Counter-point: It matters a little bit. (Destiny)

by cheapLEY , Sunday, August 17, 2025, 10:35 (12 hours, 54 minutes ago) @ Cody Miller

It's very difficult for me to try and keep perspective in all of this. I became a Bungie fan with Halo, I don't know what it was like before.

I just look at the way they interact with their community over the years, and it sucks. It's a change I understand, because spending time interacting with people on the internet sucks now in a way it never really did before. But they spend all this money on a streaming studio, only to basically never use it. Weekly Updates went from fun deep dives into water physics in Halo 3 to paragraphs upon paragraphs of saying absolutely nothing. I couldn't even name a single person who actually develops games at Bungie now (and maybe that's for the better for them). But I constantly look at Digital Extremes and Warframe in comparison, and they stream all the damn time. Rebecca Ford (the now creative lead on Warframe) is on stream interacting with fans all the time, generally making a fool of herself and loving it, and the community reacts positively to actual developers engaging with their own game, cracking jokes, becoming memes and just kinda actually buying into what their game is. Maybe it's all for show and they're really good at faking it, but I look at the people making Warframe, and it genuinely looks like they're having fun making their game and interacting with their fans. When was the last time you saw anyone from Bungie on camera and it didn't look like they had their families locked in a basement somewhere to force them to do it?

And I get it, maybe it's just a difference in the communities. I'd also interact with Destiny players as little as possible, but Warframe has its fair share of shitheads, but they somehow find a way to manage it and not let that become the lead story all the time.

Maybe it's not a fair comparison to make, but Warframe has had all the same turmoil Destiny has for the most part, but they still managed to come out the other side feeling fun and engaged, whereas Bungie came out the other side feeling like a beaten dog. It's just frustrating, because it feels like a pretty easy problem to solve in terms of player sentiment stuff.

It's not like I have any actual insight into how they run things (or even game development in general), but it truly feels like Bungie, the entity, lost their passion along the way, and that's ultimately where I lost interest. If they don't seem to give a fuck, why should I?

Maybe Sony taking tighter control will make things better from a product standpoint, but I'm not sure it'll do anything for the studio culture or fan interactions, or the things that make it even feel like a community instead of just another video game made by a faceless corporation.