A Thought About Destiny's Reception (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, September 15, 2014, 12:34 (3740 days ago) @ car15

Bungie did a bad job of getting the game across to consumers pre-release. Until I played the beta, all I had were expectations and interpretations of VERY vague statements to go on.

Yep.

Others will disagree with me, but I think that marketing strategy was intentional. Keeping the nature of the game vague generated hype, which increased sales.

I think maybe it was just the way Bungie has done things for a decade or more. It's not like we got any more info on any Halo game after all. I think the stronger surface storytelling of Halo did a lot to excuse them of their poor marketing efforts. But what worked in the past did not work with Destiny. They were trying to set up a new franchise but were trying to use the same marketing strategy that they used when setting up and returning to Halo for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th times.

Why not show us a fast, sped-up fly through of all four worlds? Or even just one of them? Why not show us one complete Destiny cycle (Tower, to Orbit, to Director, to FTL, to open world, to mission, and back to Tower) instead of a single strike without first going through the open world and a modified version of the opening tutorial gameplay segment? Maybe then people would have gotten Destiny before the beta.

Post-release, it would be nice if they would share at least the outline of their plan going forward. Is Destiny 1 meant to last 10 years? Or will there be a Destiny 2 in just three years? Will there be new kinds of missions and gametypes added? Will we eventually explore similarly sized patrol zones on the outer planets, more on the planets we know? I get not wanting to promise too much, but staying silent on the future certainly didn't get them good reviews.

In the end, if Destiny's story presentation is bad, the years of marketing leading up to it were atrocious.