Wait, there was a sequel to Destiny?
Yup, and it was a shameless money grab.
Man, I was hooked for a long time before I woke up and smelled the business model. I haven’t touched it in years, but I do miss the lore. Always thought it was their strong suit. Maybe they can set a better, non-live-service game in the same universe, but this is Bungie. Not gonna happen…
I bought the Destiny PS4 when the game launched. I knew I was basically signing up for World of Halocraft and all the bs that comes with it.
But what did surprise me was how poor the execution was. Every single DLC made all the previous gear/items COMPLETELY USELESS.
Yeah. I quit when a green floor item was a higher light level than the legendary yellow emperor launcher.
It was so liberating to just… uninstall and never look back, lol
isn’t this how MMOs work ? you’re asking for horizontal fearing which is less traditionally(GW2 does it) but most MMOs do not.
Not exactly. Did you play the first seasons? Basically every dlc there were items you’d farm to buy gear (or something it’s been a decade now and I forget) that became completely obsolete when the next dlc came out.
Most rpgs you can sell those items. But in Destiny you had to delete them.
I played tf out of MMOs. It wouldn’t have stood out to me if it was at all a typical experience.
I miss when video game companies made video games and not “not live service models.”
I swore that Bungie was dead to me the moment they walked back their plans to carry player gear over from D1 to D2. Every single thing I’ve ever learned about D2 has been secondhand and it has all completely validated that decision.
Now that they’ve given up on it they are going to open it up to Linux, right?
Hahahaha
I’d love if SKG was able to get some wins before they pull the plug entirely. Allow the community to keep it running, let them restore the lost content, unlock/add cosmetics, etc etc.
A guy can dream…of essentially what games were 15-20 years ago.
If I could play the two games from start to finish right now, I probably would. As it stands, I don’t regret sitting this out.
Lol, I remember release - it couldn’t run on Linux because of DRM so I never even played it.
Around the same time WarThunder got massive upgrade - native client ran like charm with better graphics and Vulkan rendering.
Fuck you bungie. I’ve played over 1000h in WT.
The Destiny games were a little too corny for me. But a lot of people liked them so hopefully something else comes along
Unpopular Opinion: It should have ended after The Final Shape, not hobbled along.
Not unpopular at all. That’s precisely when I stopped.
Me: “The Final Shape, huh? Is this going to be the final expansion? I’m several DLCs behind.”
Bungie: “We’ve got another one planned. And a Star Wars crossover too.”
Me: “Oh fuck off now. Peace out.”
Destiny 2 died a long time ago. Sure people were playing with its corpse but they’re finally getting bored with that too. Shame bc there’s a lot of fun stuff in there (especially the stuff they ripped away from their paying customers already) that will go away forever.
Died when they decided to put the onus of their development debt onto paying customers and throw shit they paid for in the trash.
Dude I distinctly remember the day I logged back on after a few months away to find entire planets just removed. Literally played for 5 minutes until I got mad and haven’t been back since.
I had a friend trying to get me into the game. I was like, the game has been out for years, surely they have a ton of old content to play through.
Nope, they just deleted a ton of it. My friend’s reasoning? I kid you not: The game got too big.
I still bought in, only to find ALL of the hostile anti consumer practices, and then some more I’d never even seen before. Separate dungeon keys sold separately. Holy shit that same was so trash. What a waste of money. Whoever came up with and greenlit those business practices should be put on a public list.
I had only recently gotten into the game when they did that. I hadn’t quite got to play some of the content they “vaulted”. I quite literally never logged in again.
I am eager to hear Skeletor’s opinion on this.
This is the game I put more time on my entire life. I ditched it back in 2022-2023. Greed ruins everyone’s lives, that’s all I can say.
Shit man, I quit after a couple years of playing the first one. Too much time researching and not enough playing. That’s when I decided I was done with these games that don’t give you all the info you need in the game itself. Don’t think I ever even installed 2. Doesn’t even work on Linux.
Do you mean it doesn’t work natively on Linux or via Proton?
via Proton. Per the ProtonDB, it’s “borked”. The Anti-Cheat is overly zealous and modern day corpos at Bungie are the kind that think all Linux users just wanna hack.
They have an active stance against Linux. Destiny and Destiny 2 doesn’t work on Linux. I would have played it.
Neither. Anticheat.
Warframe gonna get a shit ton of new players.
Bungie believes they’ll play Marathon. lol
Wake up, Tenno…
Thank goodness they didn’t over deliver.
I am so spiteful that the upper/middle management destroyed a game with so much potential just to chase MTX and bonuses.
Y’all ate slop so they slopped it up even more.
God forbid a gamer enjoy playing a video game and hope a studio learns from their mistakes.
What mistake? They made decisions that resulted in more money for them and learned that they could get away with it for years
That mistake? You might want to take a look at recent Bungie news if you think that their mistakes didn’t cost them their fan base.
The people in charge don’t care, they already have the money
Are you trying to make a point or just trolling? The only thing I can think of is you are trying to make the case that it is the fault of the players and not the studio that the game didn’t survive.
Fool me once shame on you, fool me consistently for a fucking decade and yeah actually that’s on me
It was created as a live-service game. It was never not a mtx fest.
Correct, but as is the case with Warframe, which has so many more premium currency purchases you CAN make than D2, it is possible to have a live service game and also make something fantastic that players can enjoy for decades.
Correct me if I’m being ignorant here but I don’t know if there’s ever been a single company that’s pulled itself out of a long line of degenerate business practices
The two off the top of my head would be No Man’s Sky and R6 Seige.
No Man’s Sky: https://imkingginger.substack.com/p/the-decade-long-journey-of-no-mans
Not sure how R6 is doing currently, but at one point they had a decent resurgence after they finally doubled down on improving the game.
These don’t match the exact scenario of Bungie, but they work as evidence that a studio CAN create something great out of something mediocre.
To be fair to Hello Games I’m pretty sure that Sony breathing down their necks for the release of No Man’s Sky really screwed them over during initial development. They had to rush big time and it was a huge increase in scope from their previous titles. Definitely not trying to undermine them though, NMS is a pretty great game now, especially compared to how rocky the start was.
As for R6 I remember hearing pretty recently there was a huge hacking incident that lead to players getting free shit en masse and effectively flipped the game economy on its head. I don’t know how they handled the fallout from that but considering it’s Ubisoft I doubt they learned anything substantial. Though if there’s one inadvertently good thing they did it was kicking off the Stop Killing Games movement by shutting down servers for The Crew.
Destiny was the tits though. I didnt play much of 2 because life got in the way, but the core gameplay was satisfying and silky-smooth.
Some of the best PVP I’ve ever experienced, I still miss it
I suspect chicken and egg is reversed in a lot of comments like this. Did popularity fall because they increased monetization? Or did they increase monetization because popularity fell and live services are expensive beasts? Gotta say, I expect it’s the latter, especially since we know Bungie wasn’t doing so hot when Sony bought them.
All you have to do is look at Warframe. Bungie had metric tons more money to work with than DE did during their early life. Warframe is better than D2 in almost every way.
I think whoever was driving the core development decisions at Bungie was actively hindering the success of the game, whether intentionally or not.
At the end of the day, the less money that is spent on the IP, the more money goes to bonuses/exec payouts.
I think the difference in money between them is exactly it, but in how many developers it took to make and how many it still takes to continue to add to it. There is no chance that Warframe had the capex or opex of Destiny at any point in either game’s life.
And as much as people’s minds can be blown by the size of executive bonuses, I have yet to see reporting that ties it as a major contributing factor to why games became too expensive to make or maintain. That cost is mostly in just how many people those games employ to make them multiplied across how many years they’re working on it.
Both chicken and egg situations say the same thing: live service GAAS is unsustainable at best and garbage at worst
I would recommend looking into the development history of Warframe. That, IMO, is the best example of GAAS that works for both the studio and the players.
Dark patterns are dark patterns, even if “the community” is more or less happy. Just means that it’s working. Being owned by Tencent actually does give them the freedom to “just be profitable” instead of squeezing each player for more and more revenue YOY, but the game still uses every retention mechanic in the book and leverages fake value by putting the MTX currency on “really good sales! Look how good the limited time deal is!!!” to keep people shelling out.
Tencent is diversified enough that they’ll probably never feel the need to tighten the screws on the Warframe studio directly.
You can play the game and not spend a penny on MTX to get the premium currency, this is why I said look it up.
So, the investors are happy, the players are happy, but the developers are actually evil because “dark patterns”?
Yeah that’s kind of the point with dark patterns. That’s not a term I made up either. Warframe isn’t as rife with them as other games but the “forever GAAS” platform is nearly always leveraging patterns like this in some way.
I am aware that it is a thing, I just don’t see why you are insisting that, because of the model Warframe operates under, the developers are evil.
I think they are doing 10X better at putting the money back into the game and also using it to support the community aspects than any other live service game out there. I believe they have worked hard to make that happen and deserve props for not fucking over their fanbase like other developers, such as Bungie, do.
As opposed to what?
I don’t think a game like this should last, and be developed, forever. It will inevitably lead to enshittification.
That’s cool, I enjoyed the game, but got frustrated with how shitty Bungie was with their refusal to learn from past mistakes. I wish this game lasted for much longer, but their pattern of repeating the same mistakes and releasing more mediocre DLCs than good ones drove me away.
Warframe has shown it is possible to exist for a long time, continuously drop quality content, and have a fantastic relationship and collaboration with their community.
Enshittification begins when the profits become a higher focus than the product.
I bailed on Destiny 2 after Shadowkeep when they announced content vaulting and I never looked back. The writing was on the wall back then that the game will end up in a ditch. My experience with Destiny 2 is basically frozen as of Shadowkeep so it’s relatively positive but I just can’t understand how anyone could tolerate player hostile decisions Bungie has made over the years. Here is Aztecross’ video explaining some of them including pay to win elements. His video is already two years old so I’m sure even more nonsense has been added to the game since. Destiny franchise started out as something special but it died as a horrific heap of anticonsumer garbage due to unchecked greed of a corporation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsIdPWB2_JA
Ngl this video pissed me off so much just now that I don’t want to play any games with any microtransactions at all.
Devs will try anything to make money except making a fun game
Edit: oof. That video ended with “I’ll still buy macrotransactions quarterly. Making it stop is impossible.”
How did he get so close, yet when faced with “we are a business and have to make money”, totally caved to late stage capitalism. Destiny players are all cognitively deficient addicts. Late state capitalism is here to stay because everybody’s fucking stupid with no spine.
I bailed on D2 shortly after Curse of Osiris even though I bought the first 2 expansions. Never even played the second expansion. I think I had around 2000 hours in D1 and D2 just didn’t feel the same. I didn’t like the changes they made so I just stopped playing it altogether.
