Cross-saves! (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, June 06, 2019, 15:41 (1783 days ago) @ Cody Miller

It's the best news in forever. Now let's hope the free-to-play model doesn't ruin everything we like.

It will. Free to Play by design and by necessity damages games.

I don't know, man... I think this makes a lot of sense, given the kind of game that Destiny is (and not what you or some others might want it to be).

Destiny is not a stationary game. The player bass moves through the content like a surfer on a wave, with the majority of their time focused on the newest additions to the game, while increasingly larger amounts of content get "left behind". Except that content doesn't exactly get "left behind" either. It has been a constant struggle for Bungie, but I think if you compare D2 now to D1 Y1, there is a vast improvement in the way they've created a whole "buffet" of various activities, and players can bounce between them depending on what they're in the mood to do. Certain activities (usually the newest ones) will be more central to increasing your power level, but even the process of leveling up has been diversified to the point where you can focus on just about any activity that you want and still make some kind of progress.

When I look at Destiny 2 right now, it reminds me a bit of the "hub and spoke" model that Bungie used to build ODST. Except that game was a single player, story-based Hub and Spoke, while Destiny 2 covers way more ground. That being the case, I think it makes a lot of sense to make the "Hub" free for everyone. All the locations (including new locations as they're introduced), strikes, Crucible, Gambit, Y1 campaigns, adventures... all that stuff is now free for anyone to jump in, leave for a while, come back later if they want to. And then the "spokes" can be purchased by anyone who wants to go a step further and dig into the extra content that is more self-contained, like the Foresaken campaign or this new Shadowkeep storyline.

This really seems like a good way to monetize new content as its released, without making anyone feel locked out of the game, or too far behind to try to catch up. It looks like it will make it way easier to put the game down for 6 months, then jump back in if something new catches your attention and you want to go straight into the new thing without needing to buy and play a bunch of older stuff.

I'm optimistic.