Destiny 2 - PC/Xbox/PS4 - Page 69

On March 11 2020 15:04 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
Emblem stats are gone, everything. Ritual weapons, one, that was delayed from last season. World loot can't even equip seasonal mods ffs.

As director of Destiny 2, Smith has overseen a game that’s increasingly about being pressured to play, enforcing diverse play, rather than supporting players in playing the way they want. Destiny 2 has become a game that’s less about exciting “you had to be there” moments like Gjallarhorn Day or the discovery of TR3-VR and more about “you should have been there” punishments when gear gets taken away every season or pushed into activities that offer little to no meaningful loot like patrols.

Destiny 2 is not in a great spot right now; the transition from premium game to free to play and the inclusion of awesome features like cross-save make it seem like Destiny should be the best it’s ever been, but the reality is a lot more complicated. Take one look at the community forums or subreddit. Negative sentiment is at an all-time high, with players desperate for answers, identifying any and every annoyance, hoping that if Bungie addresses it, all their problems will be solved.

This dynamic is not new, and it is part of what led Destiny to this point. When Bungie released Destiny in 2014, the single biggest complaint about the game was a lack of content: For an online, service-based game, a lack of content is a death sentence. As a developer, you need to give players a reason to keep playing, and the vanilla release of Destiny failed to accomplish that.

As the game matured, Bungie introduced numerous potential endgame activities, like Prison of Elders and Trials of Osiris, and made design decisions meant to give players a reason to keep playing. With Destiny 2’s launch, Bungie made a huge tactical error, releasing all weapons as fixed-rolls, which meant that every time you got a gun like Uriel’s Gift to drop, it’s identical to every other Uriel’s Gift you received. This shrank the game so aggressively that Destiny 2’s launch was the lowest point in the entire series history. Within a year, Bungie wisely pivoted back to random rolls (though unfortunately not for every activity), and the next major expansion, Forsaken, was hailed as a high point for Destiny.

Of course, every content drop has its honeymoon phase. After Forsaken, Bungie spent the next year releasing content via their season pass. The intent, it seems, was to avoid having players run out of things to do too quickly. December 2018’s Season of the Forge had a lot of great ideas, featuring great looking gear, a wonderful raid, and plenty of secrets to uncover. The problem was… the forges themselves weren’t that deep. Each one played the same, with only minor variations, and while the ability to target gear was exciting, familiarity breeds contempt, and too many forge runs would inevitably turn into tedium.

There was a problem: Bungie was putting all this work into designing, building, playtesting, and supporting unique modes with every season, but players were still exhausting content faster than Bungie could create it, and then complaining about not having anything to do. Trying to explain this dynamic to Destiny’s perpetually dissatisfied fans, Luke Smith wrote at the end of the Year 2 that “...the game cannot grow infinitely forever…”

Smith’s remarks signaled a shift in Bungie’s approach to a now-familiar problem. While players are continually demanding new things, once we’ve completed the content, there’s no reason to keep playing. Because seasonal content grows stale quickly, the effort of creating them feels wasted. Now, however, rather than splitting the player base across a plethora of game modes, Bungie would bring new modes in for a limited time, then remove them forever.

On May 15 2020 10:10 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
In 6 months everyone will start losing their gear. They are sun-setting every fucking thing for some reason.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/gjwb6o/this_week_at_bungie_5142020/