“Our schedule doesn’t allow for this in our product pipeline” is far feom “we just wait to the last minute.”

Eh, Cody is kind of right in his Cody kind of way. As the creative person in my company, my usual routine is "I have a really cool idea" which is usually met with "ok, you have 1/3 of the needed time to do it." which basically means I don't get to start from scratch but instead edit something I've already done.

Like the old saying "When you fail to plan, you plan to fail." If you find the project in a position of "so what do we do now" your creative options are limited.

“Our schedule doesn’t allow for this in our product pipeline” is far feom “we just wait to the last minute.”

If you want something, create an appropriate schedule so it can be done.

“We want a game where the bosses are all unique”. “Okay, how long will that take? Great, that’s our schedule.”.

The example is like adding an action scene to a movie once you’ve already started shooting it. You can’t. But if you decided you wanted it during preproduction and made the schedule as such, you could have.

It’s a failure 100% straight up.

There are ways to address this issue beyond adding more unique boss characters. The early Gears of War games did an admirable job of taking the same basic mechanics against the same set of enemies and repeatedly finding new, fresh, and exciting ways to contextualize it through different environments and set pieces. Halo, too. Destiny's many patrol spaces look different in superficial terms, but very few of them offer a unique gameplay experience compared to the other zones. You're usually doing the exact same thing over and over with a different skybox in the background. Again, that's a place where somebody early on needed to step in and say "for this mission, the player is going to be riding on a huge vehicle swarming with friendly NPCs, and its going to be a unique scenario unlike anything else in the game". Or "2 Scarabs. You heard me. 2 of them. I feel like those kinds of bold calls are largely missing from most of Destiny, with a few exceptions along the way. All that said, I do think things are improving on that end. The Dreaming City alone is a really special achievement, I think.

Not only was Titanfall 2's campaign specifically designed by collection of different groups coming up with cool concepts and setpieces, but the ideas behind all of the individual levels made up for the fact that every single boss fight (save for the very last) was essentially just a straightforward fight against a PvP-loadout Titan (with Ult hax).

In Destiny, all strikes are basically the same:
Run/Drive forward, fight off a wave or two, activate item/door, run forward more, defeat enemies to open door, run forward, fight big version of existing enemy with new trick.

There's no distinguishing moments to set them apart, and even the barons mostly play out the same way. Titanfall 2's campaign avoided all of this, as the level gimmicks are all distinct, the goal is never "find and fight this guy", and the small variety of enemies are thrown at you in different contexts, usually with elements of the level gimmick playing a big role in the encounters.
Fighting a Reaper and squad of soldiers on a floor-less level with sniper sightlines requires a completely different strategy than fighting a Reaper and squad of soldiers in a giant room that is constructing buildings and shifting the floor around, and then there's "Effect and Cause"...

But back to boss battles and planning, which is where Titanfall 2 faltered a bit. Enemies like Richter and Kane weren't great or memorable, because they were wholly removed from the level's gimmick, with nothing interesting to replace it. Viper and Slone, however, had unique mechanics throughout their fight that helped them stand out, even if they didn't implement their level's gimmick either. Ash was a pretty straightforward fight as well, but because the level's gimmick somewhat came into play, there was a bit more to take from it, so it could feel different or better than it was. Of course, if you just stayed in your Titan throughout the fight, you might miss out on that fact.

So yeah, the tacked-on boss fights featured a ton of missed opportunities, but the fact that they stuck out like sore thumbs is a testament to how the game could take the same generic handful of enemies, and stretch out the fun loop across an entire game, because the scenarios were interesting and varied. Halo 1 did that masterfully as well, and even that had subtle gimmicks, such as AotCR, where you're fighting the same enemies, but on a bridge with two levels, or running across an open field as wraiths bombard the space between you and a Warthog, or you walk through a room where half are sleeping and the others patrol. That game had zero dedicated boss fights, and certainly didn't have any "big" versions of an enemy.

I think Bungie has approached great bosses with stuff like Theosyion and Sedia. Neither fights had a boss that was just "This, but big, and also..."

Theosyion's fight was great because the strike's gimmick was to guide one of the Fireteam members through hordes of enemies so he could plant the orb and unlock a gate. This same mechanic played a huge part in the final fight.

Sedia's strike required careful platforming, and throwing the orb between teammates to do bonus damage and make the enemies vulnerable. The same mechanics were involved in the fight.

Protheon and the Psion Flayers were two other good fights, because even though the strike lacked a mechanic-based element, the level changed constantly, and the strikes had varied encounters (both had elements of verticality). Sure, Protheon was a big minotaur, but he didn't have to be. If the game universe hadn't already established Gate Lords, he could have been something completely new visually (or even a series of enemies), but rigged to a Minotaur skeleton, and nobody would have noticed.

(Obligatory Warframe)

Pretty much every boss in Warframe has started out as "Basic unit mesh with much more health, and they can...", but over time, DE has changed the encounter to have unique bosses, or multi-stage encounters:

Tyl Regor used to be a generic melee Grineer with an upside-down mask, now he has an entire level and custom model (still with upside-down mask), and his motivations are a part of the encounter and tileset (and he has unique enemies exclusive to the tileset).

Ambulas used to be a slightly bigger moa with a railgun. Now it's a boss fight where you disable several Ambulas units and hack them while a ship bombards you from low-atmosphere, and during normal missions, an Ambulas Moa can be dropped off by a dropship randomly.

Raptor was just a regular Osprey with high health and missiles, and now the "boss fight" involves destroying a factory production line, with Raptor-model Ospreys being manufactured throughout.

This all just reminds me of how Bungie removed the non-giant-boss Exodus Down for months while they worked on it, only to bring it back exactly the same, only with fewer waves. Yay.

This isn't necessarily a direct reply to you, Cruel. But your post sparked something in my mind, which is related to a conversation Korny and I had yesterday, and something that was discussed in the forum somewhere recently.

I will start by addressing some of the stuff you said, though, just because it's there. (:

Or "2 Scarabs. You heard me. 2 of them"

The weird thing about that is that the Scarabs in that fight aren't particularly interesting in what they do, but it's still undeniably cool because it felt unique. The area for that fight is relatively tiny (even compared to the area of the single Scarab fight earlier in the game on Earth). The Scarabs are smashed into a small area and can't move. They literally just stand in one spot and rotate. They don't have any interesting behavior. But there is enough chaos there with two Scarabs shooting at you, Banshees flying around shooting at you, some Ghosts zipping around, friendly Warthogs zooming about. The Scarabs themselves are only interesting because of their size and the fact that it feels nearly inevitable that they're going to step on you or a friendly Warthog at some point.

Destiny's many patrol spaces look different in superficial terms, but very few of them offer a unique gameplay experience compared to the other zones. You're usually doing the exact same thing over and over with a different skybox in the background

All that said, I do think things are improving on that end. The Dreaming City alone is a really special achievement, I think.

This is getting at what Korny and I talked about a bit yesterday.

The Dreaming City is the best thing that's every happened in Destiny. I'm not even sure that's a debate, for me. The way it evolves and continues to feel fresh, the secrets, the Shattered Throne, the Raid, the way all that is connected--it's damn near perfect, in my mind. While I'm no loremaster, and have undoubtedly missed a lot of important things that were revealed, the context we got every week when something new opened up is a large part of why that all felt so cool. Obviously, the fact that it's all strong in terms of gameplay loop really helps, and maybe that's ultimately why it's successful, but without that context, it undoubtedly wouldn't have been nearly as effective.

That's why the Black Armory stuff, while absolutely fun (I think), hasn't felt as cool. We're given basically zero context for any of it, to the point where I'm still not sure why we should even give a shit about these Forges. The few weapons I've obtained so far are fun and cool, but they're not anything that the Vanguard weapons aren't--they sure don't feel like they were made in some super secret Forge that Guardians have never accessed before. Which, that's fine, they can't be ridiculous because of gameplay reasons, but the game doesn't give us any context for any of this or why it matters, and it's not like the gear speaks for itself and makes that immediately evident.

I'm really curious to see how this season (and this year) will unfold. Gameplay trumps everything, and, ultimately, if it's all fun, it will be successful, but I worry a bit about getting a bunch of random activities that don't feel like they add much to the universe of Destiny. Forsaken was so strong because of the way it was built and the context it added to everything we did. It gave a definitive shape to the world of Destiny that I think it's been sorely lacking, at least since The Taken King.

I said previously that I wouldn't miss the smaller campaigns if it meant we got more fun, meaningful content. That's still true, I think, but the Black Armory rollout has shown that I actually will miss those campaigns, if only because they gave me some story elements to latch onto (even when they were mostly paper-thin).

I still want to see what Destiny looks like if the devs at Bungie are given freedom to experiment. The Whisper mission was made by a small team, just a few people, and it's some of the coolest content in the game still. What does Destiny look like if they break up into tens of those small teams and all just design one-off things that are cool? What if we could get a Whisper mission every month? That sounds appealing, but how do that contextualize that content and make it "fit" within the Destiny universe and further the story elements of the game? Forsaken (and the Dreaming City specifically) made me care about that aspect of Destiny in a way that I never have before, so I want them to lean into that now. But the idea of getting a year of support of smaller teams trying cool ideas and making neat things sounds really appealing between Forsaken style releases. I was hopeful for that when they talked about the Annual Pass initially, and I'm still very hopeful and optimistic that there will be some cool surprises along the way, but I'm not convinced that's what we're really getting.