I hope everyone likes doing bounties! (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, April 22, 2020, 11:36 (1620 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Thanks for posting this. That trailer got me kinda hyped, and that gear looks really cool, so I was considering reinstalling. Thanks for convincing me but to waste my time.

That trailer though . . . I really want to know. Are the people who work at Bungie really excited about this and think it’s great, or are they all actually completely full of shit? And which is worse?

I’m sure that’s an issue of compartmentalization. The live team makes whatever content they make, and then the video team is responsible for creating a trailer that communicates info and also makes the new content look as cool as possible. I think Bungie has a great video team, who are very good at their jobs. But as far as the live team is concerned,I have felt since their introduction that they are generally quite poor at content creation. I think they’ve done some good work in the past when a) supplementing a larger release from the primary dev team, or b) reworking existing content (such as that event towards the end of D1 where they brought back all the raids with new challenges and updated loot).

In addition to a general lack of quality content, it’s also impossible to ignore the fact that the Live Team’s focus appears to have shifted towards creating “events” with the express purpose of selling Eververse items. In a season that features the return of Trials, we can’t get adept weapons or a complete set of Trials loot (where’s my Messenger!?!), but we can get 80 (!!!) new Eververse items for sale. Now, I believe this situation is more complicated than it looks, again due to compartmentalization. I don’t think the Live Team is in charge of creating weapons at all. I think that in order to reintroduce Trials weapons, the sandbox/weapons team needs to divert time away from whatever big project they’re working on (my guess is the Fall expansion). So it’s no surprise that they’re limited in what they can add to the seasonal releases. But from the outside, it looks and feels atrocious. And even if we set that whole issue aside, it doesn’t change the fact that when we look at what content the Live team does make, the VAST majority of it ends up in Eververse.

While I’m already in my game-developer armchair, I do often wonder if Bungie’s internal compartmentalization is a huge source of the many problems that keep repeating themselves in Destiny. To be more specific, it’s not the compartmentalization itself (I’m sure that’s a logistical necessity). But with things so compartmentalized, that’s where it’s absolutely critical to have people in higher positions who oversee what the various parts of the studio are doing and ensure that they guide all the teams towards a cohesive end. SOMEBODY at Bungie should be looking at their internal roadmaps and benchmarks, and stand up and say “we can’t release 80 new Eververse items while also releasing an incomplete Trials set, no unique rewards for GrandMaster Nightfalls, and scrapping pinnacle/ritual weapons all at the same time”. That’s where I completely echo you’re original question; “are they really excited about this, and think it’s great?” I’m concerned that the answer may be “yes”.