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I played the first game and its first two expansions; dabbled in the multiplayer too. For me, Bungie completely changed direction from Halo and abandoned many of the things that made them great as a company. If you had asked me ten years ago about Bungie, I would have said with a straight face that they were masters of story-telling with a straight face. Now, I honestly think they are deluded and it fundamentally isn't the same company which made Halo 2. So that Bungie brand is a hollowed out name that doesn't signify anything.

To give a few reasons:

* Absence of story telling with a silent protagonist.

Halo CE worked because the mystery of the world carried it. Halo 2 because it did an amazing job with the Arbiter and fleshing out the Covenant. However after Halo 2 they effectively abandoned any kind of character building and world building; its just more of the same. This goes right down to reusing entire missions and settings from Halo CE in both H3 and Reach. But in Destiny they went even further and completely scrapped the idea of a linear set piece campaign. At least Reach had that cinematic quality to it even though you were a silent protagonist killing Covenant because reasons. So it took that shallow story telling to a whole new level.

I went into Destiny genuinely curious and left convinced that Bungie were simply ignorant. Look at games like Mass Effect. Story works. Characters work. This Fable/Peter Molyneaux level of "lets let the players imagination fill the blanks" is backwards and does anyone even believe that nonsense? I still hear them say that about Destiny 2 and how we're supposed to play off Zavala and the other Guardians and empathize with "their stories". Even Call of Duty abandoned the silent protagonist thing.

So when I see Bunge dev's with serious faces saying "oh we spent ages world building, but NOW, we're really ready to tell a cinematic story" and "oh the first game was really your introduction to the world and we didn't want to answer everything". Basically shameless excuses that border on dishonest. If you introduced everybody to the Halo Universe in one game with al its main cast in one game there is absolutely no reason you can't do that now. That video actually put me off Destiny 2 it was that bad and I was warming to some of the trailers I had seen and stuff I had heard about the Taken King. As an aside we were at a sci-fi weekender in Wales and a guy with us had went dressed as a Guardian (was real good) and he got me watching some of the trailers which dropped at the same time. But actually hearing the devs chat about it and make excuses is just all kinds of no for me.

* Abandoning Vehicle based combat in multiplayer and high player counts

Bungie I think wanted to aim for the e-sports crowd. This means you have to have a tight, well designed and micro managed system. Some people love this. But to enable this you have to kill all the stuff I like about multiplayer games. I like being part of a ten man infantry wave. I like having huge vehicles rampaging across the map as planes fly ahead. This was a huge aspect of the Halo series and yes its why I adore the Battlefield series at the minute. Battlefield 1 is what I would call a great multiplayer game. I am not impressed by 8 vs 8 players in a few corridors. I've also heard that Destiny 2 will only have 4 vs 4 like Halo 5's Arena mode. I mean if you look at Halo 5, they have that competitive arena stuff but also keep the big vehicle maps in the Warzone modes. So theres no reason you can't do both.

* Grind and repetitive levels and environments:

I have played MMO's. Specifically Star Wars the Old Republic. Now from that game which incorporates all the raids, PVP, open worlds with a solid single player experience means that I take an extremely low opinion of Bungie being incapable of doing both. It can be done and they could not do it. But even after butchering the campaign, they then keep throwing me through repetitive raids in the same environments shooting the same boss with a massive stack of health over and over again until he keels over. Plus the game depends on me replaying content to get loot in order to advance the story; this is irritating.

* Tone

Halo was a space opera. But, it did still have all that 80s sci-fi stuff which was relatively grounded. Destiny is Age of Sigmar in space. Literally the Guardians are Stormcast Eternals. This is a massive shift and one which I am not convinced I like.



So this is what I think and I just want to know, what has Bungie done exactly to earn this goodwill and favor? I am pretty sure they've purged all the key staff that made the Halo games like Marty O Donnel and Joseph Staten. So you can only really judge this brand on Destiny and I do not see how people can so quickly and easily accept this.

I don't think it's bungie that keeps drawing people to them its the game, and overall game play. When Destiny first launched there wasn't anything really in the form of "next gen" games to play. Destiny slid right in and filled that void.

The story line from what I was told was thrown out due to the main writer for Destiny leaving and taking the story with him due to contract agreement, but who really know.

I regretfully bought all the DLCs and didn't plan on getting Destiny 2 (which looks like another DLC) Both real friends and online friends, that played the game together are getting the game. In order for me to maintain those friendships I'm also getting the game, unfortunately. Most of us think the game will be total and utter trash, but we will suffer together.

I find it hilarious that bungie is considered unforgivable, and yet the various companies behind Call of Duty commits horrible sins left and right and are basically swiftly forgiven.

 Melissia wrote:
I find it hilarious that bungie is considered unforgivable, and yet the various companies behind Call of Duty commits horrible sins left and right and are basically swiftly forgiven.

Those companies are so vilified its almost passé to dig at them, so when people do now everyone who still likes those games will call you a hater, and everyone who agrees with you already knows

I've got a friend who's of the opinion that Destiny's story improved tremendously in the last two or three DLCs. Since I haven't played those ones, I can't offer my own opinion on the subject. But I figured it was worth bringing up.

But by the time Bungie finally did start working on the story it was way to late, the whole vanilla campaign was already played through. They couldn't add any story anywhere other than the DLC and .... grimores....

The Beta is out this weekend for 2 so im sure we will have a fresh new outlook from the public masses... Seems Lame Stop didnt give me a beta code :(

I played the first two DLC. Both of them were really mediocre. You're essentially herded through some bland levels towards a generic boss which you stomp. Theres a pathetic attempt at exposition and story telling. For example they almost never bother to explain to you why the main villain in House of Wolves betrays you and don't bother to build him up as a villain.

Having seen the cutscenes for the Taken King and Lords of Iron Bungie appears to have made some improvements. But on the level of "lets have a 20 second cutscene where the Taken King goes "I will take them all". No attempt is made to explain what he is and what sort of threat he actually is. They keep the silent protagonist, which I despise; such a backwards concept. How can you have a dynamic with the villain or any emotional attachment to the game if you are just a nameless "Guardian" the entire time.

I've played Operations in The Old Republic that have better story telling and character building than you get in Destiny. So the excuse that its because too much narration would interfere with gameplay has no cause with me.

The issue is that people seem to push that Destiny release was just a mis-step. But, I can look back to Halo 3 onwards and see the same problems. Its just that Halo CE and Halo 2 did such a good job explaining that universe and setting things in motion that they didn't need to do anymore world building.

Don't a lot of games have that free running style of gameplay? Titanfall, CoD, Halo 5, Overwatch? Its just that those games have more stuff like mechs, vehicles, kill streaks, weapon customization. Or you have Battlefield or Battlefront with those enormous and immersive maps which sell the experience of being in a huge battle.

I thought Destiny was fine. I enjoyed playing it and leveling up, but like most games, once I get to the "end" I stop playing. I rarely do 2nd playthrus or alt characters, unless it can be a totally different experience (quests, story, etc). To me it was just another shooter, but it was still fun to play. I'll most likely pick up part 2, but probably after it's been out a while and the price comes down a bit.

I gave Bungie the benefit of the doubt for the first batch of DLC.
Why?

Because they were trying something new. They hadn't ever done something akin to a MMO.

After "House of Wolves" and the changes they made with that? Nope. I was done. They were after the payday, not the playdays. It's why they've invested so heavily in Twitch streamers to plug the game.

Will not be getting Destiny 2. I'm going to play the beta though, and if it's a huge difference...then maybe. Maybe I'll consider it.

Right now, my game list looks like this:
Fortnite(yay! next Friday!)
Battlefront II. The addition of SP and the inclusion of Paul Blackthorne sold me on it.

Three points:

1. http://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-behind-the-making-of-destiny-1737556731 (worth reading)
2. I think Destiny was supposed to be a "games as a service" type of game (but it didn't work out in the end)
3. You point at Halo 1 and 2 but by the time they started with Destiny the company had already grown a lot (many new coworkers) and some of the early employees had already left the company (because of level 14)

My read of the situation is that the Halo games created a lot of goodwill for Bungie and that they themselves were very ambitious but the reality of game development—unpredictable problems cause delays because it's complex, especially in AAA game development of new properties and doubly so when you have a great track record and are optimistic about your project—hit them hard in the face. And the result is Destiny.

Nobody cares about Kotaku.

Seriously. They're the InfoWars of video game news.
Stop giving them clicks.

That's a bit overselling it, Kan.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Nobody cares about Kotaku.

Seriously. They're the InfoWars of video game news.
Stop giving them clicks.

Maybe read the article before gaking on it? They have a lot of clickbait article but also some good content now and then. If you want some other source then try this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2hqmkb/how_destinys_content_completely_changed_over_the/

or this here, a GDC presentation from one of their engine developers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UU92a5pKV6k (Destiny: Six Years in the Making - GDC 2015), this is the presentation for the above video: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022106/Lessons-from-the-Core-Engine

A few quotes:

But the big one is that our content iteration times are pretty bad. You can be looking
at minutes for small changes and tens of minutes for big changes. One of the pillars of
the engine was meant to be rapid content iteration, and we struggled with this for
the whole course of the project. It’s very hard to solve this problem during active
development, but we’ve made big strides toward fixing it after release. I’ll talk about
this more later on as well.

So, to review what we’ve learned so far:
- ** we undertook a massive transformation of our engine
- ** we built a lot of features that are highly technically advanced – which is both
good and bad
- ** And it took about one-and-a-half years longer to build the engine than we
originally thought

Well, what actually happened is that all the engine dependencies underneath the
script sandbox wound up being built out-of-order. So it wasn’t just that the Tiger
engine APIs arrived late. Rather we would replace a shim, and then realize we needed
to replace it again later because that shim needed to get rewritten due to ANOTHER
shim underneath it changing.
** We basically ended up writing 4 separate script compilers, in 2008, 2010, 2012
and 2014.
The details aren’t super important, and they are very hard to quantify anyway. The
main point of this slide is to convince you that I’m really not kidding about technical
debt that costs 10-15x what you would expect.
** At every point along the way we were making very calm, rational decisions based
on sunk costs and what we felt remained to be shippable. But the costs kept creeping
up on us, because all of the shims obscured the structure of the final system. We
always felt we were a lot closer to a shippable system than we really were.
** We ended up bogged down in this vicious cycle of shims leading to code churn,
leading to complex systems, which resulted in slow iteration times and poor
performance.

Maybe that's worth your clicks?

No, it really isn't.

Most of this was public knowledge along the way when developers aired their grievances.

Statement Redacted. Edit -

I played the Beta for Destiny 2...

I dont know how I feel. It could be another DLC.

There are plenty of new enemies (some reskinned from Destiny 1) you mainly see Cabal.

The multiplayer maps are different and where fun, but played the same as the first one.

The strike was enjoyable, but was was another strike.

The Single Player mission left me super intrigued, the Cabal somehow steal your light?! and the main villain is Ghaul who is the cabal Darth Vader wearing all white. Your Super charges really slow and the Movement speed is different.

There isn't discipline/ strength / intellect . There is resilience / agility / recovery.

I'm going to get it, but my friends and I are still have the expectation that Bungie is taking our money and running. Hope for the best, plan for the worst

While I don't disagree generally I do disagree that the strike was just like the others as it comes across as something more like a mix of strike and raid. There was nothing like the part where you have to traverse the dig site without getting hit by the big arms going in circles cutting up the earth in the original strikes and the final boss being in three parts was a bit different. The scale of the strike was much bigger than earlier. I hope most strikes in Destiny 2 are as long and inventive but they may not be.

The slow regen of grenades/melee as well as the incredibly sparse ammo drops are supposedly things that the development have made adjustments to.

After doing the Strike 4 times I wasn't looking forward to doing it again. Hopefully there isn't assassination bounties for long missions again. I like the mechanic for the guns, for the most part.
Interested to see how the armor shaders will work since you can put different ones on each piece of armor.

I didn't hate the beta, I didn't love it. It was a resounding "Meh" all in all it felt mostly the same as D1, which was also a lot of "Meh".

I played 1 alot with friends and I'll likely play 2 with friends, but its not one of those "Omg, this game is so good!" games, its resoundingly mediocre.

I agree. I followed D1 from concept to beta, and then played D1. I was appalled at the change in direction of the released game versus the original concept and more rich story. Then the whole pay issue between Bungie and Martin O'Donnell. Then the ghost voice changing. All the changes as we went. Xur. Buying dlc all the time.... I literally sold my xbox & games because D1 put me off so much. Oh, the fact they had actual psychiatrists that specialized in drug and gambling addictions help create the game to be addictive was #$%^&* up too.