Bungie Tweets: Aftermath (Destiny)

by MacAddictXIV , Seattle WA, Monday, June 08, 2020, 08:20 (1636 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

I’m really baffled, both by these tweets as well as many of the responses.

Like, I totally get if the team had to conquer some technical hurdles to make this work, and they’re proud of themselves for pulling it off. They should be proud. But “difficult to implement” does not equate to “fun user experience”. What really blows my mind is the number of replies to those tweets saying stuff like “fantastic event!” and “it was awesome!”. I’m not trying to be a downer here, but... it was literally standing in the tower for 80 minutes while nothing happened, followed by a ~4 minute lightshow. Are people’s standards/expectations so damn low that Bungie can just tell them to stand in the tower for an hour and a half and that’s an “awesome event”?

I totally understand and appreciate a game that leaves room for a group of friends to “create their own fun”. That’s why I love the early D1 raids more than most of the D2 raids; the voice chat bandwidth wasn’t completely consumed by callouts, so you could just hang out with friends while raiding. That’s why I have so much fun with games like Deep Rock, Sea of Thieves, and Destiny until recently. But praising Bungie for making you and your friends stand in the tower for an hour just doesn’t make sense to me. If you had any fun, it’s because your friends are awesome, not the event.
Or am I just totally out of touch here?

(OldManYellingAtCloud.jpg)

Don't do the thing where you assume people who were happy were happy for the wrong reasons. :-)

I take your point, and that’s certainly not what I’m trying to do. I think what I’m trying to tease out is the line between “enjoying a piece of content” vs “having fun with friends, regardless of where you are or what you’re doing”.

Like, my friends and I could go to a bar that has overpriced drinks, terrible music, sticky tables, and we’ll still have a blast. Because we have fun together. But I’m not going to go to Yelp the next day and give the bar a 5-star review because I had fun.

Set aside whatever technical hurdles Bungie has to overcome to make this work, this event was 80 minutes of doing NOTHING. The Fortnight Live Concerts that happened recently are not the kind of thing that would appeal to me, but at least I can point at it and say “there’s a freaking live concert happening in this video game”. There was something to engage with, not just 80 minutes of waiting.

I know the skybox was changing every 20 minutes or whatever, but that’s what I was driving at with my “low standards/expectations” remark. It’s a freaking skybox. They’re beautiful, and they take a lot of work, and I’m not knocking any of the effort that goes into creating them, but i can’t think of another game studio that has ever been so in love with their own farts that they’d try to market an “event” around a skybox. This is the same studio that used to bring industry-defining features to their games like clockwork, and now things like this “event” are what they seem to get themselves excited about.

For almost 2 years now, we’ve been hearing from the team that they’re stretched too thin, they don’t have the resources for X Y and Z, etc. But if their twitter accounts are anything to go by, they sunk a whole bunch of time and manpower into this glorified tech demo. Whatever happened to Jonty Barnes’ motto of “concentrated coolness”? The directive that every single scrap of effort from the team should be going towards things that are going to have a big impact on the player experience, and creating lasting, memorable gameplay experiences.

Now, it’s only fair to note that this tech could be used to create something cool. We’ll see if that ever comes to fruition.

I just want to start by saying I understand your comparison, and I agree with that. I personally enjoyed it. And I was just sitting and watching it in my living room. Was I annoyed at some points? Yes. Did I think it took a bit too long? Sure. Do I think they failed? Nope. Did I enjoy it just because of people I was hanging out with? Nope.

That being said, I feel like you are blowing up Bungie's "You need to be here or else!" advertisement. I saw a tweet, which someone else showed me, and when I logged on for this event a banner. Those were the only two things I signaled that this event was going to happen. And both of them were simply a "you should be at the tower at reset". This wasn't some marketing ploy and videos for that start of a new season (those are insane sometimes and I hate all the fluff).

Honestly the only thing I think they did wrong was the time from reset to the start of the lines in the sky. And they already said that was partly due to technical difficulties. Like if people are expecting a live concert in the tower when Bungie mentions an "event" then people need a reality check. Fortnight does a great job at events. Great, Destiny isn't fortnight. They did something eventful here. Can't people just accept that?

Lastly I want to mention the technical aspect and their use of resources. The teams shouted our for this are:
Network operations team, devops (Development Operations) engineers, site reliability engineers, VFX team, and design. Yes, that is a lot of teams, but honestly, looking at those teams, VFX team and design are the only ones I can see making NEW content. The network operations, devops, and site reliability engineers are probably just maintaining the live game. And they are the ones that I am sure made the technical hurdles. So with that said, I don't think they really took anything away from making new content. And to me, this being a new thing that can happen is really worth it.