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

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, March 22, 2018, 20:18 (2515 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

One interesting thought among all these others is: “What will Bungie be beyond Destiny?” Really, that distills down (at least) two things:

“What makes a Bungie game unique?”
“What makes Bungie as a studio unique?”

I think I can answer the former a lot better than the latter. For me, a Bungie game is one that:

• ...is fun to play in a sort of effortless way. Not that Bungie games can’t be difficult, but from Myth II to Oni to Halo to Destiny (what I’d consider my career as a Bungie fan) each of their games has been easy to pickup and play. They seem to sidestep much of the tedium and learning curve and mechanical missteps and hang ups of other games. It’s the way everything sorta just works correctly most of the time.
  
• ...that has story roots deeply embedded in text and intriguing side stories. Myth had its journal cutscenes that brought life to a top down real time tactical game. Oni had terminals everywhere that added so much both in explaining what had happened in the past and what was going on in the present. Halo had less in game text, but the foundation of Halo for the first decade of its life was The Fall of Reach. And Destiny, of course, has a wealth of great text stories through its Grimoire and Lore.
  
• ...are very well made, incredibly stable, and largely bug free. Destiny has walked this back a bit, mostly with odd weapon inconsistencies that didn’t make a bunch of sense (“oops... we accidentally worsened the stability of D1 fusion rifles while trying to improve them” being my “favorite”). But many of my favorite non-Bungie games I play with a lot of saving because they tend to freeze up once every hour or two. Myth? Oni? The Halos? Destiny? Generally rock solid and able to be played for a whole day at a time. Think also how few issues Destiny has had at its various launches. Sure, there’s been a denial of service attack or two and one launch had a long queue, but for the most part once Destiny got past its first day, it just worked. Which is apparently astounding given the launches of so many other networked games in recent years.
  
• ...are pretty and colorful without being photorealistic. There’s not exactly one graphical style that runs through all of Bungie’s games, but there is something to the way they never descended into “brown and more brown” and kept a sorta clean, organized aesthetic over the decades.

As for “What makes Bungie as a studio unique?”, this is one area where I feel somehow left out. To me it feels that many in the Halo and Destiny communities know more or remember more of feel the loss of Bungie personnel more than I ever have. I don’t focus much on how they have changed because the “how they were/are” to me has always come far more from the games. (See above).

I can recall more of the names of people than in the past, but outside a very small handful, I can’t say who was responsible for what or who likely inspired a feature or UI element or story beat like it feels like others can.

At the same time, this insulates me a bit. There is a fair sized list of people that are no longer at Bungie, a list that is sometimes used to try and show that Bungie is not as good as they once were, but for me... I keep enjoying the games so those lists have never really rung true to me.

Anyway... just some side thoughts from me.