I want to know what Bungie was thinking (Destiny)

by Jabberwok, Thursday, September 25, 2014, 21:52 (3507 days ago) @ Cody Miller

Looking around the internet at various other communities such as reddit Destiny, and here, I see the same thing arising:

People are losing interest in the game.

All of them are saying the same types of things I said day 1. There is nothing to do, and replaying stuff over and over is not content. The grind is no fun.

I honestly want to know what Bungie was thinking with this system. How did not one of the 400 people working on this game say to themselves while playing it, "You know, this is kind of lame…".

I want to know how Tyson could design the investment system he did without knowing it would lead to this. If that's the best you could come up with you need to find another man for the job, or better yet find a way to scrap the system completely.

I want to know how they could hype the Queen's event, which was literally just "play these same missions over again". I want to know why Bungie just removed the only incentive to play these missions.

I want to know why the raid was so cool, but the story missions were not.

I want to know why the story was a complete mess, and 100x more deserving of an .isnotcanon site than Reach.

It just utterly baffles me that this could happen in a studio that has nailed the fun factor up to this point, and without regards to the investment system in Destiny, mostly nailed it there.

Most of the folks who disagreed are starting to come around now that they have reached the end game.

None of the events except the Vault of Glass are any good. Combined arms and Salvage are playlists that should have just been active 24/7 from day 1. Queen's bounties are just recycled story missions. Iron Banner is just crucible with better rewards.

Why does Bungie think that people were mindlessly shooting in the loot cave not wanting to play the game? Because playing the game when you are 22+ kind of sucks. The fact that folks would rather spend their time at the loot cave than playing the game should be deeply embarrassing.

Keep in mind I predicted this FOUR YEARS AGO, even before the game was announced. Either I am a goddamn psychic, or I know something that Bungie apparently doesn't.

Destiny went out with a whimper. Contrast that with The Last of Us, which upon finishing, my first thought was "Holy shit, what an awesome game, I can't wait to try on Survivor!".

I'm not sure the comparison to The Last of Us is relevant, as the games are not really in a similar genre at all. But I do agree on a lot of points. One problem is that most MMOs or other similar titles either have a lot more content, or they have more randomized content of some kind to keep things fresh. I'm starting to wish that they had put more resources into making a dynamic single player/coop campaign, with maybe some public battles thrown in, as that's what they've been good at in the past, and then separated out things like patrols and strikes. Or, alternatively, they need to devise a system that is fundamentally more dynamic that people can keep playing, like an expanded Firefight mode. If they expanded patrols to keep things changing, instead of just respawning the same groups of enemies over and over, that would be a vast improvement.

After some thought, here's how I would want them to do things in the next title, keeping in mind limited time for development: A short, but tightly designed story mode for single and coop play that is completely separate from the public spaces, so it isn't held back by their requirements. After that, a number of sandbox maps similar to what we have now, that would be like Patrol crossed with Halo's Firefight, but with many more random events and missions, and much more dynamic monster spawns and movements. In other words, something that feels more like an actual battlefield, instead of a whack-a-mole machine. They could work strikes and raids into this system, but randomize bosses and locations more so it doesn't feel so repetitive (this would also mean less voice acting needed). The competitive multiplayer side of things seems fine, except that they should not be withholding certain modes from players. That just seems ridiculous.

Personally, I liked Reach, btw. The progression system didn't bother me because it was completely cosmetic.