice chose that name. It's not a bad name if it existed in a vacuum, but it doesn't. Surely someone on their team must have known that Halo Waypoint existed already?

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Heh, I was confused for a moment when you mentioned Waypoint. I thought “How did I miss something like that getting posted on Halo Waypoint?”. I felt guilty for a moment (given all the work and time I spent on that site) before I remembered the other “Waypoint” :)

It actually really annoys me that Vice chose that name. It's not a bad name if it existed in a vacuum, but it doesn't. Surely someone on their team must have known that Halo Waypoint existed already?

I think by the time Vice Waypoint came along, 343 had pretty much abandoned the “Halo Waypoint” brand. They still have the URL, but they revamped the Xbox App into the “Halo Channel”, and dropped the name “Waypoint” from their web portal completely, as far as I know (all this was a little after my time with them, so I could have the details wrong). But yeah, the word “Waypoint” is still very much associated with Halo in my mind.

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Heh, I was confused for a moment when you mentioned Waypoint. I thought “How did I miss something like that getting posted on Halo Waypoint?”. I felt guilty for a moment (given all the work and time I spent on that site) before I remembered the other “Waypoint” :)

It actually really annoys me that Vice chose that name. It's not a bad name if it existed in a vacuum, but it doesn't. Surely someone on their team must have known that Halo Waypoint existed already?

I think by the time Vice Waypoint came along, 343 had pretty much abandoned the “Halo Waypoint” brand. They still have the URL, but they revamped the Xbox App into the “Halo Channel”, and dropped the name “Waypoint” from their web portal completely, as far as I know (all this was a little after my time with them, so I could have the details wrong). But yeah, the word “Waypoint” is still very much associated with Halo in my mind.

They actually talk about that. They operated under Vice Gaming for a month or two while Austin built what Waypoint be and figured out the name. They did podcasts and explicitly called out Halo Waypoint during their talks about the name of the site, but just decided there wouldn’t be enough confusion for it to really matter. I’m in agreement—Halo Waypoint seemingly died long before this came along.

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Yeah. It bugs me as a Halo fan, but I'm pretty sure no one else cares.

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I'll only point out two things:

1) For better or worse, just about every Bungie game has been rebooted during development.

Gnop: No
Minotaur: No
Desert Storm: No
PiD: No
Marathon: Yes
M2: No
M∞: No
Myth: No
Myth II: No but close
Oni: Yes
Halo: Yes
Halo 2: Yes
Halo 3: No
ODST: No
Reach: No
Destiny: Yes
Des2ny: Yes

That's less than half that were rebooted. I am defining reboot as throwing away large chunks of the game already completed and starting completely fresh.

Notice the stretch from Halo to Des2ny. Who famously left the company for the time period between Halo 3 and Reach, and had nothing to do with those games? Makes you wonder…

Please pardon my ignorance and I ask this out of interest and curiosity, not out of defiance:

What are your credentials/sources to know this stuff?

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I can't really speak for Cody, but I'd imagine a lot of it is just publicly available info/things that would be known to people around here (not implying that everyone here knows every detail of Bungie history, but there's a solid collective knowledge).

In my own case, I started hanging around somewhere between Halo 1 and 2, so I don't know much about ONI and earlier, but it's known to me that Halo 1 changed drastically from a top-down RTS to a 3rd person, then 1st person shooter during its development. I don't know if that's a reboot in the "oh crap, nothing works and we have to start over" sense, but it's beginning again. I would say that's known to many people around here. Same goes for Halo 2 - it's generally known that large chunks of that game were thrown out partway through and it was effectively restarted. However, I've heard no such stories about Halo 3, ODST (although one could argue that its marketing was rebooted, LOLOLOL), or Reach.

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Isn't he writing a book about B.U.N.G.L.E.?

I think he has alluded to learning a lot of this information during interviews with employees (and/or ex-employees) for his book project.

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Isn't he writing a book about B.U.N.G.L.E.?

I think he has alluded to learning a lot of this information during interviews with employees (and/or ex-employees) for his book project.

This is what I mean.

I love Cody Miller because he is an intriguing character.

Cody, I don't know if you're a clever box of smarts or a hyperbolic windbag...or both, but I dig it. But it also makes it hard to differentiate between the two characters. And I keep reading the jokes(?) about this book...I don't know if it's real or not.

Hence my curiosity. Does Cody have firsthand knowledge of Bungie inner workings?

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Hence my curiosity. Does Cody have firsthand knowledge of Bungie inner workings?

First hand would mean I was there. It's all second hand from talking to people who were there.

It's not a joke. It's not like writing a blog post. For instance, when someone tells me that Bungie offered Jason Jones 8 figures to come back, I have to corroborate that. You can imagine that is tough.

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LOLOLOL

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So he either drinks the tea he made you and doesn’t shoot anything OR he complains about everything, but especially his arm????

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Well, yes, but my point was that you don't have to be writing a book to know at least some of this stuff.

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There's a good amount that can be inferred at this point, particularly pre-Destiny. Halo 2's development, for example, has been documented so extensively that I almost wonder if there's anything left to say, apart from perhaps more information about the cut content.

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There's a good amount that can be inferred at this point, particularly pre-Destiny. Halo 2's development, for example, has been documented so extensively that I almost wonder if there's anything left to say, apart from perhaps more information about the cut content.

I wonder if Marty still has those VO recordings... O_o

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