More thoughts on Bungie and change (Destiny)

by squidnh3, Thursday, March 22, 2018, 20:11 (2676 days ago) @ Claude Errera

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.)

Note: I'm very PvP-centric, so this post relates primarily to PvP. Also, this belongs in the criticism category.

I've been thinking a lot about Bungie and Destiny 2, and trying to take a clear eyed look back at all the Halo games and the community's experience with them, and the conclusion I'm coming to is a weird one. Frankly, from Halo 2 onward (when I started observing the community), I don't think Bungie was ever any good at this.

In not one Halo game did Bungie manage to create a mid-level starting weapon that you'd look to replace but still stand a chance against better weapons (notably, 343 finally accomplished this in Halo 5). As Luke pointed out, the weapon spawning system in Halo 2 is not balanced. Equipment and armor abilities in Halo 3 and Halo: Reach too easily led to frustrating gameplay and made balancing maps extremely difficult. Time to kill continue to slow with every new game release. Bungie did attempt to address a lot of these things, to the level of their ability at the time, but at a glacially slow pace. Destiny 2 has a lot of the same issues - poorly received lateral changes to basic gameplay.

The difference with the Halo games was that there was always some massive improvement or innovation to offset the gameplay issues. Halo 2 was online, and basically invented matchmaking, changing online gaming (and perhaps reverberating into society in general). Halo 3 took a massive leap forward with playlist management, and added Forge, saved films, and way to share them. ODST added Firefight. Reach nearly perfected the online Halo experience, and improved Forge so drastically its hard to even remember how clunky it was in Halo 3.

Destiny 2 has nothing like this. The closest thing to innovation is Guided Games, but that appears to have been all but abandoned. All that's left to parse are the basic mechanics changes, which do not appear to have been well received.

I think the people that work at Bungie are talented, creative, and innovative people, but I'm just not sure this is the perfect fit for making game sequels. What I (and perhaps others) wanted out of Destiny 2 was either "more Destiny", or "Destiny but more!". I did not want "Destiny - but different!". I did not particularly want "Halo - but different!", but what I got for years was "Halo - but more! and different!", and that was okay. Then Destiny came out and it turned out that was what I really wanted more of. Destiny 2 did not hit the bullseye in that regard - but this time it didn't land anywhere else exciting. Does that mean Bungie has changed? I don't really think so. But personally, if my thoughts in any way resemble reality, I think in the future Bungie and their fans would be better served if their innovative energies were focused on either making new games or adding features in sequels rather than overhauling the basic gameplay that made people fall in love with those games in the first place.