From my perspective, there is a lot that doesn’t make sense (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, January 04, 2018, 12:01 (2356 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

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.