My theory on what happened (Destiny)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Wednesday, August 08, 2018, 09:53 (2376 days ago) @ Cody Miller

As someone who works in a SAAS company, we prioritize requests (generally) by
1. Fixes that have broken the software
2. Features that get us more customers
3. Features that keep our customers
4. Features

The shader problem is 3 or 4. There is far more time spent on 1 and 2 for Bungie right now.

This isn't specifically about the shaders. Bungie is slow to adapt and implement any changes (unless it is closing an exploit that gets you gear!). They are slow to move on just about everything.

That feels like a generalization to me. They are held back by server side changes, which they can do instantly, which is what they did for Bureaucratic walk by removing it from being purchased. And local changes, which have to go through a large QA/testing team, not only from Bungie but from XBox as well.

After what was detailed in HandMade Con regarding the mistakes they made in Destiny's design resulting in changes and additions being very painful, you would think that they would have decided not to repeat that mistake, and design Des2ny to be robust and flexible when it comes to fast or frequent changes. Other companies with online games are able to respond much more quickly, so it simply looks bad when issues go unaddressed. No one issue is super major, but it's death by 1000 cuts.

I don't know what to say about what you consider "slow" as well as what other companies consider "quickly". Every fix is dependent on so many factors. Engine, employees, platform, just to name a few. I'm not saying that Bungie hasn't made mistakes, but I feel like Bungie has done a good job at reacting to actual game breaking problems.

And when Bureaucratic Walk happened I distinctly remember they didn't fix the actual issue right away. They simply canceled Trails!

They fixed it within a couple weeks as I recall. Canceled trials because they didn't want it to affect everyone as well as took it off the store. That is as best as any development team can do.