CoD, Activision, and Destiny (Gaming)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Sunday, December 01, 2013, 14:42 (3797 days ago) @ Schooly D
edited by Ragashingo, Sunday, December 01, 2013, 14:45

3. What is the danger for Bungie here, given that Bungie will ostensibly be on the same two-year cycle (which the article claims caused stagnation with CoD) but will, additionally, be developing DLC expansions in the off years? If the development of the expansion doesn't interfere with the development of the next game, will it be a substantial release? If the expansion is substantial enough to affect the next game's release, how concerning is that given it's eating into an already brief, CoD-ish 2-year cycle?

Perhaps not at all! For a few reasons:

1. It feels like Destiny and maybe even more importantly its tools were built for much more rapid development. Watching them throw together respectable, properly lit locations very rapidly was pretty amazing. Knowing that the designers' work has been simplified by not having to completely seal off world segments seemed to be a big deal. If the tools are much better and the engine itself handles some of the troublesome / slowdown issues of the past then perhaps rapid development is much less of a problem for Destiny that it would have been for Halo.

2. Knowing as little about Destiny as we do this is kinda a vaguely informed guess, but I get the sense that Destiny is being designed from the start as something that can be easily expanded. Not just because the tools are better, but because the story and universe have had a lot more pre-development / pre-success thought put into them. This time, unlike with Halo, I think Bungie knows the beginning, middle, and end of the story, which will be a huge help in shaping future gameplay and engine changes.

3. The Bungie of today is not the Bungie at the start of Halo. Back then it still felt like a tight knit group of friends that only partially knew what they were doing. Talent and good taste led to a fantastic string of games, but the planning and knowing what would come next didn't seem to be there as much. The Bungie of today still has the talent and the good taste, but also has a decade of experience good worthwhile experience. They've seen what poor planning can do and seem to have gotten things much more in order since then. They are, in some ways, more of an actual video game company than they were at the start of Halo, which is a good thing. A group of friends making games is great, but I think a well led powerful company making them is going to be even better.

4. Halo had to blaze a lot of trails and pioneer a lot of stuff that Destiny doesn't need to worry about. Destiny isn't needing to come up with and be a test case for good online multiplayer. Destiny isn't Bungie's first attempt to get a FPS working on a console controller. Destiny will surely be influenced by the past decade's successes and failures in FPS story telling. Then there's all the well developed middleware. Bungie isn't having to code their entire physics engine from scratch, or make all their trees one by one, or build any number of other things from the ground up because those things have been established and matured over the last decade. In many ways it is amazing that Halo did as well as it did for being the first of its kind.

Personally, I can't wait to see what happens when you take the people who made Halo, and add in money, resources, and experience. I think we're in for a treat. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Destiny will simply be a more serious Borderlands with some clever behind the scenes matchmaking. Well, I can't really come up with how THAT would be such a bad thing either! :)

I remember when news of the Bungie-Activision contract got out, the opinion of a lot of people in the b.org community was that Bungie made out like bandits, or that it was at least a win-win: Bungie gets ACTV's money and platform while retaining "full creative control" or whatever the phrase was. What if that calculus was wrong? What if the long game is a decisive win for ACTV and loss for BNG, as BNG is forced to pump out Destiny titles on an even more abbreviated schedule than CoD which has now been driven into the ground?

The story was always that Bungie shopped around and found a partner who would give them what they wanted. If Destiny was planned to succeed on a Halo-like 3 year development schedule and Activision only gives two years, then yes, it's going to show. But if Bungie went in with the concept of a game that was meant to be developed in two year chunks then there shouldn't be any problems. And, of course, none of us even know how often Destiny DLC and games will come out. It is possible that we're worrying about timing issues that simply don't exist.