You're not wrong (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Thursday, June 25, 2015, 21:57 (3675 days ago) @ General Vagueness

I appreciate where you're coming from, but I think you're putting too much onus on my expectations of Bungie based on my experience of their work and not enough on the fact that Bungie is also fully aware of their previous body of work and the expectations that body of work will set into the minds of consumers. Reputation is a real thing, and it's a thing that people pay millions of dollars for. Companies merge all the time, and they keep the name of the company with the best reputation. To argue that Bungie's reputation for great games and kept promises and not misleading consumers is not material to the case of feeling misled by the advertising for Destiny is simply wrong. It is completely material. I based my evaluations of the advertising, demos, official vidocs, etc. on my knowledge and understanding of the reputation of the company involved. That totality was misleading.

Bungie's reputation is relevant, but it's not quantifiable or objective. There is the element of the majority reputation, what the gaming public thinks of them, but that's only marginally relevant to a given game or a given player. There are people that didn't like Bungie's previous games but like Destiny. As for a reputation of not misleading people, that goes back to the actual question of how you were mislead. I hold that you should not take anything as a fact unless it's put in an advertisement or maybe prefaced with the words "we promise", and even then you should take it with a grain of salt because things change, plans fail, and people exaggerate. Other than the "you can go anywhere you can see" comment* (and maybe Mercury), I think you believed what you wanted to believe based on either minimal evidence or none at all. I get that Bungie never let you down before and it hurts now that it's finally happened, but to think it could never happen is totally naïve.

* I still don't get how that was supposed to work, every side of every world map ends in cliffs going up, adjoining very tall buildings, holes so deep you can't see the bottom, or water with no islands in it? Even then someone would say "I can see the water over there" or "I can see that higher/lower part of the cliffs/where the cliffs end" and complain they couldn't get to it.

This is the only example I can remember of a game advert showing obvious in-game footage that never actually was part of the game. I've seen adverts with pre-renders and the like, but those were always obvious and usually had a disclaimer such as "*not actual game footage" at the bottom of the screen.

As for the "you can go there" I took it to mean that they actually built massive worlds to explore in the vein of World of Warcraft.

--

If you want to get into the nitty gritty of the advertising, I have not "become legend" either in the meta scope of the game or in the plot element of the game, either. The amazing legendary act I performed was, per the Speaker, worth only a single mote of light. No one in the tower recognizes me as "that Legend" but rather I'm just another Guardian. And how many times has Deej said that our gear would tell our tale? What's the tale of your Gjallerhorn? I bet it's along the lines of "I killed Phogoth 500 times and then I finally got this" or maybe, like mine, "My friend had a saved checkpoint at the harpy chest in VoG, so I joined him and opened the chest on all of my characters. Did that for weeks before I got it." Those are stories, so Deej wasn't lying when he said my gear would have a story, but they're terribly boring stories.

Okay, so what about the E3 presentation that started with "today we're going to explore The Wall outside Old Russia and see if we can't make it to the other side." That sets up that you had some kind of choice about where to go and that it wasn't part of a wholly linear story. Technically you can replay the first mission, but the presentation of it at E3 was that this was standard gameplay - there's areas you haven't explored that you can choose to explore. Presumably lots of them. Wow, see the spaceship fall over when that alien ship warped in?! Oh man, look how much cool stuff is in Destiny. Except there's almost no big set piece action like that ever again. The satellite dish opens up in one later mission and.... yeah, that's it. For the whole game. See what I mean about it's not an out and out lie but the implication that this is representative of what the experience of playing the game will be like is throughout the presentation?

Sure, in my mind I built these expectations, but every single thing they showed me prior to launch was consistent with those expectations. They never took any steps to temper those expectations, nor did they ever show us any part of the game that went counter to their main advertising goals of selling this massive, epic, incredible space adventure where you "Become Legend."

I mean... do you feel like your character has become legend? I don't. I feel like my actions have had zero impact on the game world and that I'm just one of hundreds of Guardians who are all basically the same.