Free To Play (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Friday, January 05, 2018, 10:47 (2596 days ago) @ narcogen

$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.