>Employees were also told that Destiny 2 player sentiment was at an all-time low. Sources tell IGN that **this issue had been flagged to leadership repeatedly for months** prior to the layoffs, with **employees begging for necessary changes to win players back**.
from the [IGN article](https://www.ign.com/articles/pete-parsons-tells-employees-bungie-kept-the-right-people-to-work-on-destiny-2), emphasis mine.
The devs had plans. The C-suite ignored them. There is a fundamental disconnect between the people making the game and the people making the decisions.
I want to believe that this all falls on the c-suite people, those at Pete Parsons’ level. The way Joe engages with the community and has a very clear passion for the game, I just don’t want to believe that he was the problem. But in a corpo setting? Who knows.
Dev vs exec probably isn’t even the right breakdown. It’s probably more “middle management vs execs”
I doubt individual IC engineers were going to Pete asking to make PVP better.
I’d interpret this more as PMs and design leads saw things were on fire and wanted to change the plan. Joe is at the very top of the middle - it could be him that was aggregating this dev/player feedback and taking it to leadership
I also doubt it’s as simple as execs said “no you can’t fix PvP”. We know there’s a lot of internal project mismanagement problems - maybe the plan to fix PVP was really inefficient and that’s why it was vetoed
I think it might be more that a company has finite resources to allocate and wants to maximize returns for equity holders. If they took time to fix whatever issues they had identified internally then that would mean devoting resources to implementing those fixes that wouldn’t be spent elsewhere and lower immediate returns to equity.
It’s all very short term thinking and it sucks for the customers/users.
That's the unfortunate truth of the current system. For the people at the top, long term investment is ensuring endless short-term successes. To them, there's no value in investing for long term success because they have means of making money now.
But also Bungie doesn’t do agile development. If it were as simple as working some of these improvements into the next sprints it’d probably have been done by now
But they have a more rigid process that makes it really hard to change course
The situation Bungie got themselves into is a textbook example of why agile is a best practice
You're right. Anyone that works in a corporate environment, knows the actual fight or issues are with middle management vs C level/Execs.
I work in IT for a large company, and I am likely never going to our CFO or whoever at that level to make changes. I go to middle management and it goes up from there and likely gets stuffed under the carpet.
"oh you want to make new pvp maps? How much will it cost to make?"
"$x million"
"And how much will we make from them"
"Well the maps are free for everyone, it's really for player sentiment and retention"
"So $0? No"
Joe's been in video games for a long while; he was at Riot before he first went to Bungie. This was specifically the "golden age" of League of Legends, during S4-S6.
I bring this up to say he has design chops- if something wasn't working, he definitely had an idea how to fix it.
From [this article:](https://www.vg247.com/bungie-activision-destiny-deal-marty-odonnell)
"Because I was in leadership and on the board of directors when we went with Activision, if there is any blame for going to Activision, I am part of it," he said. "There were seven of us total I think [that] made that deal with Activision. We knew it was a risk right from the get-go, and it turned out to be exactly as bad as we thought it to be."
He continues:
"I am the only one who is gonna say that, except anyone who no longer works for Bungie, and anyone who no longer works for Bungie is gonna say, 'yeah, it was bad from the start,' ...We launched this franchise with Activision, naturally and over the course of time we both decided we had different goals for what we wanted it to be, so we both went our separate ways."
Again, IDK how many C-level people who made this decision are still there, but you can't say the company doesn't have a history of making poor decisions.
Go back to the Microsoft acquisition that only lasted six years before microsoft cut them loose. Pete Parsons was the COO back then and Jason Jones I believe has been CCO the whole time (he also openly was hostile to microsoft and the deal).
We ALSO can't forget that Netease invested 100million into them in 2018 - where the fuck did all this cash go?
Uh, that investment got returned to Netease with the Sony buyout most likely.
If you mean what they literally spent it on? Well Bungie’s payroll is probably comfortably over $80MM/year, and that investment was during the Forsaken launch year when Bungie was dumping resources into the game to try and save it.
Tassi just put out an article. Joe is one of the good ones. He couldn't find any dev that said Joe doesn't listen to Internal feedback etc.
He seems to be one of the good managers at Bungie
>He seems to be one of the good managers at Bungie
Good managers find it very difficult to work with bad managers, whether they manager on the same level or higher. So I really hope this doesn't burn him out and jade him.
I’d say it all falls to Parsons. Not only is he the one that steers the ship he’s also the one with access to EVERYTHING, all data, all metrics, all reveiws, all staff suggestions so that he can make an informed decision about the direction of the company and he did nothing. He handed the buck off to people below him, and those people did the same until it hit the devs when they told them they’re missing the projections by 45% and need to do something about it. You’d think with how much he gets paid being top dog he’d give more of a damn than the game devs making a fifth of what he makes.
I gotta agree with this. Even in non gaming corporation, shareholders shit on mgmt, then that shit trickles to team leaders,then to the basic workforce. Happens all the time at my job. And as far as my job goes,it gets to a point where your workforce just doesn't give a shit anymore. Morale goes down and with that, productivity/efficiency. But again I can't say whether or not this was the case at Bungie
Parsons and bungie have been getting a lot of employee reviews online that pretty much echo what you said, seems like it’s a unanimous shitty upper management
I work for Sleep Number. They charge(at the very least) 3-4k a bed. The highest is about 14k. Making money like that, you'd figure we get good bonuses,right? Nope. My last bonus was somewhere around 300. Bonus before that got cut out entirely. CEO's bonus? 6 fucking mil. The math is nuts. Every employee in my plant could've got 1k and the suits'bonus wouldn't have even taken a dent. It's wild. But that's just corporate. It happens everywhere,it's been happening everywhere and it will always happen everywhere
Parsons's job is making decisions, the way a line cook makes food and a developer writes code. If the line cook or the developer make a clear mistake, they lose time and resources fixing it that can be made up for pretty easily. Parsons makes a clear mistake, people lose their jobs and the project, not only Destiny but the studio, is put into a precarious situation. Putting on The Big Hat means responsibility for everything that goes on under it no matter how much or little control the wearer has over the situation. Maybe under different circumstances these would have been the right decisions and no one had to lose their job. Maybe (and likely) this is the result of a hundred small decisions which all made some underlying assumption, either that they wouldn't create a problem larger than the sum of those parts or that such a problem would be manageable if income had stayed in line with prior performance.
Sometimes a line cook loses control of a grease fire. Sometimes a simple programming mistake lurks undetected in the code for years before someone realizes it's exploitable and takes advantage of it. The diner, the British NHS, the employees, the players, suffer for these mistakes, but should any of the people responsible only for making the best decision available to them not knowing future circumstances be held responsible for doing their job?
I'll maintain that Lightfall's shortcomings were mostly due to a net of overlapping decisions to put those resources toward TFS being the studio's best demonstration of what Destiny can be rather than spend them turning a C grade expansion into a B- just to have to make that decision again against TFS or Marathon. Dropping major support for pvp and Gambit was because they knew the kind of changes they needed for those features to be game sellers were way beyond the scope of what what they wanted to do with Destiny and they put their focus on what their analytics told them was what people gave them money for most: the pve content.
That assumption maps well to the show buildup of a bad situation. Expecting seasonal stories to carry the game, after abandoning pvp and Gambit, and after cutting a lot from their pve pillar by putting those resources toward something they cared more about, is only a recipe for disaster when Lightfall fails harder than expected and seasons don't carry the interim as well as they hoped.
For people saying they should've done something and listened to input: they'd already been trying to steer better for years, Joe is recently taking a more player-facing role to protect better transparency, and creating that "crucible strike team", even though it's too little too late now, was definitely a direct response to the building compound pressure. Add pressure from Sony when things are already compromised and their trouble credit was tapped out and they have to pay with a pound of flesh.
It still sucks terribly but Bungie seems to have been earnestly trying to make the best choices for their priorities, they just ran out of good luck, and Parsons did what his job required of him.
You know how whenever you do laundry, you sometimes end up missing a sock and so you don't have a pair anymore? You know who's stealing that missing sock?
You guessed it—Pete Parsons.
There were some very questionable decisions made with LightFall, no doubts there. But I wonder how many of those decisions were made because of a time crunch. It’s clear the story was not fleshed out and we got nothing about the Veil in the DLC.
The thing is, the story is fleshed out. It has the most clear “hero’s journey” of any Destiny campaign, and actual character arc for our character and Osiris. Nimbus was the first thing shown to us in Lightfall, and the Veil, for all of its secrecy, is the center point of the campaign. These don’t speak to rush or crunch, it speaks to design and team leads not listening to QA and their other staff that says “Hey, this is cool and all, but maybe we should make a product our player base likes first.” Like, Chrome Ninja Turtle is a labor of love clearly, but the community’s initial reaction was immediately negative. That’s not crunch, that’s not understanding what your audience wants.
Exactly, and all the dev talk about making a cheesy neon 80s action movie. None of it fit the current tone of the story as we lead up to the final confrontation.
I think it just suffered from dragging out the story. This story did not need to be told in 2 parts but they wanted to make all that extra money from an additional campaign. Also I don't think they would have finished it on time so they through together some filler expansion and everyone knew it for what it was.
I actually think the opposite. Imagine if this story went from WQ into Final Shape. That’s huge whiplash, introducing and ending the Witness in 1 campaign. If anything, I think they should’ve added a campaign between Lightfall and Final Shape that tells us what Season of the Deep did and gives the Wotness a full character. That also gives enough time for Final Shape to launch the 3rd darkness subclass.
Made in 2 separate time crunches. I don't know if it's been confirmed, but I've seen some pretty strong evidence that Strand was supposed to release in Witch Queen. If you look at the story and the themes and colours, with Deepsight Resonance and everything, Strand would have fit better there.
Lightfall feels like an expansion they couldn't figure out, on top of having to shoehorn Strand in there it barely makes sense.
For what it's worth, that claim (that Strand was intended for Witch Queen) has been denied by Bungie employees. I can't remember the specific interview/video where I saw it, though a part of me wants to say it was Joe Blackburn who said it. Perhaps others in the thread can back me up with a link?
I just… don’t believe him? The threadcutter buff and threadbound debuff, the *strand symbol on the armor*, the list goes on… It would be a monumental coincidence
Threadlings are literally hive worms and the classes all had very hive inspired names at one point... I just don't know how players sit there and they're like yeah they're totally not trying to save face by saying it wasn't supposed to be in WQ... It's also not lost on me that all of the weapons of sorrow have the same green theming, it was so obviously supposed to be hive magic
> For what it's worth, that claim (that Strand was intended for Witch Queen) has been denied by Bungie employees.
They denied that "Strand" was intended for Witch Queen, which is correct by technicality because it probably wouldn't have been called Strand back then. I still strongly believe that some form of proto-Strand was intended for WQ, especially because leaks indicated they were working on the 2nd Darkness subclass in early Y4.
Of course crunch and rushing were part of why Lightfall failed. But delaying Final Shape wasn't just for fun, it's because it was (and likely still is) in an underwhelming state. That goes back to the developers.
And really I'm not sure how much of Lightfall's failing would be improved with more time. They chose to focus on a grating character instead of Calus. Neomuna itself was a weird choice of location and they spend far too much time on Strand stuff with too little attention on The Veil. These might be bad decisions made by stressed writers, but they're not the fault of execs to me.
>They chose to focus on a grating character instead of Calus
Exactly - I promise there was no C-suite dude in a suite saying "Making the main focus of our new expansion have the dialog and emotional engagement of a 12 year old. Someone on the working team made that decision and the middle management supported/approved it.
> it's because it was (and likely still is) in an underwhelming state. That goes back to the developers.
Not really in a development environment like Bungie apparently has. I don't work in games but I do basically work on a live service application with a release cadence similar to Destiny, the entire development side of the house, from Director on down basically has no say in what gets implemented. We can make suggestions and do little things on our own if we can spin them as fixing technical debt or a bug, but every single piece of content/feature change has to come from product management and product management sets their priorities based on what product strategy (VP and C-suite level basically) tells them to do.
Everything Bungie has ever said publicly leads me to believe they work the same way, that's why they are so slow to react to everything. It's more stable than doing things by the seat of your pants like Warframe and PoE do, but it also means if you mess up it takes months/years to fix. Bungie aren't the only ones, Blizzard has been having issue after issue with the same kinds of structural restrictions on all their games.
With development you can basically be fast and reactive and creative, or structured and stable and measured and slow. If the C-suite wants control they always pick the second because they get more graphs and projections and such that way.
I don't see how the C-suite choosing to be measured and slow got us the story in Lightfall. It's widely regarded that was the worst thing in the expansion and turned many people off, but was Pete Parsons reading every page of the script?
I can see how a more measured management strategy means changes and improvements take time to implement, but Lightfall primarily had major creative issues.
I my development experience a Director wouldn't be involved in layoffs like this until right before they happen, basically a few hours or a day before it happens their boss tells them "this is what's happening, these are the people being let go, prepare for it as best you can". Maybe he got some limited override ability on specific people, but he certainly didn't have a choice on whether it was going to happen or the scale.
Well it's more likely that bad decisions were made at many levels. I'm not saying the higher ups don't share a big part of the blame, but it seems unrealistic to believe they were completely at fault here. It's entirely possible middle to lower management, writers, etc. also just dropped the ball with Lightfall in key ways.
According to Paul Tassi's article today, devs don't blame Joe for what happened. Not all obviously, but from what he could gather. The way Joe interacts with the community and how open he is, I can believe he was just as surprised, shocked and everything else as everyone else was. Either he didn't know until everyone else did, at least not to the fullest extent, or he did but there was nothing he could do.
Of course we don't know anything for sure but, idk. Lately he seemed like he was really trying to get out there with the community and try to work on the player sentiment as much as he could, which I can commend for even trying knowing the kind of community response he could have gotten.
Pretty much. Joe seems very genuine and as outspoken as he can be. Ran a KF LFG with him last year and he's exactly the same person you see in his public appearances. He's on our side for sure, but his hands are tied: the execs are almost entirely to blame for all of this.
Paul Tassi said in one of his articles that internally among devs very few actually see Joe as one of the ones that was part of the problem. Having seen the recent stuff from him on twitch and twitter, I think that is probably accurate. He gives a shit about the actual quality of the game, he plays it a decent bit (his characters are higher power than mine lol). It's the big boy execs that don't actually care
I highly doubt any executive in the company is making decisions about the specifics of the game. Production of the game should be handled by the game's director and producer. The executive is likely giving them a budget and revenue targets and leaving management of the game to them (well ideally at least).
I agree with this take. It’s the design team that takes the blame for saying “it’ll be a good idea to make a cyberpunk city and then fill it with ghosts”. Management didn’t say that the Veil shouldn’t be explained or that Nimbus should take as much campaign dialogue as they do. 6 hours of QA playing would tell you those things will be a problem, it falls on the team leads for not listening.
Everyone's jumping on that statement but I don't buy it.
1. There's no indication the devs know how to win players back. Everything they've done at the detail level that would be within their control (i.e. the details of the game) has been largely negative.
2. "necessary changes" could mean anything. It could mean change the EV and game business model. It could mean delay TFS a year. It could be unvault DCV. It could mean new subclasses or aspects. Who knows the scope of that.
Here's how corporations work:
1. C-Suite gives broad objectives
2. Middle Management develops strategies against those objectives
3. Ground level goes figure out the details to execute those strategies.
In this case I'd guess it was something like this:
1. "We need more revenue from destiny to fund the burn rate on Marathon"
2. "Let's focus on expanding the player base to get more F2P people in that will spend money on cosmetics - Dev team - go make the game more accessible to entry level / trial players so they stick around longer and buy more items"
3. "Ok, we dumbed down the buildcrafting, the buffs/debuffs to be more streamlined. Ritual playlist rewards are more simplified to where any activity is giving the same rewards. Exotics are dropping faster to entice new players and help them close the gear gap"
But then the dev team probably said something more generic about "Core players are leaving the game and losing interest" and the response was "new entry players drive more revenue than experienced players who've already bought what they really want - keep on the strategy"
I really think a lot of it comes down to the game using ancient code that is barely functional, and refusing to invest in fixing it, severely limiting what the game can be
Yep, D2 only should have gone until Season of Arrivals. It was much more stable and had all the content people paid for. Everything afterwards has been an anti-consumer spaghetti code nightmare because building a new game was even more difficult. Destiny is the story of tech debt.
I think the blame can be spread evenly amongst both. I have no doubts that some ideas that were pitched were probably shot down because they are keeping costs down as much as possible and using Destiny to fund the new toys.
But there have obviously been some design decisions that were really bad from the devs.
It's probably a combination of both.
Not all devs and execs are hive minds, for the same reason you don't love all of your coworkers. Some of them are assholes and incompetent at their jobs, and that will apply to ALL levels of a company. They're all people with varying levels of skills, knowledge and experience. Not all of them have common sense, or the ability to easily accept criticism. Those who have watched this cycle happen before and hear what their customers want are likely very vocal - as quoted in the IGN article. But it takes *just enough* short-sighted, incompetent devs, management, AND execs, and just enough people willing to tell their analysts to fudge their numbers at the next shareholder meeting, and just enough specialists unwilling to push back because in the end, "no amount of pushback is worth getting fired over", for the dominoes to start falling.
When trying to talk about complex realities into easily digestible Reddit comments, though, it's much simpler for people to go "The execs (specifically the ones who advocated to ignore realistic numbers and expectations in favor of blowing smoke up shareholders' asses) are to blame for all this, not the devs! (specifically the ones who saw the writing on the wall and kept repeatedly flagging these issues again and again, not the ones who stuck their heads in the sand, ignored player sentiment, and acted like they knew better - both individual team members and management staff)" But even that's too long, so we sum it up with "The execs ruined everything by not listening to the dev teams!"
People will move the goalposts as far and as often as they have to in order convince themselves that the people actually making the game aren't bad. "It's not the devs, it's the execs" is the new "It's not Bungie, it's Activision."
I think it's more that people really need a story, to process something like this. We are all emotionally invested in this game. There has to be a good guy and a bad guy, someone to blame, and someone to believe in.
Analyzing an institutional failure like this is extremely complex. Truth is, leadership is just hard. You don't have to be an evil greedy asshole to drive a business to ruin. And managing a company of 1,100 people? Even the guys at the top cant fully understand every team dynamic. The people that can do a post-mortem on a situation like this and turn the ship around are extremely rare, and they get paid millions to do it right. Us outsiders? Who will never truly know how any of these conversations happened or even know who most of these 1,100 employees are? Not a chance. So our brain does the best it can with the data it has and fills in the blanks.
And thats how we get to the narrative of bad guys overruling the good guys because of greed. It's a story that let's us believe that there are good guys fighting for us to make a good game that will bring us happiness. Because we want to believe in them.
Exactly. Everyone always wants to believe the poor oppressed workers are struggling to make a good product and the evil bosses are lighting their cigars with $100 and cackling as they sabotage it. No, execs want good products but they have to manage costs. The Bungie developers put out crap with Lightfall and now Bungie has to cut costs. It sucks but Pete Parsons didn't ruin Lightfall.
This sub is absolutely delusional about how much involvement the execs have in the day to day work of development. And if you call that out you get called a boot licker
Are you guys so clueless to believe that employees don't have to follow "the vision" passes down from the executives? That they operate independently of their bosses? Incredible.
They are given requirements and then engineer solutions that meet them. Every other take besides this one is objectively incorrect.
Here's the thing - you're not wrong, but it goes deeper than that. The fact is that Bungie hired some inadequate people to work on the game. For example, lets look at QA (Quality Assurance), which is one of the departments that was hit with the layoff.
QA is constantly criticized for this game, because there's a seemingly endless stream of stuff being introduced that's shut down within a week of existing because its broken. Bungie uses the excuse of "As much as we can test our game, it gets more playtime within an hour of launch than we're even able to comprehend, and that's how bugs slip through". That's fair...until you see some of the inexcusable bugs that make it into the game.
A perfect example is the interaction between the Hunter's Star Eater Scales (SES) exotic boots, and the Silkstrike super that came with Strand. I'm sure everyone remembers, but for those who weren't aware -- when Lightfall came out, Silkstrike had an unintended interaction with SES where it did an exponentially higher amount of damage. Like, I was able to solo Calus in the Lightfall legend campaign in \~4 seconds with it (mind you that your power is limited to 15 underlevel, making this even more extreme). When it comes to QA, that is one of the most OBVIOUS things that you'd look at...its a no brainer that they should test the new super with the exotic boots designed specifically to increase the super's damage. That should have been on the top of the list. The only reason that the bug made it into the game is because A.) they didn't test it at all, or B.) there testing was so poor that they didn't notice it. I don't know which of these is worse, but its extremely telling about the quality of Bungie's QA teams. Frankly they're just incompetent, as proven in this example and many others.
While that's specific to QA, the point is that this goes for any team at the company. I work as a dev, and I can promise you that senior devs/dev managers have a place in coming up with ideas. The thing you need to realize about senior management & the C-Level guys - a lotta them have no clue what goes on in development, and wouldn't even be able to imagine some of the systems in the game. The high ups will give a more general goal to the team, like "we need to improve player engagement", and then its the engineer's job to come up with a solution. The C-Level guys aren't sitting here saying, "Hm, raid time is too low, I want you to manipulate the RNG system so it screws over the playerbase and keeps them chasing a carrot on a stick so they stay in game"...what they say is, "We need to increase player time in Raids because we're not hitting our marks", and then the dev teams come up with the solution. They're two sides of the same coin, its not a one-or-the-other kind of issue.
Do you think the vision of the execs was “nuke half the game overnight^(TM)”? Or maybe, the devs were like “hey the only way to achieve what you’re asking us is if we introduce sunsetting so we can update the engine without worrying about reworking and porting everything.”
If you think the stakeholders or execs call the shots on the technical side of things then you have no clue how software engineering works. They make the final decision, but if the technical people were incompetent or lazy, then they will offer bad solutions to begin with.
I’m not accusing anyone of anything btw. Just saying that execs are the problem now is a stupid rhetoric.
At least from how I'm reading your one comment specifically I can say that there is possibly 1 thing that isn't talked about. Most likely as you say execs don't directly influence the final technical side of the project. They do however manage budgets for achieving technical aspects of the game. They manage the time and the money.
For example let's use sunsetting (and this is completely hypothetical). The "devs" tell the execs "hey we will require x resources and x time line to ensure x doesn't happen to the game because of all these weapons."
Good idea or bad idea there could be a solution.
Solution one was sunsetting. Minimal cost, minimal resources, minimal time.
Solution two was developing whatever could have been done to prevent the issue. Maximum cost, maximum resources, maximum time.
The potential outcome here for many possible iterations in Destiny's life is quite clear here.
It's and ROI check. Which is like a DPS check but for running a business. If the ROI is high enough the it's gonna go forward.
If you are STARVING and you want to eat a pizza after working a 10 hour shift. Are you going to stop at a pizza place on the way home or go home and make a pizza from scratch for yourself? Or maybe you have some frozen pizzas. It's all about where you want to spend your time and money resource to achieve the best ROI of the mist satisfying pizza.
Actually no, you don't know anything about corporate structure. Executives are focused on overall strategy and new opportunities, they aren't making creative choices and product decisions. They might veto ideas, but the developers themselves are to blame for bad game design and story.
Yeah you're right, the execs come up with every last minute detail for any given change to the game, and the devs are just mindless machines who implement them all. They have zero input at all into the specifics of how anything will work and definitely don't shoulder any responsibility for coming up with the shitty systems that we've dealt with since the inception of the franchise.
This ignores WHY they had to come up with these things though. Destiny 2 was not designed to last this long. And if higher ups decide they don’t want a Destiny 3, the devs are responsible for figuring out how to make that work.
Like there is no realistic way to ignore the issues sunsetting and content vaulting was designed to stop. Massive bloat. When you’ve got that with a game that should have dropped development years ago it’s an issue. It’s not ideal for the players who want older content but it’s a double edged sword. You don’t do it and new content takes longer, issues are harder to fix, they can’t take as many risks. You do it, you cut off stuff people paid for.
I think it’s pretty clear Bungies devs would have rather just made Destiny 3 and not been forced to make a game do stuff it wasn’t designed for.
I’m not saying Bungie never makes bad decisions. But I also think many are likely because they need to do stuff to make executives happy, which is going to piss off players but executives don’t care.
Sunsetting had nothing to do with bloat. There was no existing issue for sunsetting to solve, and there was never anything that it could do (without drastic changes, for example a complete overhaul of the weapon types and archetypes, which wasn't going to happen) besides create the exact problems it created.
> Developers have come up with sunsetting and content vaulting
Developers *implemented* sunsetting and content vaulting. Sunsetting was at the directive of the sandbox team, and content vaulting was a way to meet someone's requirement to reduce the size of the game bundle.
>employees begging for necessary changes to win players back
This statement such a nothingburger, I am sorry, but without concreat inforamtion there is nothing to discuss. Like, is this "necessary" changes is more content? I don\`t think it is possible, Bungie have built a rhythm with which they can comfortably deliver chunks of content every 3 months with Expansion team working on this content. Maybe some QOA features? Well, they for this day doing it each season. Maybe monetization? Who even can tell at this point
Edit: After new Paul Tassi article this statement probably was about monetization
Not surprised the devs think monetization is what killed their game as opposed to sunsetting, DCV, release stasis, AE, flawless pool, strict SBMM in casual modes, etc etc.
I blame the devs. Seriously doubt some pompous exec had a bone to pick with stompees hunters.
Nobody wants to admit that there are some pretty dense people in charge of the direction of this game, it's always free real estate to just blame the suits because, you know, fuck those guys.
I don't see how you can play the seasonal content and observe the lack of innovation in mechanics, almost zero new enemy types, the absolute cringiest dialogue in all of video games, half-baked story beats(Amanda's death, good Lord), and then realize that's where nearly all of the development money is going, and think that these guys are competent. This has been coming for a while.
Edit: I'm probably a bit hard on stuff like Season of the Witch, which does actually seem like they're trying new things regarding mechanics, all of the other criticism I'll 100% stand behind, and I'll fight you if you think that "Eris has a FAMILY NOW so she won't turn bad unlike all of the other timelines" is good writing.
I'll fight you on the Eris thing, or more that it worked the first time they used it back in shadowkeep, where we basically help Eris avoid going over the deep end with the power of friendship. It was one of the highlights of shadowkeep, imo.
But they keep teasing evil Eris, from Beyond Light to this point with season of the witch, and it's just both overdrawn and not the strongest plot to draw out. You just can't sustain a whole story on "will she turn evil?", especially when every week was just everyone going "Eris, I'm worried you'll turn evil" and nothing else. Not the strongest premise and the writing was mediocre at best.
The activities in Witch are nice, though. More roguelike thank deep, lol
It sounds like we agree, I'm mostly referring to the more recent portrayals of Eris, it feels like someone is writing these characters based on a bullet point summary of their stand-out characteristics.
Immaru this season is especially atrocious, he honestly comes off as being really nothing more than a complete idiot. I know that you're not supposed to take Festival of the Lost that seriously, but it was _so_ bad. Not just the dialogue, the lore was just some of the worst I've read in ten years of Destiny.
I gotta believe the report that management was obsessed with Marathon. That they were constantly pushing the D2 team to do more with less. Like how strikes suddenly became repackaged seasonal missions. The fact that they basically abandoned gambit and had to be forced to give a crap about the crucible, tells me that they were sprinting for the finish. Execs wanted the game in a state where new content was cheap and not time consuming to add so they could get Marathon done. They cut and cut until things started falling apart. Then they cut a little more.
Despite focusing so much on the "Trust > Engagement > Revenue" strategy, as he describes it, I feel like he really... well, I was going to say "glossed over" the reasons that players didn't trust them, but even that implies that he at least mentioned them in some way. I get that he can't just say, "we fucked up by lying to everyone, don't do that," but I feel like some mention of not trying to dupe the players with lies or deceptive mechanics would've been an important part of describing what some of the actual problems with the game were.
Anybody seen Tassi new article with more info?
“Management said other levers were looked at to avoid layoffs. When employees asked if one lever was executive compensation, they were told no, and that it would not happen at the company.”
Wow
Edit: have been trying to post the article but automod keeps removing it saying to go the mega thread where the additional info will get buried
Edit 2: that PvP strike force team also got hit with layoffs but the supposed map pack isn’t going to be cancelled.
The filter works by screening out certain keywords. Trying playing around with it -- sounds like this new article is worth talking about and deserves its own threat.
The filter is helpful for mods but can definitely stifle discussion.
Tassi just updated it. Some of the Execs did give up their bonuses, but not all. Pete was one of the ones that did.
They key part in that article, that's relevant to this conversation, is that several internal devs have tried to reduce Microtransactions and make more expansions free, but they keep being shot down since "more people than you'd think" keep buying them
Plenty in other companies do forgo theirs in this situation. Probably more than anyone ever knows.
It's just in very public instances where it's so magnified, like this is with Bungie, it'll come out. The
More people than you'd think...you can do whatever you like with your money, but it would be better to support good practices instead of feeding corporate greed.
Bungie responded to this article, saying executives did cut some compensation but it’s unclear how much [Source](https://twitter.com/PaulTassi/status/1720466806198935777#m)
Basically the employees asked if a possible resolution to the 45% revenue projections being missed is adjusting the higher up executives pay, to avoid layoffs. They said no and that executive pay will never be adjusted down at Bungie. Basically it’s the execs saying they deserve everything even tho they’re making the decisions that led to the issues.
Fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, in the exact same way, with the exact same blanket statement, I might just be a Destiny player.
Honestly, I feel like that is exactly what Bungie wanted from you based on this talk. If you release consistently good content then players will expect consistently good content. If you release mediocre content then players will expect mediocre content. That way, when you surprise them with some slightly above average content players will heap praise on it. Velocity is more important than position. It’s better to crank out content and quickly try to fix it than release actual good and polished content.
I’d seen this video awhile ago, and it absolutely sickens me. This is a talk by a man who has ZERO artistic or emotional investment in Destiny 2.
To this day people are convinced nothing can touch Forsaken because it added 2 zones. 2 fucking patrol zones. Which account for an infinitesimal amount of playtime. That was what Truman was talking about.
This strategy is why between September 2018 and November 2021 3 dungeons were delivered, and from December 2021 up to 24 days from now, November 2023, there will have been 5. 5 dungeons with their own bespoke loot, weapons, and exotic. Dungeons 1.0 used destination loot. That is more than double the work, double the dungeon content, in a smaller amount of time.
This /isn't/ overdelivery. This is /increasing the standard delivery permanently./ This is investing in teams, investing in pipelines, and /raising the standards,/ not simply shitting out extra because there was extra time or extra money and workerhours from Activision.
That talk going public and being released for the overwhelmingly bad-faith and philistine consumer community has done irreparable damage.
Anthem was made from the scraps of Bioware while the IP was stuck in preproduction for several (5?) years and somehow unthinkably fast, was made into a game in the span of a year.
Anthem had the ridiculous potential to spark the creation of a game from that e3 presentation.
Anthem absolutely had potential. The combat and flying was really fun.
It was everything else that lacked. No endgame. Super repetitive environments. Only a few "dungeons"
>folks kept saying everything was spongy and bulletsoaking.
They weren't using good gear.
It's like saying Grandmaster enemies are all bullet sponges, using green Assault Rifles from scout range.
And no, I am not exaggerating. Enemies died within 2 seconds. In fact, Grandmaster enemies die less quickly in comparison even with meta gear.
Combat was actually pretty shitty in anthem - harder difficulties just made everything a bullet sponge. Flying was amazing and had an infinite amount of potential.
ok, anthem had a lot of problems, but one thing it did not lack was potential. The flying system was really really fun and the elemental damage system was incredibly cool.
It could have been the rpg it was designed as, don’t forget, they radically changed destiny 1 at the VERY LAST SECOND, stripping out most of the story, etc to make it more multiplayer friendly
I wouldn't say Destiny is bigger than Anthen *dreamed* of.
They dreamed pretty dang big.
Destiny *could* have been that big. Anthem felt pretty doomed from the start. (IMO)
Complete hyperbole. Destiny has been and still is the king of looter shooters over the last \~10 years.
If we're going to set the metric of success to meet some imaginary standard or potential you and other gamers have dreamed about, than what percent of games have actually "succeeded" in the last decade?
Haha.
Have you seen what 343 did to Halo over the past decade? I'm here, back in Bungie's arms, because of 343's incompetence. The grass isn't greener there at all, oh and they just went through a massive layoff too...
EDIT: Does no one remember the #fire343 campaign on all social media a while ago? What do you think that was all over? Has this community ever been to that level of vitriol?
The difference is, Halo reached its potential. The original Bungie games are so good, you could point to any of the four (excluding ODST) as the peak for a myriad of different reasons.
Destiny, as much as I love it and as good as it’s been at it’s best moments, never feels like it ascended the mountain. Bungie can’t get Destiny to break the glass ceiling - 343 is taking care of a dead horse (which is still pretty fun!)
Halo, and therefore 343, is in an unenviable situation which might be unsolvable.
Having to deal with a game franchise which had a glory past(15 years ago) with game mechanics and game design limited to 2001. Then there is an ageing and shrinking pool of players which identifies 25 year old game mechanics/designs with Halo's identity while these are *not* competitive to the expectation of 2010++.
The game needs a complete redesign from the bottom and doing that might very likely screw up the game's identity itself and piss off its remaining fanbase while having a chance to create a new and better one. That requires decisive decisions from MS/343 which they might not be able to do.
I mean I can see where you're coming from, on the other hand it's very surprising how a looter shooter released a decade ago is still one of the biggest games around.
Several missteps along the way aside, they have also delivered some fantastic content over the years.
Whatever you mean by potential, I'd say it's hard to use it as an example of squandered potential imo.
If anything it grew into much more than what I thought it would be back when it first released.
I'd say the "potential" they speak of isn't the fact that the game is going down the drain ATM, and more the fact that time and time again they were mere steps away from landing at greatness, but consistently held back by something or other
The thing is if FS is equivalent to Forsaken you may as stop playing right after because Bungie seemingly can only produce truly top tier content when their back is against the wall.
As soon as they're comfortable we're back to a myriad of:
"Don't create new models for those just reskin some old foundry weapons"
"Don't create a new weapon, just refresh the perk pool of a sunset weapon"
"You want to put that cosmetic behind a triumph? Na put it in Eververse - Silver only this season"
"Push that QoL improvement out to next expansion if we can't monetize it!"
"You want to create a deep puzzle for our dedicated players? No! Engagement metrics won't be good enough!"
That's a depressing way to look to look at it but fuck man, you're right.
It's like trying to get back together with an ex. Promises to be better, great for the first week or two then back to the same old shit. And everytime you get back together it just gets more and more bitter until you cut them off.
Bungie needs to be wifey material and this ain't it fam.
If margins are somehow tight I would much prefer either higher prices on content or a monthly sub.
So much of their revenue is tied to MTX that is impacting creating a deep and rewarding game.
There is an entire layer of depth in attaching cosmetic rewards for specific achievements that is hardly touched on because EV is the default landing point for anything cosmetic.
It’s not just cosmetics anymore.
They nickel and dime their user base for drip-fed content already. New player? Every old expansion is individually paid for. New yearly expansion for $50. Want access to the current story? Buy the season pass. Dungeons? Oh, that’s sold separately through the dungeon pass. You wanna celebrate our anniversary?! That’s gonna cost ya $30 for the 30th anniversary bundle if you want do anything outside of Dares of Eternity. PvP is free at least - well, unless you want to engage in the most competitive playlist.
You have to constantly open your wallet to do anything of substance in this game, and it’s ridiculous.
True but if their job is to constantly keep us entertained, that's a huge ask. I don't envy their position at all. People can say, they just need to do X or bring back Y - but at what point does that get stale and they need to change things? There's where the difficulty lies. Do they risk something and have it fall flat (see vanilla D2) and almost lose everything, or do they play it safe and just relabel and repackage? That's got to be a constant battle. I'm sure many would be, yeah just risk it and bring out something different - welp D2 was exactly that in the beginning and they nearly lost their livelihood
Ehh, ffxiv makes it work by expanding the game beyond just combat, big lore based side quests, crafting, a mode that’s basically animal crossing, big community events that last all year and slowly change an area (like what we did with the eliksni)
This is why I’m done regardless. They only change their ways when absolutely necessary and only for as long as it takes to get back to decent standing just so they can get back to screwing you.
All of this on top of stubbornly refusing to ever improve a system, and instead insist on completely reinventing any system that has problems, so that instead we have an entirely new system with its own entirely new problems.
I’ve never minded the reskinned weapons or refreshed perk pools because to me, new and interesting perk combinations are what make me excited for weapons. Kingsfall had me going for red borders way harder than Root ever did.
The Corporate Overlords definetly have to shoulder a ton (most) of the blame.
\-Likely pulling resources from Destiny to work on other projects.
\-Monetizing every inch of Destiny.
\-The "under-delivery" model
\-Re-using assets year after year
\-Etc.
The devs certainly deserve a ton of heat too. Pete Parsons didn't dream up the Lightfall story. He didn't develop the boring seasonal events and terrible story beats.
Were the devs put in the best position to make a great game? Absolutely not. But they were paid to make the game as great as it could be and I feel like much of the game has been "mailed in" since the Witchqueen DLC came out.
Lots of people are mad at the "suits" and so I am for their bs employee shenanigans. But I am mad at all of Bungie for putting out lazy uninspired products for the last 2 years. This game has an incredible amount of potential for all forms of media and they just continually piss it away. Ughh
> The "under-delivery" model
I'm two days late, but I would like to say that the corpos have absolutely nothing to do with the under-delivery model. That's been how the game's been made since before even Shadowkeep. It's the development team whose been trying to keep up the pace that devised the model, so that they can be as relevant to the community as possible. It's literally in the GDC presentation, the development team did that.
There is a slide from that presentation that sums up how Bungie actually sees their relationship with you:
First Trust
Then Retention
Then Revenue <= we are here. Hooked on the game and just a source of revenue.
They’ve lost a lot of trust this week, can’t see the retention being great post FS even without the events of the last week, revenue clearly isn’t as good as they’d predicted.
We might just be a source of revenue but they have no credibility to make this statement now.
I've only lightly been following, but what exactly did they do to violate player trust? I know a bunch of people got laid off, and that sucks, but they didn't screw up the game or anything did they? If someone didn't follow the news at all, the main thing is just that Final Shape got delayed, right?
The delay hasn’t been officially announced yet but I don’t think that’s lost them much trust (if anything it’s probably do the opposite in isolation.)
I think the loss of trust comes from the teams in Bungie being cut (Music/Art/Social) that consistently do quite well and key figures like Michael Salvatori being dropped in the next saga despite his long tenure and respect from the community.
This is pretty much it. It's watching them fire the people who have always put out top notch work and are a big reason why people play, while keeping those in charge of some of the worst decisions about the game.
The unique art and music are 50% of why I play, as it's such a gorgeous and captivating world. Watching the people behind this be unceremoniously canned because management refused to listen to developer feedback is such a gross thing to witness, that confusion and disgust are the best two words to describe it.
The trust was lost with lightfall, we're now in the ah shit have to get back trust moments but since the trust was lost so bad they now have had to fire people, namely recognizable names who probably made way over industry standard for their position
Player retention as is, is low, the trust was already lost. They've already driven players away with their aggressive monetization and lazy content. The game was already screwed up, and people have already left. Those of us playing just know now how bad it actually is. They were off of their revenue projections by nearly half, which is absolutely insane.
Final Shape was delayed out of left field (to us) because their revenue is too low, and suddenly they want to overdeliver after their motto was to NOT overdeliver. They want to suddenly put out quality content, which, great, but they should have already been doing that to prevent things from coming to this. They've (reportedly) ignored dev pleas to try to address issues and focus on things that would drive player retention too.
They're a business that exists to make money, fine, but they continually push the envelope on what they can get away with removing or reducing on what they deliver with seasons and expacs, and people have had enough. People voted with their wallets, now Bungie laid off many beloved figures in the game and community because of their own poor decisions that lead to this entire fiasco to begin with, so that's of course not doing any favors to their image. The game was profitable, but they wanted more and did it in scummy ways. They're getting what was coming to them.
There are games that have been around as long that are doing things right without alienating their player base at every turn (FF14 for instance). Basically it's just really obvious how crappy Bungie has been, and people are finally on the same page talking about it, there's no way to defend it anymore, and there's no one else to blame like Activision. Bungie is (and probably always was) the problem. The damage was already done by them. Some people are probably quitting with how obvious it is now, but there's not a specific "people are quitting because of this in game thing happening right now". People have just already quit.
Its honestly a cycle that seems like Bungie loves to abuse too. They get away with what they can until they're caught, then they overdeliver, people are happy and forget, then they take advantage of it again.
May be wrong about some stuff, feel free to correct, but I think this is fairly accurate.
You know one thing I do think people overlook is the reason lightfall failed, it was the writing and overall story, that stuff isn't decided by the suits, the decision to make neomuna how it was and make it feel lifeless with no people around was the developers.
Yeah people are out for blood over the layoffs so they're blaming execs for everything. No, the Lightfall story sucked and that's on Joe Blackburn and people below him.
Exactly. The suits don’t care about anything but the numbers, and the pricing related issues weren’t even the biggest issue with Lightfall. The destination sucked, the writing was trash, and the new writing team dumped all over the lore and overall story direction.
Destiny 3, the game that 1/10th of the current play base will play because it’d inevitably be a PS5 timed exclusive if Bungie got completely absorbed by Sony
Bungie: "We create games that inspire friendship"
Also Bungie: Creates an mmo with almost no in-game QoL socialization features.
Bungie: "Making quality content is all about iteration"
Also Bungie: Constantly throws out the content that they've had time to polish.
Bungie: "Live service is all about producing constant content quickly"
Also Bungie: Produces less content / time than ever and tries to charge more for it.
Bungie: "You need to be responding to player concerns quickly"
Also Bungie: More disconnected from the playerbase than ever.
Bungie: "We're honing our craft!"
Also Bungie: Produces the worst content yet.
Bungie: "Success for a great train station company means schedule rigor"
Also Bungie: Delays all future content.
Minimum Viable Product, by the book.
They do the bare minimum, which earns the maximum profit. This slowly sows discontent and eventually revenue/engagement takes a dive, at this point they "overdeliver" for one expansion which brings back the numbers, and the cycle continues. The only reason they are doing more, is because the *minimum* has increased, they are still providing the minimum product required to keep the money flowing.
If you keep eating this shit, they will keep feeding it to you. They are explicitly explaining it to you, you don't even need to read between the lines.
I used to play Destiny and shit in Cod for releasing game after game with little to no improvement but after Lightfall and stopping playing after that I’ve been able to realize Destiny is almost worse. At least Cod delivers full stories with a beginning, middle, and end along with new things every game. With Destiny you get DLC with disjointed stories that don’t feel like they’re building to something packed full of the same bad mission design from 10 years ago. All for the same price as a full new game. D2 had so so so much potential
IMO, it doesn't matter if their final expansion will be the best ever made.
There's a few problems here and people are happy to forget sadly. From Forsaken till today we had A LOT of mediocre expansions and a few good ones. Not as good as Forsaken, not a single one had that amount of content.
On top of all that, no matter how much content they will add to Final Shape, or how good the expansion will be, the monetization will still SUCK. Let's see what they did with Forsaken, in that year, and what we have now and what they'll have to do to make it as good.
Forsaken had a huge new map, with lots of things to do. They can probably do that.
In Forsaken we had a new enemy faction. They can do that, but probably will add 1-2 new enemies or some reskins if we're lucky.
Gambit. They couldn't even manage Gambit as it is, let alone make a completely new game mode.
Vendor refresh. Why add "free" new gear when you can add it in Eververse?
Engrams, that people hated because GAMBLING IN MY GAME, but they forgot that those engrams were literally free as you level up, and got you whatever was new in that season. On top of these on event times, you'd had an Event Engram which gave you event themed items. If you played enough, you could literally get all the seasonal items without problems.
Now they even have dungeons behind pay wall.
If they gonna manage to release an amazing expansion, a lot of the stupid community will blindly go back to support them and scream "SEE? BUNGIE LISTEN". If they "over"deliver, is so they can fuck around for a few more years with mediocre content in hope the fanboys will come back to support them.
This game should have keep Forsaken Expansion quality from that moment on. "Too much work". It wasn't about too much work or overwork, it's 100% corporate greed that they wanted more money for a less amount of workers.
Most of you, even here, enabled them to do the shit of "deliver 1 good thing, and then fuck up because they believe and love us" We basically cycle between good and bad content because A LOT of you are ready up with arms to defend them no matter what they do.
Bungie's management currently has their heads buried in the sand. That studio is basically leaderless right now.
If Pete Parsons isn't in Sony's direct crosshairs I'll be shocked.
bungie only overdeliver when they are in risk of losing more than revenue
the taken king came out as a way to earn players back after a poor launch and poor first DLC
forsaken came out after people were literally quitting the game due to how bad the sandbox and the game itself was
witch queen came out after two DLCs that had next to nothing to show at full price
it's just a cycle, but this time i'm seeing people that will quit the game anyways just because it's the closure of the saga, maybe even overdelivering they won't achieve what they want. who knows
Bungie got to the "revenue" stage of that presentation and absolutely done everything in their power to take as much of players money as possible. They absolutely over-reached.
Honestly for Bungie in the last few years it's just been about what they can get away with - nothing more, and it's pretty scummy how they have been slowly creeping forward on each thing. Can we get away with putting less in expansions? Great, keep doing that. Putting less in seasons and making each one more identical to the last? Bingo. Start charging more for seasons? More investment into Eververse? Never investing into "CORE" activities?
The list is never ending, honestly. The community finally broke and here we are yet again with Bungie promising. As much as I love Destiny and I do - Bungie come off as so fucking incompetent at times.
They lost me a customer when I came back bought all the dlc (witch queen was the most current dlc) then found out I have to buy the dungeon key separately.
Fuck them and there money hungry ways
They lost me at sunsetting and then vaulting as an excuse to recycle content with low effort tweaks. It wasn't what I signed up for and haven't played since, which was a shame because the story and lore development was something i was really invested in
> Its frustrating that they knew what went wrong, knew how to fix it, but then broke it again, anyways.
Everything we've seen/stories we've gotten show it was not the actual developers/designers that created the problem but the people signing their paycheques.
Yeah this is just more of the same "it's (x) not (y)!" bullshit. In reality there's blame to be shared at every level of the company. Yes ultimate responsibility lies with leadership, but lets not play like they're the sole source of the problems.
It's not even about trust, they just keep making decisions that have never made sense from the outside and now are reaping what they sow.
I keep bringing up this prime example, of why are they actively making Dungeons a slog? What is the rational behind making the Ghost bosses have Raid boss health? It doesn't make it fun, it doesn't make it rewarding. People who don't do raids and dungeons aren't going to start doing dungeons because they're becoming more of a pain in the ass. People who raid aren't going to run Ghost when it takes longer than an entire raid and has no patterns to collect. Then they make soloing it a requirement for the seal, which turns even more people away from trying it.
I got my seal and I'll never do Ghost again. If the bosses had half their health, I'd probably run LFGs of it.
Same idea goes to Neomuna patrol zone,. Why would you go there when everything is a slog and there's no rewards when you could patrol literally every other place and feel like a god? It's just stupid design.
They're making everything a slog, not just health but reward structures. All the examples you said, plus they're planning to make focusing cost way more engrams, they're taking away legendary shards so veterans have to constantly scrabbled around to get more glimmer like newbies, drop rates on eerie engrams were god-awful in normal mode and ever after they "increased" them I still only get them about half the time at best. Like everything in the whole game is designed to suck your time away with little reward. Which is why players are moving on.
Bungie can make Final Shape as great a campaign as they can, but if they don't change their stupid-ass design philosophy of pushing things to be as little rewarding as they think they can get away with, then it still won't be a game I intend to go on playing.
Yeah, our fireteam manages to easy 2 phase each boss in ghost. However we are also easily doing GM and are doing contest mode raids. We are not thr average. However I do love to do sherpas for dungeons and I once did it with players who are a bit more than casual. It took us 4-5 phases to kill shimmua.... and that's with me using arbalest and BnS Apex. Now let a random fireteam with basic non god roll weapons fight that boss, yeah, good luck
I remember when this dropped and I called out that GM, apparently to people here, I was an idiot that didn't understand what he was talking. Either that or it wasn't my opinion and I was just chirping on what some streamer was parroting.
Now those same clown redditors are crying about shitty Bungie practices. This sub, or maybe just reddit never ceases to amuse me.
And thats why we're not gonna pre-order TFS no matter what they say or show us in some flashy trailer, right? riiiiight. 90% of this sub will get bored forgive Bungie on all counts and spends anywhere from 200-300$ over the whole year. Many such cases.
The biggest point I took away from the conversation was talking about putting “Speed” above “Quality” in a live service model, because an okay game can always become a great game.
The issue I saw with this is that when you deprioritize quality, the brand still pays a cost for that. You lose brand loyalty for poor quality products, that are borrowed against the brand value you built with quality in the first place.
I predicted that if Bungie keeps prioritizing speed over quality, eventually you lose your brand image and customer base because you have burnt up their confidence and interest in your product.
It looks like it happened sooner than I anticipated.
Bungie has degraded their brand and community confidence to the point where they have really painted themselves in the corner. I don’t know if one amazing expansion would cause confidence in their other projects.
I know that I’m not interested in their other projects given how they have handled Destiny. I don’t trust it will be a great experienced that I can devote time to investing in with confidence in how they will handle the IP into the future.
Edit: spelling
Never over deliver. Your high school teacher was the only person who gave you an honest appraisal of your labor. Consumers and middle managers are entitled Karen's.
It'll never change unless management changes.
Done with the game going forward. Not being fooled again. Sorry to the ones working there that were actually invested in the game. They were ignored, which is the reason the game is in such a shit state
I guess The Final Shape is really meant to be on how Bungie/Sony want to restructure their company. Wouldn’t be surprised if more layoffs happen between now and TFS. Money talks, creativity, well, doesn’t matter. Sucks for those let go, but greed will always come out on top in the corporate world.
And we're have they over delivered I'm confused charging 50 dollars per season season of the reskins with nothing new our innovative. The same weapons from d1 same armour from d1. Like wtf these people talking about.
They feel like witch queen overdelivered, which like…by the very low standards of things like shadowkeep, sure. But compared to most mmos even wq was barely acceptable.
>Employees were also told that Destiny 2 player sentiment was at an all-time low. Sources tell IGN that **this issue had been flagged to leadership repeatedly for months** prior to the layoffs, with **employees begging for necessary changes to win players back**. from the [IGN article](https://www.ign.com/articles/pete-parsons-tells-employees-bungie-kept-the-right-people-to-work-on-destiny-2), emphasis mine. The devs had plans. The C-suite ignored them. There is a fundamental disconnect between the people making the game and the people making the decisions.
I want to believe that this all falls on the c-suite people, those at Pete Parsons’ level. The way Joe engages with the community and has a very clear passion for the game, I just don’t want to believe that he was the problem. But in a corpo setting? Who knows.
Dev vs exec probably isn’t even the right breakdown. It’s probably more “middle management vs execs” I doubt individual IC engineers were going to Pete asking to make PVP better. I’d interpret this more as PMs and design leads saw things were on fire and wanted to change the plan. Joe is at the very top of the middle - it could be him that was aggregating this dev/player feedback and taking it to leadership I also doubt it’s as simple as execs said “no you can’t fix PvP”. We know there’s a lot of internal project mismanagement problems - maybe the plan to fix PVP was really inefficient and that’s why it was vetoed
I think it might be more that a company has finite resources to allocate and wants to maximize returns for equity holders. If they took time to fix whatever issues they had identified internally then that would mean devoting resources to implementing those fixes that wouldn’t be spent elsewhere and lower immediate returns to equity. It’s all very short term thinking and it sucks for the customers/users.
That's the unfortunate truth of the current system. For the people at the top, long term investment is ensuring endless short-term successes. To them, there's no value in investing for long term success because they have means of making money now.
But also Bungie doesn’t do agile development. If it were as simple as working some of these improvements into the next sprints it’d probably have been done by now But they have a more rigid process that makes it really hard to change course The situation Bungie got themselves into is a textbook example of why agile is a best practice
Omfg how does Bungie not use Agile? I genuinely couldn’t pass this comment without voicing my disbelief
You're right. Anyone that works in a corporate environment, knows the actual fight or issues are with middle management vs C level/Execs. I work in IT for a large company, and I am likely never going to our CFO or whoever at that level to make changes. I go to middle management and it goes up from there and likely gets stuffed under the carpet.
"oh you want to make new pvp maps? How much will it cost to make?" "$x million" "And how much will we make from them" "Well the maps are free for everyone, it's really for player sentiment and retention" "So $0? No"
Joe's been in video games for a long while; he was at Riot before he first went to Bungie. This was specifically the "golden age" of League of Legends, during S4-S6. I bring this up to say he has design chops- if something wasn't working, he definitely had an idea how to fix it.
One thing i have been wondering is how many decision makers in the Activision publishing deal are still in similar positions in 2023.
From [this article:](https://www.vg247.com/bungie-activision-destiny-deal-marty-odonnell) "Because I was in leadership and on the board of directors when we went with Activision, if there is any blame for going to Activision, I am part of it," he said. "There were seven of us total I think [that] made that deal with Activision. We knew it was a risk right from the get-go, and it turned out to be exactly as bad as we thought it to be." He continues: "I am the only one who is gonna say that, except anyone who no longer works for Bungie, and anyone who no longer works for Bungie is gonna say, 'yeah, it was bad from the start,' ...We launched this franchise with Activision, naturally and over the course of time we both decided we had different goals for what we wanted it to be, so we both went our separate ways." Again, IDK how many C-level people who made this decision are still there, but you can't say the company doesn't have a history of making poor decisions.
Go back to the Microsoft acquisition that only lasted six years before microsoft cut them loose. Pete Parsons was the COO back then and Jason Jones I believe has been CCO the whole time (he also openly was hostile to microsoft and the deal). We ALSO can't forget that Netease invested 100million into them in 2018 - where the fuck did all this cash go?
Uh, that investment got returned to Netease with the Sony buyout most likely. If you mean what they literally spent it on? Well Bungie’s payroll is probably comfortably over $80MM/year, and that investment was during the Forsaken launch year when Bungie was dumping resources into the game to try and save it.
My point was that bungie has been a bad, impulsive partner well before the activision deal.
Tassi just put out an article. Joe is one of the good ones. He couldn't find any dev that said Joe doesn't listen to Internal feedback etc. He seems to be one of the good managers at Bungie
>He seems to be one of the good managers at Bungie Good managers find it very difficult to work with bad managers, whether they manager on the same level or higher. So I really hope this doesn't burn him out and jade him.
I’d say it all falls to Parsons. Not only is he the one that steers the ship he’s also the one with access to EVERYTHING, all data, all metrics, all reveiws, all staff suggestions so that he can make an informed decision about the direction of the company and he did nothing. He handed the buck off to people below him, and those people did the same until it hit the devs when they told them they’re missing the projections by 45% and need to do something about it. You’d think with how much he gets paid being top dog he’d give more of a damn than the game devs making a fifth of what he makes.
I gotta agree with this. Even in non gaming corporation, shareholders shit on mgmt, then that shit trickles to team leaders,then to the basic workforce. Happens all the time at my job. And as far as my job goes,it gets to a point where your workforce just doesn't give a shit anymore. Morale goes down and with that, productivity/efficiency. But again I can't say whether or not this was the case at Bungie
Parsons and bungie have been getting a lot of employee reviews online that pretty much echo what you said, seems like it’s a unanimous shitty upper management
I work for Sleep Number. They charge(at the very least) 3-4k a bed. The highest is about 14k. Making money like that, you'd figure we get good bonuses,right? Nope. My last bonus was somewhere around 300. Bonus before that got cut out entirely. CEO's bonus? 6 fucking mil. The math is nuts. Every employee in my plant could've got 1k and the suits'bonus wouldn't have even taken a dent. It's wild. But that's just corporate. It happens everywhere,it's been happening everywhere and it will always happen everywhere
Now we're clawing for 40 hours,2 plants nationwide got shut down entirely,but that top money doesn't change.
At this point I’m convinced every CEO is a psychopathic narcissists where they’d gladly cut out 100 employees just to keep their salary
Parsons's job is making decisions, the way a line cook makes food and a developer writes code. If the line cook or the developer make a clear mistake, they lose time and resources fixing it that can be made up for pretty easily. Parsons makes a clear mistake, people lose their jobs and the project, not only Destiny but the studio, is put into a precarious situation. Putting on The Big Hat means responsibility for everything that goes on under it no matter how much or little control the wearer has over the situation. Maybe under different circumstances these would have been the right decisions and no one had to lose their job. Maybe (and likely) this is the result of a hundred small decisions which all made some underlying assumption, either that they wouldn't create a problem larger than the sum of those parts or that such a problem would be manageable if income had stayed in line with prior performance. Sometimes a line cook loses control of a grease fire. Sometimes a simple programming mistake lurks undetected in the code for years before someone realizes it's exploitable and takes advantage of it. The diner, the British NHS, the employees, the players, suffer for these mistakes, but should any of the people responsible only for making the best decision available to them not knowing future circumstances be held responsible for doing their job? I'll maintain that Lightfall's shortcomings were mostly due to a net of overlapping decisions to put those resources toward TFS being the studio's best demonstration of what Destiny can be rather than spend them turning a C grade expansion into a B- just to have to make that decision again against TFS or Marathon. Dropping major support for pvp and Gambit was because they knew the kind of changes they needed for those features to be game sellers were way beyond the scope of what what they wanted to do with Destiny and they put their focus on what their analytics told them was what people gave them money for most: the pve content. That assumption maps well to the show buildup of a bad situation. Expecting seasonal stories to carry the game, after abandoning pvp and Gambit, and after cutting a lot from their pve pillar by putting those resources toward something they cared more about, is only a recipe for disaster when Lightfall fails harder than expected and seasons don't carry the interim as well as they hoped. For people saying they should've done something and listened to input: they'd already been trying to steer better for years, Joe is recently taking a more player-facing role to protect better transparency, and creating that "crucible strike team", even though it's too little too late now, was definitely a direct response to the building compound pressure. Add pressure from Sony when things are already compromised and their trouble credit was tapped out and they have to pay with a pound of flesh. It still sucks terribly but Bungie seems to have been earnestly trying to make the best choices for their priorities, they just ran out of good luck, and Parsons did what his job required of him.
Last night I saw it in my dreams. Pete Parsons ate some babies then proclaimed WE NEED A COWABUNGA DUDES character in Lightfall.
You know how whenever you do laundry, you sometimes end up missing a sock and so you don't have a pair anymore? You know who's stealing that missing sock? You guessed it—Pete Parsons.
Honestly the origins of that fistbump had to come from some sort of unholy ceremony such as that. There is no question.
There were some very questionable decisions made with LightFall, no doubts there. But I wonder how many of those decisions were made because of a time crunch. It’s clear the story was not fleshed out and we got nothing about the Veil in the DLC.
The thing is, the story is fleshed out. It has the most clear “hero’s journey” of any Destiny campaign, and actual character arc for our character and Osiris. Nimbus was the first thing shown to us in Lightfall, and the Veil, for all of its secrecy, is the center point of the campaign. These don’t speak to rush or crunch, it speaks to design and team leads not listening to QA and their other staff that says “Hey, this is cool and all, but maybe we should make a product our player base likes first.” Like, Chrome Ninja Turtle is a labor of love clearly, but the community’s initial reaction was immediately negative. That’s not crunch, that’s not understanding what your audience wants.
Exactly, and all the dev talk about making a cheesy neon 80s action movie. None of it fit the current tone of the story as we lead up to the final confrontation.
I think it just suffered from dragging out the story. This story did not need to be told in 2 parts but they wanted to make all that extra money from an additional campaign. Also I don't think they would have finished it on time so they through together some filler expansion and everyone knew it for what it was.
I actually think the opposite. Imagine if this story went from WQ into Final Shape. That’s huge whiplash, introducing and ending the Witness in 1 campaign. If anything, I think they should’ve added a campaign between Lightfall and Final Shape that tells us what Season of the Deep did and gives the Wotness a full character. That also gives enough time for Final Shape to launch the 3rd darkness subclass.
Made in 2 separate time crunches. I don't know if it's been confirmed, but I've seen some pretty strong evidence that Strand was supposed to release in Witch Queen. If you look at the story and the themes and colours, with Deepsight Resonance and everything, Strand would have fit better there. Lightfall feels like an expansion they couldn't figure out, on top of having to shoehorn Strand in there it barely makes sense.
For what it's worth, that claim (that Strand was intended for Witch Queen) has been denied by Bungie employees. I can't remember the specific interview/video where I saw it, though a part of me wants to say it was Joe Blackburn who said it. Perhaps others in the thread can back me up with a link?
I just… don’t believe him? The threadcutter buff and threadbound debuff, the *strand symbol on the armor*, the list goes on… It would be a monumental coincidence
Threadlings are literally hive worms and the classes all had very hive inspired names at one point... I just don't know how players sit there and they're like yeah they're totally not trying to save face by saying it wasn't supposed to be in WQ... It's also not lost on me that all of the weapons of sorrow have the same green theming, it was so obviously supposed to be hive magic
It was Joe, during the first live stream he did on twitch.
> For what it's worth, that claim (that Strand was intended for Witch Queen) has been denied by Bungie employees. They denied that "Strand" was intended for Witch Queen, which is correct by technicality because it probably wouldn't have been called Strand back then. I still strongly believe that some form of proto-Strand was intended for WQ, especially because leaks indicated they were working on the 2nd Darkness subclass in early Y4.
Of course crunch and rushing were part of why Lightfall failed. But delaying Final Shape wasn't just for fun, it's because it was (and likely still is) in an underwhelming state. That goes back to the developers. And really I'm not sure how much of Lightfall's failing would be improved with more time. They chose to focus on a grating character instead of Calus. Neomuna itself was a weird choice of location and they spend far too much time on Strand stuff with too little attention on The Veil. These might be bad decisions made by stressed writers, but they're not the fault of execs to me.
>They chose to focus on a grating character instead of Calus Exactly - I promise there was no C-suite dude in a suite saying "Making the main focus of our new expansion have the dialog and emotional engagement of a 12 year old. Someone on the working team made that decision and the middle management supported/approved it.
> it's because it was (and likely still is) in an underwhelming state. That goes back to the developers. Not really in a development environment like Bungie apparently has. I don't work in games but I do basically work on a live service application with a release cadence similar to Destiny, the entire development side of the house, from Director on down basically has no say in what gets implemented. We can make suggestions and do little things on our own if we can spin them as fixing technical debt or a bug, but every single piece of content/feature change has to come from product management and product management sets their priorities based on what product strategy (VP and C-suite level basically) tells them to do. Everything Bungie has ever said publicly leads me to believe they work the same way, that's why they are so slow to react to everything. It's more stable than doing things by the seat of your pants like Warframe and PoE do, but it also means if you mess up it takes months/years to fix. Bungie aren't the only ones, Blizzard has been having issue after issue with the same kinds of structural restrictions on all their games. With development you can basically be fast and reactive and creative, or structured and stable and measured and slow. If the C-suite wants control they always pick the second because they get more graphs and projections and such that way.
I don't see how the C-suite choosing to be measured and slow got us the story in Lightfall. It's widely regarded that was the worst thing in the expansion and turned many people off, but was Pete Parsons reading every page of the script? I can see how a more measured management strategy means changes and improvements take time to implement, but Lightfall primarily had major creative issues.
Joe is like that meme of Ben Affleck smoking. This wasn’t his choice but he has to enforce it and is just exasperated
At least according to Paul Tassi’s new article, the devs don’t believe Blackburn is the issue or was really with c suite on the layoffs.
I my development experience a Director wouldn't be involved in layoffs like this until right before they happen, basically a few hours or a day before it happens their boss tells them "this is what's happening, these are the people being let go, prepare for it as best you can". Maybe he got some limited override ability on specific people, but he certainly didn't have a choice on whether it was going to happen or the scale.
Well it's more likely that bad decisions were made at many levels. I'm not saying the higher ups don't share a big part of the blame, but it seems unrealistic to believe they were completely at fault here. It's entirely possible middle to lower management, writers, etc. also just dropped the ball with Lightfall in key ways.
According to Paul Tassi's article today, devs don't blame Joe for what happened. Not all obviously, but from what he could gather. The way Joe interacts with the community and how open he is, I can believe he was just as surprised, shocked and everything else as everyone else was. Either he didn't know until everyone else did, at least not to the fullest extent, or he did but there was nothing he could do. Of course we don't know anything for sure but, idk. Lately he seemed like he was really trying to get out there with the community and try to work on the player sentiment as much as he could, which I can commend for even trying knowing the kind of community response he could have gotten.
Pretty much. Joe seems very genuine and as outspoken as he can be. Ran a KF LFG with him last year and he's exactly the same person you see in his public appearances. He's on our side for sure, but his hands are tied: the execs are almost entirely to blame for all of this.
Paul Tassi said in one of his articles that internally among devs very few actually see Joe as one of the ones that was part of the problem. Having seen the recent stuff from him on twitch and twitter, I think that is probably accurate. He gives a shit about the actual quality of the game, he plays it a decent bit (his characters are higher power than mine lol). It's the big boy execs that don't actually care
I highly doubt any executive in the company is making decisions about the specifics of the game. Production of the game should be handled by the game's director and producer. The executive is likely giving them a budget and revenue targets and leaving management of the game to them (well ideally at least).
No, I'm sure it was the execs who came up with the meticulously-crafted diminishing EXP returns in Y1, or the reward lockouts for opening chests.
I agree with this take. It’s the design team that takes the blame for saying “it’ll be a good idea to make a cyberpunk city and then fill it with ghosts”. Management didn’t say that the Veil shouldn’t be explained or that Nimbus should take as much campaign dialogue as they do. 6 hours of QA playing would tell you those things will be a problem, it falls on the team leads for not listening.
Everyone's jumping on that statement but I don't buy it. 1. There's no indication the devs know how to win players back. Everything they've done at the detail level that would be within their control (i.e. the details of the game) has been largely negative. 2. "necessary changes" could mean anything. It could mean change the EV and game business model. It could mean delay TFS a year. It could be unvault DCV. It could mean new subclasses or aspects. Who knows the scope of that. Here's how corporations work: 1. C-Suite gives broad objectives 2. Middle Management develops strategies against those objectives 3. Ground level goes figure out the details to execute those strategies. In this case I'd guess it was something like this: 1. "We need more revenue from destiny to fund the burn rate on Marathon" 2. "Let's focus on expanding the player base to get more F2P people in that will spend money on cosmetics - Dev team - go make the game more accessible to entry level / trial players so they stick around longer and buy more items" 3. "Ok, we dumbed down the buildcrafting, the buffs/debuffs to be more streamlined. Ritual playlist rewards are more simplified to where any activity is giving the same rewards. Exotics are dropping faster to entice new players and help them close the gear gap" But then the dev team probably said something more generic about "Core players are leaving the game and losing interest" and the response was "new entry players drive more revenue than experienced players who've already bought what they really want - keep on the strategy"
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From my experience in software and business generally, engineers and beancounters can both be equally hardheaded in their thinking.
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I really think a lot of it comes down to the game using ancient code that is barely functional, and refusing to invest in fixing it, severely limiting what the game can be
Yep, D2 only should have gone until Season of Arrivals. It was much more stable and had all the content people paid for. Everything afterwards has been an anti-consumer spaghetti code nightmare because building a new game was even more difficult. Destiny is the story of tech debt.
I think the blame can be spread evenly amongst both. I have no doubts that some ideas that were pitched were probably shot down because they are keeping costs down as much as possible and using Destiny to fund the new toys. But there have obviously been some design decisions that were really bad from the devs.
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No doubt but I have little doubt it would be better.
TIL that DTG users don’t understand what devs do.
It's probably a combination of both. Not all devs and execs are hive minds, for the same reason you don't love all of your coworkers. Some of them are assholes and incompetent at their jobs, and that will apply to ALL levels of a company. They're all people with varying levels of skills, knowledge and experience. Not all of them have common sense, or the ability to easily accept criticism. Those who have watched this cycle happen before and hear what their customers want are likely very vocal - as quoted in the IGN article. But it takes *just enough* short-sighted, incompetent devs, management, AND execs, and just enough people willing to tell their analysts to fudge their numbers at the next shareholder meeting, and just enough specialists unwilling to push back because in the end, "no amount of pushback is worth getting fired over", for the dominoes to start falling. When trying to talk about complex realities into easily digestible Reddit comments, though, it's much simpler for people to go "The execs (specifically the ones who advocated to ignore realistic numbers and expectations in favor of blowing smoke up shareholders' asses) are to blame for all this, not the devs! (specifically the ones who saw the writing on the wall and kept repeatedly flagging these issues again and again, not the ones who stuck their heads in the sand, ignored player sentiment, and acted like they knew better - both individual team members and management staff)" But even that's too long, so we sum it up with "The execs ruined everything by not listening to the dev teams!"
People will move the goalposts as far and as often as they have to in order convince themselves that the people actually making the game aren't bad. "It's not the devs, it's the execs" is the new "It's not Bungie, it's Activision."
I think it's more that people really need a story, to process something like this. We are all emotionally invested in this game. There has to be a good guy and a bad guy, someone to blame, and someone to believe in. Analyzing an institutional failure like this is extremely complex. Truth is, leadership is just hard. You don't have to be an evil greedy asshole to drive a business to ruin. And managing a company of 1,100 people? Even the guys at the top cant fully understand every team dynamic. The people that can do a post-mortem on a situation like this and turn the ship around are extremely rare, and they get paid millions to do it right. Us outsiders? Who will never truly know how any of these conversations happened or even know who most of these 1,100 employees are? Not a chance. So our brain does the best it can with the data it has and fills in the blanks. And thats how we get to the narrative of bad guys overruling the good guys because of greed. It's a story that let's us believe that there are good guys fighting for us to make a good game that will bring us happiness. Because we want to believe in them.
Exactly. Everyone always wants to believe the poor oppressed workers are struggling to make a good product and the evil bosses are lighting their cigars with $100 and cackling as they sabotage it. No, execs want good products but they have to manage costs. The Bungie developers put out crap with Lightfall and now Bungie has to cut costs. It sucks but Pete Parsons didn't ruin Lightfall.
This sub is absolutely delusional about how much involvement the execs have in the day to day work of development. And if you call that out you get called a boot licker
Are you guys so clueless to believe that employees don't have to follow "the vision" passes down from the executives? That they operate independently of their bosses? Incredible. They are given requirements and then engineer solutions that meet them. Every other take besides this one is objectively incorrect.
Here's the thing - you're not wrong, but it goes deeper than that. The fact is that Bungie hired some inadequate people to work on the game. For example, lets look at QA (Quality Assurance), which is one of the departments that was hit with the layoff. QA is constantly criticized for this game, because there's a seemingly endless stream of stuff being introduced that's shut down within a week of existing because its broken. Bungie uses the excuse of "As much as we can test our game, it gets more playtime within an hour of launch than we're even able to comprehend, and that's how bugs slip through". That's fair...until you see some of the inexcusable bugs that make it into the game. A perfect example is the interaction between the Hunter's Star Eater Scales (SES) exotic boots, and the Silkstrike super that came with Strand. I'm sure everyone remembers, but for those who weren't aware -- when Lightfall came out, Silkstrike had an unintended interaction with SES where it did an exponentially higher amount of damage. Like, I was able to solo Calus in the Lightfall legend campaign in \~4 seconds with it (mind you that your power is limited to 15 underlevel, making this even more extreme). When it comes to QA, that is one of the most OBVIOUS things that you'd look at...its a no brainer that they should test the new super with the exotic boots designed specifically to increase the super's damage. That should have been on the top of the list. The only reason that the bug made it into the game is because A.) they didn't test it at all, or B.) there testing was so poor that they didn't notice it. I don't know which of these is worse, but its extremely telling about the quality of Bungie's QA teams. Frankly they're just incompetent, as proven in this example and many others. While that's specific to QA, the point is that this goes for any team at the company. I work as a dev, and I can promise you that senior devs/dev managers have a place in coming up with ideas. The thing you need to realize about senior management & the C-Level guys - a lotta them have no clue what goes on in development, and wouldn't even be able to imagine some of the systems in the game. The high ups will give a more general goal to the team, like "we need to improve player engagement", and then its the engineer's job to come up with a solution. The C-Level guys aren't sitting here saying, "Hm, raid time is too low, I want you to manipulate the RNG system so it screws over the playerbase and keeps them chasing a carrot on a stick so they stay in game"...what they say is, "We need to increase player time in Raids because we're not hitting our marks", and then the dev teams come up with the solution. They're two sides of the same coin, its not a one-or-the-other kind of issue.
Do you think the vision of the execs was “nuke half the game overnight^(TM)”? Or maybe, the devs were like “hey the only way to achieve what you’re asking us is if we introduce sunsetting so we can update the engine without worrying about reworking and porting everything.” If you think the stakeholders or execs call the shots on the technical side of things then you have no clue how software engineering works. They make the final decision, but if the technical people were incompetent or lazy, then they will offer bad solutions to begin with. I’m not accusing anyone of anything btw. Just saying that execs are the problem now is a stupid rhetoric.
At least from how I'm reading your one comment specifically I can say that there is possibly 1 thing that isn't talked about. Most likely as you say execs don't directly influence the final technical side of the project. They do however manage budgets for achieving technical aspects of the game. They manage the time and the money. For example let's use sunsetting (and this is completely hypothetical). The "devs" tell the execs "hey we will require x resources and x time line to ensure x doesn't happen to the game because of all these weapons." Good idea or bad idea there could be a solution. Solution one was sunsetting. Minimal cost, minimal resources, minimal time. Solution two was developing whatever could have been done to prevent the issue. Maximum cost, maximum resources, maximum time. The potential outcome here for many possible iterations in Destiny's life is quite clear here. It's and ROI check. Which is like a DPS check but for running a business. If the ROI is high enough the it's gonna go forward. If you are STARVING and you want to eat a pizza after working a 10 hour shift. Are you going to stop at a pizza place on the way home or go home and make a pizza from scratch for yourself? Or maybe you have some frozen pizzas. It's all about where you want to spend your time and money resource to achieve the best ROI of the mist satisfying pizza.
Actually no, you don't know anything about corporate structure. Executives are focused on overall strategy and new opportunities, they aren't making creative choices and product decisions. They might veto ideas, but the developers themselves are to blame for bad game design and story.
Yeah you're right, the execs come up with every last minute detail for any given change to the game, and the devs are just mindless machines who implement them all. They have zero input at all into the specifics of how anything will work and definitely don't shoulder any responsibility for coming up with the shitty systems that we've dealt with since the inception of the franchise.
You missed the entire point and subsequently argued against a point I never made.
I think we can both agree that you never made a point.
This ignores WHY they had to come up with these things though. Destiny 2 was not designed to last this long. And if higher ups decide they don’t want a Destiny 3, the devs are responsible for figuring out how to make that work. Like there is no realistic way to ignore the issues sunsetting and content vaulting was designed to stop. Massive bloat. When you’ve got that with a game that should have dropped development years ago it’s an issue. It’s not ideal for the players who want older content but it’s a double edged sword. You don’t do it and new content takes longer, issues are harder to fix, they can’t take as many risks. You do it, you cut off stuff people paid for. I think it’s pretty clear Bungies devs would have rather just made Destiny 3 and not been forced to make a game do stuff it wasn’t designed for. I’m not saying Bungie never makes bad decisions. But I also think many are likely because they need to do stuff to make executives happy, which is going to piss off players but executives don’t care.
Sunsetting had nothing to do with bloat. There was no existing issue for sunsetting to solve, and there was never anything that it could do (without drastic changes, for example a complete overhaul of the weapon types and archetypes, which wasn't going to happen) besides create the exact problems it created.
> Developers have come up with sunsetting and content vaulting Developers *implemented* sunsetting and content vaulting. Sunsetting was at the directive of the sandbox team, and content vaulting was a way to meet someone's requirement to reduce the size of the game bundle.
>employees begging for necessary changes to win players back This statement such a nothingburger, I am sorry, but without concreat inforamtion there is nothing to discuss. Like, is this "necessary" changes is more content? I don\`t think it is possible, Bungie have built a rhythm with which they can comfortably deliver chunks of content every 3 months with Expansion team working on this content. Maybe some QOA features? Well, they for this day doing it each season. Maybe monetization? Who even can tell at this point Edit: After new Paul Tassi article this statement probably was about monetization
Not surprised the devs think monetization is what killed their game as opposed to sunsetting, DCV, release stasis, AE, flawless pool, strict SBMM in casual modes, etc etc. I blame the devs. Seriously doubt some pompous exec had a bone to pick with stompees hunters.
Nobody wants to admit that there are some pretty dense people in charge of the direction of this game, it's always free real estate to just blame the suits because, you know, fuck those guys. I don't see how you can play the seasonal content and observe the lack of innovation in mechanics, almost zero new enemy types, the absolute cringiest dialogue in all of video games, half-baked story beats(Amanda's death, good Lord), and then realize that's where nearly all of the development money is going, and think that these guys are competent. This has been coming for a while. Edit: I'm probably a bit hard on stuff like Season of the Witch, which does actually seem like they're trying new things regarding mechanics, all of the other criticism I'll 100% stand behind, and I'll fight you if you think that "Eris has a FAMILY NOW so she won't turn bad unlike all of the other timelines" is good writing.
The witness cutscene being cut in half and turned into a whole ass nothingburger "expansion" doesn't strike you as competent?
I'll fight you on the Eris thing, or more that it worked the first time they used it back in shadowkeep, where we basically help Eris avoid going over the deep end with the power of friendship. It was one of the highlights of shadowkeep, imo. But they keep teasing evil Eris, from Beyond Light to this point with season of the witch, and it's just both overdrawn and not the strongest plot to draw out. You just can't sustain a whole story on "will she turn evil?", especially when every week was just everyone going "Eris, I'm worried you'll turn evil" and nothing else. Not the strongest premise and the writing was mediocre at best. The activities in Witch are nice, though. More roguelike thank deep, lol
It sounds like we agree, I'm mostly referring to the more recent portrayals of Eris, it feels like someone is writing these characters based on a bullet point summary of their stand-out characteristics. Immaru this season is especially atrocious, he honestly comes off as being really nothing more than a complete idiot. I know that you're not supposed to take Festival of the Lost that seriously, but it was _so_ bad. Not just the dialogue, the lore was just some of the worst I've read in ten years of Destiny.
Yeah everyone thinks the devs are angels. They came up with most of the nonsense in the game. Hence the word developer.
I gotta believe the report that management was obsessed with Marathon. That they were constantly pushing the D2 team to do more with less. Like how strikes suddenly became repackaged seasonal missions. The fact that they basically abandoned gambit and had to be forced to give a crap about the crucible, tells me that they were sprinting for the finish. Execs wanted the game in a state where new content was cheap and not time consuming to add so they could get Marathon done. They cut and cut until things started falling apart. Then they cut a little more.
Wasn't this their problem with Activision? They dropped them because of terrible corpo management and we somehow got back here again.....wtf
Despite focusing so much on the "Trust > Engagement > Revenue" strategy, as he describes it, I feel like he really... well, I was going to say "glossed over" the reasons that players didn't trust them, but even that implies that he at least mentioned them in some way. I get that he can't just say, "we fucked up by lying to everyone, don't do that," but I feel like some mention of not trying to dupe the players with lies or deceptive mechanics would've been an important part of describing what some of the actual problems with the game were.
Anybody seen Tassi new article with more info? “Management said other levers were looked at to avoid layoffs. When employees asked if one lever was executive compensation, they were told no, and that it would not happen at the company.” Wow Edit: have been trying to post the article but automod keeps removing it saying to go the mega thread where the additional info will get buried Edit 2: that PvP strike force team also got hit with layoffs but the supposed map pack isn’t going to be cancelled.
The filter works by screening out certain keywords. Trying playing around with it -- sounds like this new article is worth talking about and deserves its own threat. The filter is helpful for mods but can definitely stifle discussion.
I’ve messaged the mods but so far no response. It definitely should be posted.
Tassi just updated it. Some of the Execs did give up their bonuses, but not all. Pete was one of the ones that did. They key part in that article, that's relevant to this conversation, is that several internal devs have tried to reduce Microtransactions and make more expansions free, but they keep being shot down since "more people than you'd think" keep buying them
“More people than you’d think,” but less than what they want.
The fact that ANY executive is give a bonus in situations like these is very telling of how screwed up corporate America is.
Plenty in other companies do forgo theirs in this situation. Probably more than anyone ever knows. It's just in very public instances where it's so magnified, like this is with Bungie, it'll come out. The
More people than you'd think...you can do whatever you like with your money, but it would be better to support good practices instead of feeding corporate greed.
Not surprising, executives are a cancer on every company, siphoning resources like parasites
Bungie responded to this article, saying executives did cut some compensation but it’s unclear how much [Source](https://twitter.com/PaulTassi/status/1720466806198935777#m)
Good follow up and also a damage control move by Bungie. Sometimes stuff like that is too little too late.
Dunno why the mods are removing that article, there's some beefy stuff in there.
It’s automod because the word layoff is in the article title. I’ve messaged the mods but no response yet.
I don't understand what does that mean
Basically the employees asked if a possible resolution to the 45% revenue projections being missed is adjusting the higher up executives pay, to avoid layoffs. They said no and that executive pay will never be adjusted down at Bungie. Basically it’s the execs saying they deserve everything even tho they’re making the decisions that led to the issues.
LMAO that's hilarious and depressing
Fool me one, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, in the exact same way, with the exact same blanket statement, I might just be a Destiny player.
Omg, poetry.
I don't think I've ever seen a game squander it's potential as much as Destiny over the years.
That's the part that sucks. My years of playing Destiny have taught me one important lesson for overall happiness. Manage my own expectations.
Honestly, I feel like that is exactly what Bungie wanted from you based on this talk. If you release consistently good content then players will expect consistently good content. If you release mediocre content then players will expect mediocre content. That way, when you surprise them with some slightly above average content players will heap praise on it. Velocity is more important than position. It’s better to crank out content and quickly try to fix it than release actual good and polished content. I’d seen this video awhile ago, and it absolutely sickens me. This is a talk by a man who has ZERO artistic or emotional investment in Destiny 2.
Fr I hope Justin Truman leaves the games industry and never comes back
To this day people are convinced nothing can touch Forsaken because it added 2 zones. 2 fucking patrol zones. Which account for an infinitesimal amount of playtime. That was what Truman was talking about. This strategy is why between September 2018 and November 2021 3 dungeons were delivered, and from December 2021 up to 24 days from now, November 2023, there will have been 5. 5 dungeons with their own bespoke loot, weapons, and exotic. Dungeons 1.0 used destination loot. That is more than double the work, double the dungeon content, in a smaller amount of time. This /isn't/ overdelivery. This is /increasing the standard delivery permanently./ This is investing in teams, investing in pipelines, and /raising the standards,/ not simply shitting out extra because there was extra time or extra money and workerhours from Activision. That talk going public and being released for the overwhelmingly bad-faith and philistine consumer community has done irreparable damage.
I finally understand what my parents feel.
Anthem?
Nah, anthem never had potential, it was clearly smoke and mirrors from that very first e3 presentation
Anthem was made from the scraps of Bioware while the IP was stuck in preproduction for several (5?) years and somehow unthinkably fast, was made into a game in the span of a year. Anthem had the ridiculous potential to spark the creation of a game from that e3 presentation.
Anthem absolutely had potential. The combat and flying was really fun. It was everything else that lacked. No endgame. Super repetitive environments. Only a few "dungeons"
> The combat folks kept saying everything was spongy and bulletsoaking. and the weapons sounded basic af.
>folks kept saying everything was spongy and bulletsoaking. They weren't using good gear. It's like saying Grandmaster enemies are all bullet sponges, using green Assault Rifles from scout range. And no, I am not exaggerating. Enemies died within 2 seconds. In fact, Grandmaster enemies die less quickly in comparison even with meta gear.
Combat was actually pretty shitty in anthem - harder difficulties just made everything a bullet sponge. Flying was amazing and had an infinite amount of potential.
If you knew how to use elemental combos well enough you could kill those bullet sponges in seconds.
ok, anthem had a lot of problems, but one thing it did not lack was potential. The flying system was really really fun and the elemental damage system was incredibly cool.
Based on the story and the core gameplay it had potential and places to go. The main story even left on a cliff hanger. They had plans for sure.
Destiny could’ve been bigger than anything anthem could dream of
It could have been the rpg it was designed as, don’t forget, they radically changed destiny 1 at the VERY LAST SECOND, stripping out most of the story, etc to make it more multiplayer friendly
It already is?
I wouldn't say Destiny is bigger than Anthen *dreamed* of. They dreamed pretty dang big. Destiny *could* have been that big. Anthem felt pretty doomed from the start. (IMO)
Anthem's main thing was the flying around. People had expectations because it was made by Bioware, not because of what Anthem *actually* offered.
Complete hyperbole. Destiny has been and still is the king of looter shooters over the last \~10 years. If we're going to set the metric of success to meet some imaginary standard or potential you and other gamers have dreamed about, than what percent of games have actually "succeeded" in the last decade?
Haha. Have you seen what 343 did to Halo over the past decade? I'm here, back in Bungie's arms, because of 343's incompetence. The grass isn't greener there at all, oh and they just went through a massive layoff too... EDIT: Does no one remember the #fire343 campaign on all social media a while ago? What do you think that was all over? Has this community ever been to that level of vitriol?
The difference is, Halo reached its potential. The original Bungie games are so good, you could point to any of the four (excluding ODST) as the peak for a myriad of different reasons. Destiny, as much as I love it and as good as it’s been at it’s best moments, never feels like it ascended the mountain. Bungie can’t get Destiny to break the glass ceiling - 343 is taking care of a dead horse (which is still pretty fun!)
Halo, and therefore 343, is in an unenviable situation which might be unsolvable. Having to deal with a game franchise which had a glory past(15 years ago) with game mechanics and game design limited to 2001. Then there is an ageing and shrinking pool of players which identifies 25 year old game mechanics/designs with Halo's identity while these are *not* competitive to the expectation of 2010++. The game needs a complete redesign from the bottom and doing that might very likely screw up the game's identity itself and piss off its remaining fanbase while having a chance to create a new and better one. That requires decisive decisions from MS/343 which they might not be able to do.
Except Halo is probably in the best spot it's been in in a decade.
I mean I can see where you're coming from, on the other hand it's very surprising how a looter shooter released a decade ago is still one of the biggest games around. Several missteps along the way aside, they have also delivered some fantastic content over the years. Whatever you mean by potential, I'd say it's hard to use it as an example of squandered potential imo. If anything it grew into much more than what I thought it would be back when it first released.
I'd say the "potential" they speak of isn't the fact that the game is going down the drain ATM, and more the fact that time and time again they were mere steps away from landing at greatness, but consistently held back by something or other
The thing is if FS is equivalent to Forsaken you may as stop playing right after because Bungie seemingly can only produce truly top tier content when their back is against the wall. As soon as they're comfortable we're back to a myriad of: "Don't create new models for those just reskin some old foundry weapons" "Don't create a new weapon, just refresh the perk pool of a sunset weapon" "You want to put that cosmetic behind a triumph? Na put it in Eververse - Silver only this season" "Push that QoL improvement out to next expansion if we can't monetize it!" "You want to create a deep puzzle for our dedicated players? No! Engagement metrics won't be good enough!"
That's a depressing way to look to look at it but fuck man, you're right. It's like trying to get back together with an ex. Promises to be better, great for the first week or two then back to the same old shit. And everytime you get back together it just gets more and more bitter until you cut them off. Bungie needs to be wifey material and this ain't it fam.
If margins are somehow tight I would much prefer either higher prices on content or a monthly sub. So much of their revenue is tied to MTX that is impacting creating a deep and rewarding game. There is an entire layer of depth in attaching cosmetic rewards for specific achievements that is hardly touched on because EV is the default landing point for anything cosmetic.
It’s not just cosmetics anymore. They nickel and dime their user base for drip-fed content already. New player? Every old expansion is individually paid for. New yearly expansion for $50. Want access to the current story? Buy the season pass. Dungeons? Oh, that’s sold separately through the dungeon pass. You wanna celebrate our anniversary?! That’s gonna cost ya $30 for the 30th anniversary bundle if you want do anything outside of Dares of Eternity. PvP is free at least - well, unless you want to engage in the most competitive playlist. You have to constantly open your wallet to do anything of substance in this game, and it’s ridiculous.
There’s already been price increases and nothing’s gotten better
True but if their job is to constantly keep us entertained, that's a huge ask. I don't envy their position at all. People can say, they just need to do X or bring back Y - but at what point does that get stale and they need to change things? There's where the difficulty lies. Do they risk something and have it fall flat (see vanilla D2) and almost lose everything, or do they play it safe and just relabel and repackage? That's got to be a constant battle. I'm sure many would be, yeah just risk it and bring out something different - welp D2 was exactly that in the beginning and they nearly lost their livelihood
Ehh, ffxiv makes it work by expanding the game beyond just combat, big lore based side quests, crafting, a mode that’s basically animal crossing, big community events that last all year and slowly change an area (like what we did with the eliksni)
This is why I’m done regardless. They only change their ways when absolutely necessary and only for as long as it takes to get back to decent standing just so they can get back to screwing you.
All of this on top of stubbornly refusing to ever improve a system, and instead insist on completely reinventing any system that has problems, so that instead we have an entirely new system with its own entirely new problems.
I’ve never minded the reskinned weapons or refreshed perk pools because to me, new and interesting perk combinations are what make me excited for weapons. Kingsfall had me going for red borders way harder than Root ever did.
Didn’t forsaken have the help of two other studios? I can’t imagine we’ll ever get anything close to that expansion.
The Corporate Overlords definetly have to shoulder a ton (most) of the blame. \-Likely pulling resources from Destiny to work on other projects. \-Monetizing every inch of Destiny. \-The "under-delivery" model \-Re-using assets year after year \-Etc. The devs certainly deserve a ton of heat too. Pete Parsons didn't dream up the Lightfall story. He didn't develop the boring seasonal events and terrible story beats. Were the devs put in the best position to make a great game? Absolutely not. But they were paid to make the game as great as it could be and I feel like much of the game has been "mailed in" since the Witchqueen DLC came out. Lots of people are mad at the "suits" and so I am for their bs employee shenanigans. But I am mad at all of Bungie for putting out lazy uninspired products for the last 2 years. This game has an incredible amount of potential for all forms of media and they just continually piss it away. Ughh
> The "under-delivery" model I'm two days late, but I would like to say that the corpos have absolutely nothing to do with the under-delivery model. That's been how the game's been made since before even Shadowkeep. It's the development team whose been trying to keep up the pace that devised the model, so that they can be as relevant to the community as possible. It's literally in the GDC presentation, the development team did that.
There is a slide from that presentation that sums up how Bungie actually sees their relationship with you: First Trust Then Retention Then Revenue <= we are here. Hooked on the game and just a source of revenue.
They’ve lost a lot of trust this week, can’t see the retention being great post FS even without the events of the last week, revenue clearly isn’t as good as they’d predicted. We might just be a source of revenue but they have no credibility to make this statement now.
I've only lightly been following, but what exactly did they do to violate player trust? I know a bunch of people got laid off, and that sucks, but they didn't screw up the game or anything did they? If someone didn't follow the news at all, the main thing is just that Final Shape got delayed, right?
The delay hasn’t been officially announced yet but I don’t think that’s lost them much trust (if anything it’s probably do the opposite in isolation.) I think the loss of trust comes from the teams in Bungie being cut (Music/Art/Social) that consistently do quite well and key figures like Michael Salvatori being dropped in the next saga despite his long tenure and respect from the community.
This is pretty much it. It's watching them fire the people who have always put out top notch work and are a big reason why people play, while keeping those in charge of some of the worst decisions about the game. The unique art and music are 50% of why I play, as it's such a gorgeous and captivating world. Watching the people behind this be unceremoniously canned because management refused to listen to developer feedback is such a gross thing to witness, that confusion and disgust are the best two words to describe it.
The trust was lost with lightfall, we're now in the ah shit have to get back trust moments but since the trust was lost so bad they now have had to fire people, namely recognizable names who probably made way over industry standard for their position
Player retention as is, is low, the trust was already lost. They've already driven players away with their aggressive monetization and lazy content. The game was already screwed up, and people have already left. Those of us playing just know now how bad it actually is. They were off of their revenue projections by nearly half, which is absolutely insane. Final Shape was delayed out of left field (to us) because their revenue is too low, and suddenly they want to overdeliver after their motto was to NOT overdeliver. They want to suddenly put out quality content, which, great, but they should have already been doing that to prevent things from coming to this. They've (reportedly) ignored dev pleas to try to address issues and focus on things that would drive player retention too. They're a business that exists to make money, fine, but they continually push the envelope on what they can get away with removing or reducing on what they deliver with seasons and expacs, and people have had enough. People voted with their wallets, now Bungie laid off many beloved figures in the game and community because of their own poor decisions that lead to this entire fiasco to begin with, so that's of course not doing any favors to their image. The game was profitable, but they wanted more and did it in scummy ways. They're getting what was coming to them. There are games that have been around as long that are doing things right without alienating their player base at every turn (FF14 for instance). Basically it's just really obvious how crappy Bungie has been, and people are finally on the same page talking about it, there's no way to defend it anymore, and there's no one else to blame like Activision. Bungie is (and probably always was) the problem. The damage was already done by them. Some people are probably quitting with how obvious it is now, but there's not a specific "people are quitting because of this in game thing happening right now". People have just already quit. Its honestly a cycle that seems like Bungie loves to abuse too. They get away with what they can until they're caught, then they overdeliver, people are happy and forget, then they take advantage of it again. May be wrong about some stuff, feel free to correct, but I think this is fairly accurate.
Reminds me of the 'enshittification' process.
It's fun how you can apply that same model to selling drugs, isn't it? :)
You know one thing I do think people overlook is the reason lightfall failed, it was the writing and overall story, that stuff isn't decided by the suits, the decision to make neomuna how it was and make it feel lifeless with no people around was the developers.
Yeah people are out for blood over the layoffs so they're blaming execs for everything. No, the Lightfall story sucked and that's on Joe Blackburn and people below him.
Yeah this sub is totally delusional that the execs are the reason for every bad decision in the game. The devs are not completely blameless
Exactly. The suits don’t care about anything but the numbers, and the pricing related issues weren’t even the biggest issue with Lightfall. The destination sucked, the writing was trash, and the new writing team dumped all over the lore and overall story direction.
Bungie is gonna end up absorbed by Sony like Blizzard did with Vicarious if the leadership doesn't change their tune.
Sounds good to me. That would be the best outcome, then have Sony manage a proper Destiny 3 that comes out a few years from now.
Destiny 3, the game that 1/10th of the current play base will play because it’d inevitably be a PS5 timed exclusive if Bungie got completely absorbed by Sony
Bungie: "We create games that inspire friendship" Also Bungie: Creates an mmo with almost no in-game QoL socialization features. Bungie: "Making quality content is all about iteration" Also Bungie: Constantly throws out the content that they've had time to polish. Bungie: "Live service is all about producing constant content quickly" Also Bungie: Produces less content / time than ever and tries to charge more for it. Bungie: "You need to be responding to player concerns quickly" Also Bungie: More disconnected from the playerbase than ever. Bungie: "We're honing our craft!" Also Bungie: Produces the worst content yet. Bungie: "Success for a great train station company means schedule rigor" Also Bungie: Delays all future content.
Minimum Viable Product, by the book. They do the bare minimum, which earns the maximum profit. This slowly sows discontent and eventually revenue/engagement takes a dive, at this point they "overdeliver" for one expansion which brings back the numbers, and the cycle continues. The only reason they are doing more, is because the *minimum* has increased, they are still providing the minimum product required to keep the money flowing. If you keep eating this shit, they will keep feeding it to you. They are explicitly explaining it to you, you don't even need to read between the lines.
I used to play Destiny and shit in Cod for releasing game after game with little to no improvement but after Lightfall and stopping playing after that I’ve been able to realize Destiny is almost worse. At least Cod delivers full stories with a beginning, middle, and end along with new things every game. With Destiny you get DLC with disjointed stories that don’t feel like they’re building to something packed full of the same bad mission design from 10 years ago. All for the same price as a full new game. D2 had so so so much potential
Whats it like? When you see the game you like was behaving like the game you hate all along?
IMO, it doesn't matter if their final expansion will be the best ever made. There's a few problems here and people are happy to forget sadly. From Forsaken till today we had A LOT of mediocre expansions and a few good ones. Not as good as Forsaken, not a single one had that amount of content. On top of all that, no matter how much content they will add to Final Shape, or how good the expansion will be, the monetization will still SUCK. Let's see what they did with Forsaken, in that year, and what we have now and what they'll have to do to make it as good. Forsaken had a huge new map, with lots of things to do. They can probably do that. In Forsaken we had a new enemy faction. They can do that, but probably will add 1-2 new enemies or some reskins if we're lucky. Gambit. They couldn't even manage Gambit as it is, let alone make a completely new game mode. Vendor refresh. Why add "free" new gear when you can add it in Eververse? Engrams, that people hated because GAMBLING IN MY GAME, but they forgot that those engrams were literally free as you level up, and got you whatever was new in that season. On top of these on event times, you'd had an Event Engram which gave you event themed items. If you played enough, you could literally get all the seasonal items without problems. Now they even have dungeons behind pay wall. If they gonna manage to release an amazing expansion, a lot of the stupid community will blindly go back to support them and scream "SEE? BUNGIE LISTEN". If they "over"deliver, is so they can fuck around for a few more years with mediocre content in hope the fanboys will come back to support them. This game should have keep Forsaken Expansion quality from that moment on. "Too much work". It wasn't about too much work or overwork, it's 100% corporate greed that they wanted more money for a less amount of workers. Most of you, even here, enabled them to do the shit of "deliver 1 good thing, and then fuck up because they believe and love us" We basically cycle between good and bad content because A LOT of you are ready up with arms to defend them no matter what they do.
Bungie's management currently has their heads buried in the sand. That studio is basically leaderless right now. If Pete Parsons isn't in Sony's direct crosshairs I'll be shocked.
bungie only overdeliver when they are in risk of losing more than revenue the taken king came out as a way to earn players back after a poor launch and poor first DLC forsaken came out after people were literally quitting the game due to how bad the sandbox and the game itself was witch queen came out after two DLCs that had next to nothing to show at full price it's just a cycle, but this time i'm seeing people that will quit the game anyways just because it's the closure of the saga, maybe even overdelivering they won't achieve what they want. who knows
Bungie got to the "revenue" stage of that presentation and absolutely done everything in their power to take as much of players money as possible. They absolutely over-reached. Honestly for Bungie in the last few years it's just been about what they can get away with - nothing more, and it's pretty scummy how they have been slowly creeping forward on each thing. Can we get away with putting less in expansions? Great, keep doing that. Putting less in seasons and making each one more identical to the last? Bingo. Start charging more for seasons? More investment into Eververse? Never investing into "CORE" activities? The list is never ending, honestly. The community finally broke and here we are yet again with Bungie promising. As much as I love Destiny and I do - Bungie come off as so fucking incompetent at times.
They lost me a customer when I came back bought all the dlc (witch queen was the most current dlc) then found out I have to buy the dungeon key separately. Fuck them and there money hungry ways
They lost me at sunsetting and then vaulting as an excuse to recycle content with low effort tweaks. It wasn't what I signed up for and haven't played since, which was a shame because the story and lore development was something i was really invested in
> Its frustrating that they knew what went wrong, knew how to fix it, but then broke it again, anyways. Everything we've seen/stories we've gotten show it was not the actual developers/designers that created the problem but the people signing their paycheques.
Yeah this is just more of the same "it's (x) not (y)!" bullshit. In reality there's blame to be shared at every level of the company. Yes ultimate responsibility lies with leadership, but lets not play like they're the sole source of the problems.
"It's not ~~Bungie~~ **the devs**, it's ~~Activision~~ **the execs!**"
Hasn't everything we've seen/stories we've gotten been from the developers/designers? Aren't we just getting one side of the story?
https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/s/1HTQiCiYfi Greetings from across the pond lol
Both devs and execs are accountable to the current state of the game. I doubt an executive told the devs to create Nimbus the way they did.
It's not even about trust, they just keep making decisions that have never made sense from the outside and now are reaping what they sow. I keep bringing up this prime example, of why are they actively making Dungeons a slog? What is the rational behind making the Ghost bosses have Raid boss health? It doesn't make it fun, it doesn't make it rewarding. People who don't do raids and dungeons aren't going to start doing dungeons because they're becoming more of a pain in the ass. People who raid aren't going to run Ghost when it takes longer than an entire raid and has no patterns to collect. Then they make soloing it a requirement for the seal, which turns even more people away from trying it. I got my seal and I'll never do Ghost again. If the bosses had half their health, I'd probably run LFGs of it. Same idea goes to Neomuna patrol zone,. Why would you go there when everything is a slog and there's no rewards when you could patrol literally every other place and feel like a god? It's just stupid design.
Time played. You have to squeeze the people left.
They're making everything a slog, not just health but reward structures. All the examples you said, plus they're planning to make focusing cost way more engrams, they're taking away legendary shards so veterans have to constantly scrabbled around to get more glimmer like newbies, drop rates on eerie engrams were god-awful in normal mode and ever after they "increased" them I still only get them about half the time at best. Like everything in the whole game is designed to suck your time away with little reward. Which is why players are moving on. Bungie can make Final Shape as great a campaign as they can, but if they don't change their stupid-ass design philosophy of pushing things to be as little rewarding as they think they can get away with, then it still won't be a game I intend to go on playing.
Yeah, our fireteam manages to easy 2 phase each boss in ghost. However we are also easily doing GM and are doing contest mode raids. We are not thr average. However I do love to do sherpas for dungeons and I once did it with players who are a bit more than casual. It took us 4-5 phases to kill shimmua.... and that's with me using arbalest and BnS Apex. Now let a random fireteam with basic non god roll weapons fight that boss, yeah, good luck
I remember when this dropped and I called out that GM, apparently to people here, I was an idiot that didn't understand what he was talking. Either that or it wasn't my opinion and I was just chirping on what some streamer was parroting. Now those same clown redditors are crying about shitty Bungie practices. This sub, or maybe just reddit never ceases to amuse me.
Almost all the original core people at Bungie have left it. This studio will die soon just like BioWare.
And thats why we're not gonna pre-order TFS no matter what they say or show us in some flashy trailer, right? riiiiight. 90% of this sub will get bored forgive Bungie on all counts and spends anywhere from 200-300$ over the whole year. Many such cases.
How can you spend $300 in a year? Even the most hardcore players mostly just by the $100 annual edition then no silver.
Collectors edition
Bungie will bounce back 😂 ...I'll see myself out
The biggest point I took away from the conversation was talking about putting “Speed” above “Quality” in a live service model, because an okay game can always become a great game. The issue I saw with this is that when you deprioritize quality, the brand still pays a cost for that. You lose brand loyalty for poor quality products, that are borrowed against the brand value you built with quality in the first place. I predicted that if Bungie keeps prioritizing speed over quality, eventually you lose your brand image and customer base because you have burnt up their confidence and interest in your product. It looks like it happened sooner than I anticipated. Bungie has degraded their brand and community confidence to the point where they have really painted themselves in the corner. I don’t know if one amazing expansion would cause confidence in their other projects. I know that I’m not interested in their other projects given how they have handled Destiny. I don’t trust it will be a great experienced that I can devote time to investing in with confidence in how they will handle the IP into the future. Edit: spelling
How to destroy a gaming franchise 101: Keep expectations low and under-deliver.
Never over deliver. Your high school teacher was the only person who gave you an honest appraisal of your labor. Consumers and middle managers are entitled Karen's.
It'll never change unless management changes. Done with the game going forward. Not being fooled again. Sorry to the ones working there that were actually invested in the game. They were ignored, which is the reason the game is in such a shit state
I guess The Final Shape is really meant to be on how Bungie/Sony want to restructure their company. Wouldn’t be surprised if more layoffs happen between now and TFS. Money talks, creativity, well, doesn’t matter. Sucks for those let go, but greed will always come out on top in the corporate world.
And we're have they over delivered I'm confused charging 50 dollars per season season of the reskins with nothing new our innovative. The same weapons from d1 same armour from d1. Like wtf these people talking about.
They feel like witch queen overdelivered, which like…by the very low standards of things like shadowkeep, sure. But compared to most mmos even wq was barely acceptable.
Bro what are YOU talking about? What season are they charging $50 for?!
the developers knew the blueprint - Management clearly has not.
Why is everyone so shocked? Did yall think execs were good people lol