Oh, we're here again?

03 Nov 2023

Another go ‘round the merry-go-round…

Look, not to be glib, but I’m tired. The last three years alone have been exhausting for anyone with a functioning frontal lobe, not to speak of any time before that. And now, it comes out that Bungie is once again in trouble. First off: it really fucking sucks that once again, the workers are the ones punished for ‘underperformance’ and apparently the fault never lies at the feet of the managers that the problems developed under their watch. This year in particular has been notible for the amount of layoffs in a lot of sectors, particularly in technology, and goddamn it always hurts to see good people lose their jobs for something that ultimately isn’t their fault. Any long term fan of Destiny and Bungie will tell you that this is not the first time the company’s had a serious problem. Aside from the various crisises and dramas with particular nitpicks regarding the game’s mechanics, there was the reported sexism and abuse issues in 2021, and then in 2018 how Bungie was basically a month from complete collapse if Destiny 2: Forsaken didn’t succeed. So, given that Destiny 2: Lightfall missed it’s targets by a massive 45%, I would like to ask the question - how did this happen?

Let’s try and take a … ‘objective’ look at where Destiny is right now, and what contributes to it being here. For the last several years the game’s run on the model of a major update on a semi-yearly cadence (delays aside), with four smaller content seasons, each taking three months of the year. For the last several major content updates we’ve gotten:

• A story campaign, about 8-10 missions long and would generally take 3-4 hours to complete.
• 1-2 strikes (a roughly half-hour narrative-driven mission designed for repeat play)
• A raid (a 1-4 hour narrative driven combat challenge designed for six players, and is supposed to represent the most complex and challenging content in Destiny)
• A bunch of armour and weapons, exotic or otherwise
• Some sort of ability update, whether it’s the entire new subclasses of Stasis and Strand of Beyond Light and Lightfall, or the Subclass 3.0 updates from Witch Queen.

A seasonal content update usually consists of (most of which requires the paid season pass):

• A three-or-six player activity
• A (harder) three-player activity, often non-matchmade
• A story that plays out over six or so weeks, usually in the form of a few cutscenes / audio recordings, a laundry list of tasks, and a mission each week.
• An exotic quest of some sort, depending on the season.
• An exotic weapon from the season pass, that free-to-players can earn midway through the free tiers.
• A three week event which usually involves some sort of remix on an existing activity with fun modifiers and some sort of armour and weapon loot reward. (free to play)

Also, there’s some sort of a ‘returning’ raid from Destiny 1 in the third season of the year, and the second and fourth seasons get a Dungeon, which is sort of like a smaller three-player raid. The dungeons require the purchase of a Dungeon key from the online store, or if you’ve purchased the big-mega-huge-ultimate version of the expansion it comes with the year of seasonal passes and the dungeon keys. The reprised raids in season 3 are free-to-play for all.

It’s also worth noting that with each major content update, due to what Bungie claims is keeping the game’s package size small and also not having to constantly retest older content to make sure they don’t break it, Destiny removes the previous year’s seasonal content from the game, making the armour and weapons from those seasons mostly unavailable to players at all. The content removed is access to the seasonal activities, narrative content, and rewards.

So looking at it all laid out like that you might think “Wow, Chris, that’s a lot of stuff! And you paid $150 AUD for it, that’s nuts!” and my answer to that is … “sort of.” If you’re not familiar with Destiny, aside from the chunks of story content that add up to maybe 20 hours of content a year if you’re being generous, you have to understand one thing about the game: You spend a lot of time running the same content over and over again. Strikes, Crucible, Gambit, seasonal activities, tne seasonal event, you’ll spend hours upon hours running the activities over and over again to earn rewards. And that’s the problem - why are you doing this, and are you having fun?

So, and keeping in mind I have 3000 hours in the game, the game is fun to play. Shooting the guns is fun and feels good due to a combination of animations and sound and tweaking feedback. The abilties that you get access to are unique and can significantly change how you approach any given encounter. At the higher tiers, combat is challenging and there are encounters in the game that are absolutely brilliant to play through. The raids are, for the most part, amazing experiences and are where Destiny shines the most. The PVP can be brilliant, showing your mastery of the games mechanics against someone else’s (or your mastery of the game’s bullshit).

What’s not so great about Destiny? The way guns work in Destiny is that they have a series of perks on them. Any given random drop of a gun randomly selects from a pool of perks for that weapon that can significantly affect how that particular instance of that weapon behaves. The first two perks on a gun will affect things like it’s accuracy, range, reload speed and recoil, and the third and fourth perks will be more esoteric modifiers, almost always requiring you to meet some sort of requirement like killing an enemy, or killing with a precision (head) shot, or killing multiple enemies, or dealing melee damage, or using an ability, and the effect it applies ranges from improving damage or reload speed to creating miniture explosions, to healing you, to giving you ability energy. There’s a massive amount of perks in the game, and not every gun has every perk as they each have a curated-by-bungie pool of perks to make this hand cannon different from that hand cannon, for example. In any case, given the massive pool of random options that can occur on any specific weapon, you could be hunting for a 1 in 1000 or higher chance to see a specific combination of perks on a gun, which is what drives players to repeatedly play activities. Repeat that for particular stat splits on armour, or completing triumphs (specific tasks that the game has you complete for prestige reasons), or obtaining “red borders”, weapons with a red border that give you progression for a blueprint to allow you to craft that gun, allowing you to select the perks - for an (in-game currency, not real money) fee, of course.

So you’re playing activities over and over again to get guns that work well to play activities over and over again. It’s a weird gameplay loop, but it works. vsauce sting noise But does it? If you’re actively playing Destiny 2 it’s hard to not notice that, well, there’s less people playing. Matchmaking times are longer, you see the same people more often than normal, you’re playing with international players more, using the Looking for Group (where you can find other people to coordinate to typically complete raids and difficult activities) has less ‘traffic’. Why is that? There’s a few reasons.

1. This is an absolute banger year for video games. Baldur’s Gate 3, Alan Wake 2, Spider-man 2, just to name a few - you’re absolutely spoiled for top-quality games to play, and this is after previous years that also had excellent titles.
2. Lightfall’s story was… lackluster. The plot was a little nonsensical, players did not mesh well with the new characters in general and had issues with tone and delivery, the conclusion was incomplete and felt unsatisfying - to the point where they added more plot in later seasonal updates that provided some answers as to what the hell was going on.
3. Very little of the content added to the game is the repeatable content - we got two new PvP maps this year, the second one only after complaints reached a breaking point regarding the issue - one new strike, and a raid. The seasonal activities are 15 minutes long at most, and there’s only two, meaning you’re doing slight variations on the same fifteen minutes over and over again. The game’s content is feeling stale at this point, and there’s less of it since the Beyond Light update removed a stack of strikes, and gambit and crucible maps from the game.
4. All the content and narrative from the previous year, apart from the major expansion content, is gone. Any narrative context is almost completely removed from the game and you have to basically go to YouTube in order to find out what even happened.
5. It’s super difficult for a new player to start playing the game. You enter this game, nine years into a dense narrative, a lot of which isn’t even available to experience in the game, and you’re thrown into the deep end with mechanics and terminology that other players have learnt over nine years and the game makes an attempt to teach you, with varying success depending on your willingness to engage with the often oblique ways this game presents it’s content. It’s often stated that new players have to be sherpa’d into the game. And that’s all on top of the confusion of “which version of Destiny 2 do I buy”, because you need to buy each expansion separately, and if you want Stasis you need Beyond Light and if you want that you need to buy this and that and it’s all a bit much.

I’m sure I missed some reasons, but basically it comes down to: the overwhelming sentiment is that players are bored, the game feels like a chore to play, and the narrative payoff is whelming at best. (side note: I have less issues with the narrative than most - I *like Nimbus, and I miss Sagira, and I didn’t mind the ‘more cheesy’ Red War story, and I love the little bits of narrative all over the place; the recent lore book from the Festival from the Lost is a great example - but even I recognise issues with the Lightfall narrative.) After nine years it’s really not surprising that half-measures aren’t going to cut it to keep this game alive, and this is *on top of having new corporate owners (Sony) that surely look at the budget sheets and ask questions.

So, given that Bungie are (yet again) at the precipice of do-or-die for Destiny 2; what do I think they should do?

1. All development on unannounced projects is mothballed. Marathon goes to skeleton development staffing at best. They now have 8% less staff than they used to, they can’t afford to waste time here. All available resources on The Final Shape.
2. Bungie announces The Final Shape has a six month delay. Replacing that slot they extend the final season and basically do what they did for the 30th anniversary expansion with key differences: it’s free, and it’s more akin to the Age of Triumphs final update from Destiny 1 where they make it rain loot, bring back vaulted strikes and maps and remix encounters. No new content, but heavily lean on existing content. Heck, next year they’ll have the 10th anniversary for Destiny, play off that somehow.
3. Reduce RNG - give players ways to affect RNG even further in their favour. Note that players’s behaviour seems to indicate that a certain amount of RNG is an enjoyable way to play; much in the same way that people enjoy gambling, but clearly a line has been crossed here and they need to pull back - it’s worth noting that they have been pulling back RNG since Shadowkeep, but I think they’re still too far over in Gatcha territory for what this game costs.
4. Unvault content, particularly narrative content. I think The Final Shape just needs more stuff. More strikes, more maps, more everything. Gambit maps will go a long way but I think they need to take a hard look at that mode’s balancing again. I don’t think we’ll magically end up with another darkness subclass - it’ll take more than nine months to develop that, but I can pipedream. Maybe they’ll announce it for a later seasonal update.
5. Package all previous expansions into a single cheap bundle, including the dungeons. Emphasis on the cheap, like 20 bucks. 40 if you include Lightfall maybe. Make it easy for a player to work out what to buy to play the game fully. Heck, maybe make Shadowkeep and Beyond Light’s narrative free to play.
6. (pipedream) SRL. Screw it, people keep asking for it.

The problem with this wishlist is that they don’t have a lot of time to do it in. They might have legal and/or accounting issues with preorders and not delivering inside windows - but that’s for lawyers to work out. They just cut a small pile of staff, that’s not-insigificant chunk of people less to do work with, particularly when some of the people laid off are some of the most experienced staff they had. They’re fighting an uphill battle and I’m not even confident that management are going to learn the right lessons from this - there’s every chance that they turn around and go “well it was working better when the game was more frustrating to play, so let’s double down on that”. Hopefully they still have smart people who can identify the issues and make the game a more engaging place for more people to play.

I really love Destiny and it’s world, and I think it’s a real shame if it was to fizzle away at the ten year mark and become nothing more than a quiet footnote in gaming history as a “hey, remember Destiny?”.