Great expectations (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Friday, August 14, 2015, 17:55 (3391 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

A partial answer, I think, comes down to expectations. Destiny faced a level and ferocity of expectations that few games are up against. Not just expectations of quality, but of the kind of experience it would deliver. When people spend months expecting and waiting for "x" and they get "y", it can cause frustrations, even if "y" is great.

Life is Strange faced none of the pre-launch scrutiny that Destiny did. Most people played it and judged it for what it is, not what they thought it was going to be.

You've touched on how I felt exactly. I'm not saying Bungie did anything wrong, but here was my experience, justified or not:

Info about Destiny has already been released, including the concept art showing Saturn, Jupiter, Phobos, Chicago, etc. Vidocs tell us about how big it is and how expansive the universe is. I play the game pre-alpha thanks to someone in the industry, and I get hype for the first time because the game plays great. The alpha comes, and is said to be 5% of the game. Game is misleadingly said to have a 500 million dollar budget.

Now. At this point, based on all that, I was fully expecting to go to all the places in the concept art, mentioned in the Vidocs, and have multiple explore (now patrol) spaces per destination. Apparently I was not the only one, since when it was announced there was one explorable space per planet, there was a collective unease, and Deej had to take over Matt's old job as Damage and Spin.

Game comes out, and is nowhere near my expectations. I was not alone.

I don't want to place blame, but Bungie could have been much more transparent about the eventual delivery of content. My expectations didn't come from thin air. If they had said that there was this huge universe that you'd be exploring, that new content would be rolled out over the years, and that eventually you'll visit all these awesome places, then that would have tempered expectations I think. They needed to say that the places in the concept art were just concepts, and aren't in the final game but will be rolled in over the ten years. This needed to be done almost immediately after the leak. I don't recall any qualifiers when they told me I could go to Saturn. So, I expected to be able to. I will kind of be able to in a month, but that's not what I was led to believe. Right up until the Beta the illusion of a scope was there.

This wasn't intentional of course, which is why it's frustrating. I think in a perfect world, companies would only announce games when they are content complete :-)