We, all of us, color the past with our present. (Destiny)

by Claude Errera , Thursday, March 22, 2018, 14:46 (2515 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

First of all, I don't remember a time where the commentary on the Bungie forums was not teeming with negativity and vitriol (I frequented them as early as the Halo 2 days, so my experience with them doesn't go earlier than that. But that's still a long time ago). I do feel that it has gotten even worse lately, but I don't see that as simply a change within the community. That just doesn't track with Bungie's timeline over the past few years.

People would be jerks and get into heated arguments back in the Halo 3/ODST days over the silliest little things. But that is in no small part because the state of Halo in those days was pretty darn great. Halo (and Bungie) were on top of the world, and there really wasn't anything major to complain about, even for the more unreasonable players. So people would nitpick because people will always find something to argue about, but things were too good to argue over anything "big".

I've got to disagree. When Halo 2 came out, it was polarizing. There were some that loved its 'couch on the internet' matchmaking, to a point where they were willing to forgive the rest of the game... but there were many that couldn't forgive. Halo2Sucks.com was astoundingly full of vitriol in those days. Even hardcore fans, who were willing to give Bungie the benefit of the doubt, had trouble with Halo 2's campaign and weapon rebalancing (with respect to the original game). Dan Barbour, a pretty major Bungie fan (one who loved the story enough to come on board as HBO's Story Page editor in the early days), wrote a powerful piece on the failings of the game that I had trouble stomaching at the time; I couldn't understand how someone who called themselves a Bungie fan could be that critical of the new title.

http://7hr33.bungie.org/commentaryfiles/woe.html

(The original site, 7hr33.org, has been offline for more than a decade; I just asked him if I could host a mirror, so that the content wasn't lost.)

The community, in those days, for the most part, wasn't willing to walk away from Bungie over a single game... but MAN were the b.net forums ugly for a while. (If you don't remember that, maybe you showed up after things started getting better.)

That's the difference, in my opinion: in those days, even if people were angry or disappointed with the PRODUCT, they still had faith in the PRODUCER. They gave Bungie a lot of shit - but they waited around for the next thing anyway, hoping it would be better. And it was.

The community we have now, the community that we had in the early days of D1... it's a different flavor. Now, it's far more "what have you done for me lately?" and less "I hated that, but I'll give you another chance." There are Destiny fans... but not a lot of Bungie fans. If they don't like the game, they don't have any trouble pouring out the anger for the company - the company doesn't matter much to them.

(To be clear: I don't think there are a ton of 'Bungie Fans' from the old days that simply lost faith in the company - I think that the Destiny community is much bigger than the Bungie community was, and swamped them, in feeling.)