Just one opinion here, but I've played a /ton/ of Destiny in a fairly casual but consistent way (e.g. no raids or Mic) since launch, and I think it is fairy underrated at this point. There were definitely droughts along the way, but at this point it is a solid game, which when played on Xbox One X is IMHO the finest looking game on consoles. The semi-multiplayer modes are great fun and they've tuned the weekly reset cycle to a point where pretty much every play session is rewarding in some way or another.
I'm glad for their independence and look forward to what the future brings, and I do hope that further investment in Destiny (3 or continuation of 2) is part of that picture.
I share this opinion. I was so excited for Destiny (fun fact: it came out the same day Apple announced the Apple Watch - I remember playing Destiny then taking a break to tune into the keynote) but it was pretty unpolished on Day 1. I dived back in with The Taken King, which I really enjoyed.
I ignored Destiny 2 when it first came out, then picked it up on Black Friday last year with all the expansions. I basically treat it as a single player game and absolutely love it. The combat is so sharp and tight, the missions are enjoyable.
I know it has a lot to offer with raids and fireteams and all of that, but I just want a few hours of escapism and for that, it truly delivers.
I do enjoy the game, but I can't agree with this insane pricing model. Just on principle I refuse to pay $60 for a game and $40 for DLC and then $20 for more DLC then $40 for an expansion and then $40 for DLC to the expansion. I'd play it if there was just a single cost that was reasonable. Until the game stops getting paid DLC and there is just a flat cost to play the rest of the games I am not going to get back into it.
You vote for this kind of nonsense with your money and people keep buying it then this will never stop.
Since 2014 I've been playing with mostly one solid group of real-life friends. We've had times where we weren't playing as much, but Destiny would eventually draw us back. Forsaken has been amazing, and we are having a blast at the moment. This is the best Destiny has ever been.
The general sentiment among friends (and the community) is that this is a good thing.
>they've tuned the weekly reset cycle to a point where pretty much every play session is rewarding in some way or another.
Oh my god this. It's almost impossible for you to rotate through all daily's and weekly's with three characters without resetting before you're done. It's great, it's still the same seemingly mundane stuff (just kill a bunch of shit, collect whatever bullshit) if I read it aloud to you, but it's so damn satisfying. The gunplay is a well oiled machine, and it feels amazing to just screw around.
It's fine that you enjoy it casually, but the end game is what most people who are hard on the game care about. That's where they've had a lot of issues and it's the single most important aspect of a game like this. If your diehards don't enjoy end game then you have a problem.
I remember running AppleTalk network cables (the ones with the phone line adapters) out of windows between dorm rooms in the winter. Risking life and limb to crawl out on ice-covered ledges just to build a network that allowed us to play Marathon.
Modding the game was really fun too, we'd build guns that were more powerful, or guns that shot out drones that could help you. I remember setting one of the enemies to create a clone of itself -- introduction to loops right there as my Macintosh Performa ran out of RAM.
I still feel like, even to date, the immersive story telling in this game was some of the best I've seen. Impressive given they were working on computers that had less power than today's phones -- like 1/1,000th of the power of today's phones. I remember running the game on a Color Classic with 33 MHZ and 4 MB of RAM.
My first Bungie game was Myth. I absolutely loved the series. First time I was drawn into the story and characters. I loved being able give names to the characters and keep them alive. It was slow paced but surprising suspenseful. Online multiplayer in later titles was hilarious.
I also remember the teaser to what would become halo. I think originally Halo was going to be a lot more like Destiny...Then the xbox came along and microsoft bought Bungie.
Myth is criminally underrated both in terms of gameplay and technological ambition. Real time reflections, Physics based projectiles, wide variety of multiplayer options and customization, hand animated cutscenes, a post apocalyptic medieval fantasy setting it is certainly one of the most unique games I have played.
It's one of my favorite games of all time and I wish they would rerelease it or at least add modern OS support for it.
Myth had a plot quality and replay value way beyond what I expected for the price point. Not really comparable to even the AI in Shogun, but still more replayable.
I remember when Bungie first sold to Microsoft. In one of the levels in Halo, there’s a bulletin board on a wall with a flyer that reads: FOR SALE - CHICAGO OFFICE - INTEGRITY
Glad to see them fully independent again, even if it took almost two decades.
Blizzard is not a separate company with just a publishing contract like Bungie did. Blizzard was bought out by Activision and is now Activision-Blizzard and treated as a subsidiary company.
I suppose Blizzard could try to raise enough capital to buy themselves but I think its unlikely
Does anybody have any thoughts on how this separation squares with Bungie's recent 100M investment from NetEase? [1]. IIRC this is the same company behind Activision/Blizzard's Diablo mobile game.
It would seem that the biggest change here is that Bungie cut out the middleman.
I'd think that the NetEase investment gave them the confidence boost they needed to try out on their own and self-publish in most of the world. As with every non-Chinese game company the question is how they can get a piece of the Chinese market, and now Bungie has their answer.
I don't think I could go back to Pathways. It was really a product of it's time and while I enjoyed my time with it, I don't think it has aged very well.
Welp, that means we won’t be able to blame Activision for any stupid decisions from here on out...
I do wish Bungie the best here. I also suspect that the next installment will be more of a “$x/month for everything” instead of the “$x for the game and $x for the expansions” they’ve been doing.
I see a tonne of people making statements along the lines of "That's great, now Bungie can back to being the company that makes games like Halo". But can someone explain to me why they think that could ever happen? The Microsoft acquisition was a key part of what made Halo, Bungie was a way smaller company back then and a huge amount of the talent will have moved on. How many companies churn out great series decades apart? I just think people are setting themselves up for a HL3 situation again- huge expectations that never get delivered on.
I worked there for a bit and as its been a few years since I last swiped my badge in Bellevue, but I think there are a few tidbits I can add.
- Independence has always been a priority for Bungie, the leaked contract and the relationships with Activision/Blizzard/HalfMoon were always "at most we are peers". Bungie got what they wanted out of this deal, a bit of a mentor relationship with Blizzard and some knowhow on large scale publishing and marketing from Activision. I dont think the endgame was anything less of getting out after Destiny 4+
- Leaving might have to do more with sunsetting and moving on from the Destiny franchise than creative freedom for it. I still have a few friends (Hey guys!) there and there has been a bit of burnout. The community will either reward you with riches and praise for something as simple as a cool looking weapon or dump hate and death threats for what should be a needed stats nerf. So people's eyes started to wander on other things. After the departure of the long time studio head onto his garage game experiment, you saw a lot of exits and shuffling.
- Destiny was slated for 4 milestone releases, each with point releases. This was laid out on a conference whiteboard at one point, where every two years you saw a new Destiny release with a core gameplay mechanic added (dogfighting spaceships in the expanses past Pluto?) and point releases that seem to dance from one race story to another. Something about having your future lined up and being contractually obligated to draw out an already gutted story over 8-10 years can be a bit draining, especially when revenue takes a significant hit after Fortnite and you are still expected to maintain the same AAA dev costs.
- Some of the old timers hate being known as the "Halo" company and departing means that they don't have to just be the "Destiny" company. These designers, from Jason, down to the tester who makes sure you dont get nausea from an ingame fall, care more about the art and experience than the microtransaction potential. They would rather build new IP that sold itself than something that keeps you on the treadmill.
- The culture there was easily the best in the industry for a studio of its size. They put a serious effort to bring everyone to the table, from the Pentathlon and playing some random Wii game with a Senior Executive and getting a bit tipsy, to having lunch and probing questions with Jason as he mowed down a bowl of frozen peaches and quinoa. Bungie did what it could to make you feel like you were a part of the family, even if you didnt work on HaloX or if you were just a Tester, or if you were just a tester. When I was there, I never felt like I was a part of Activision, and from what I gathered in the years since, that hasn't changed much. Artists, designers, and engineers always came before the marketing and profiters.
I know they are building something new, and given the frustrations they had with Activision and the lessons learned on Destiny2, its going to be a piece of fun art.
I love seeing Oni mentioned in discussions about Bungie. It's always held a special place in my heart.
Did you ever check out the Anniversary Edition mod? It's a massive community-made enhancement to the base game that adds a ton of fixes alongside a really dope mod framework. The reason I bring this up is because it allows for stuff like Oni Team Arena[0], a fake multiplayer mode that lets you basically play team deathmatch with bots. It's super fun and when I first played it, it breathed a whole new life into the game for me.
I don't know if they could do much more with it, but that was a darn enjoyable video game.
I've recently read some of Glen Cook's "Chronicles of the Black Company" and I think that was very much in line with the story in Myth in some ways. It was kind of like reading a novelisation of the game, only to find out the novel was written 15+ years ahead of the game!
Interesting. Hopefully they start producing quality stuff, but really, the people who made the best games (Marathon, Halo) don't even work there anymore.
That's true, but institutional memory is a thing. Those people established and influenced systems that persist.
There isn't anybody in the US government who was there for the 1970s, but the US is still fundamentally the same entity that does the same things the same way
Bungie wasn’t acquired by activision, they were an independent developer that had a publishing contract for the Destiny franchise with activision. Seems like the contract was renegotiated at the request of one side or the other.
So how does this benefit Activision? It seems everyone is focusing on Bungie but not asking how in the world Activision allowed this to pass. Did bungie just give them a bunch of cash? Giving up destiny is still a huge cash cow with the franchise bringing in well over $500 million since it was released in 2014.
Blizzard and Bungie have a completely different relationship to Activision. Bungie was a game developer with Activision as the publisher; Blizzard was bought by Activision, and merged to become 'Activision Blizzard studios'. We're not going to see anything of the same from Blizzard.
[+] [-] stuart78|7 years ago|reply
I'm glad for their independence and look forward to what the future brings, and I do hope that further investment in Destiny (3 or continuation of 2) is part of that picture.
[+] [-] emdowling|7 years ago|reply
I ignored Destiny 2 when it first came out, then picked it up on Black Friday last year with all the expansions. I basically treat it as a single player game and absolutely love it. The combat is so sharp and tight, the missions are enjoyable.
I know it has a lot to offer with raids and fireteams and all of that, but I just want a few hours of escapism and for that, it truly delivers.
[+] [-] izzydata|7 years ago|reply
You vote for this kind of nonsense with your money and people keep buying it then this will never stop.
[+] [-] jasonlotito|7 years ago|reply
The general sentiment among friends (and the community) is that this is a good thing.
[+] [-] hatsunearu|7 years ago|reply
Oh my god this. It's almost impossible for you to rotate through all daily's and weekly's with three characters without resetting before you're done. It's great, it's still the same seemingly mundane stuff (just kill a bunch of shit, collect whatever bullshit) if I read it aloud to you, but it's so damn satisfying. The gunplay is a well oiled machine, and it feels amazing to just screw around.
[+] [-] EpicEng|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bombthecat|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|7 years ago|reply
* Marathon (video game) - Wikipedia || https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(video_game)
I remember running AppleTalk network cables (the ones with the phone line adapters) out of windows between dorm rooms in the winter. Risking life and limb to crawl out on ice-covered ledges just to build a network that allowed us to play Marathon.
Modding the game was really fun too, we'd build guns that were more powerful, or guns that shot out drones that could help you. I remember setting one of the enemies to create a clone of itself -- introduction to loops right there as my Macintosh Performa ran out of RAM.
I still feel like, even to date, the immersive story telling in this game was some of the best I've seen. Impressive given they were working on computers that had less power than today's phones -- like 1/1,000th of the power of today's phones. I remember running the game on a Color Classic with 33 MHZ and 4 MB of RAM.
[+] [-] jrobn|7 years ago|reply
I also remember the teaser to what would become halo. I think originally Halo was going to be a lot more like Destiny...Then the xbox came along and microsoft bought Bungie.
[+] [-] bliblah|7 years ago|reply
It's one of my favorite games of all time and I wish they would rerelease it or at least add modern OS support for it.
[+] [-] selimthegrim|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danaliv|7 years ago|reply
Glad to see them fully independent again, even if it took almost two decades.
[+] [-] jfoutz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptonerd2212|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] astonex|7 years ago|reply
I suppose Blizzard could try to raise enough capital to buy themselves but I think its unlikely
[+] [-] beezischillin|7 years ago|reply
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/activision-and-blizz...
[+] [-] throwawaywhynot|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProfessorLayton|7 years ago|reply
It would seem that the biggest change here is that Bungie cut out the middleman.
[1] https://www.polygon.com/2018/6/1/17418862/bungie-netease-inv...
[+] [-] alexland|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Waterluvian|7 years ago|reply
How can you not be intrigued by an FPS adventure horror RPG text-based adventure?
[+] [-] germinalphrase|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kbenson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __david__|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oddevan|7 years ago|reply
I do wish Bungie the best here. I also suspect that the next installment will be more of a “$x/month for everything” instead of the “$x for the game and $x for the expansions” they’ve been doing.
[+] [-] Traster|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmichelin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _cerv|7 years ago|reply
- Independence has always been a priority for Bungie, the leaked contract and the relationships with Activision/Blizzard/HalfMoon were always "at most we are peers". Bungie got what they wanted out of this deal, a bit of a mentor relationship with Blizzard and some knowhow on large scale publishing and marketing from Activision. I dont think the endgame was anything less of getting out after Destiny 4+
- Leaving might have to do more with sunsetting and moving on from the Destiny franchise than creative freedom for it. I still have a few friends (Hey guys!) there and there has been a bit of burnout. The community will either reward you with riches and praise for something as simple as a cool looking weapon or dump hate and death threats for what should be a needed stats nerf. So people's eyes started to wander on other things. After the departure of the long time studio head onto his garage game experiment, you saw a lot of exits and shuffling.
- Destiny was slated for 4 milestone releases, each with point releases. This was laid out on a conference whiteboard at one point, where every two years you saw a new Destiny release with a core gameplay mechanic added (dogfighting spaceships in the expanses past Pluto?) and point releases that seem to dance from one race story to another. Something about having your future lined up and being contractually obligated to draw out an already gutted story over 8-10 years can be a bit draining, especially when revenue takes a significant hit after Fortnite and you are still expected to maintain the same AAA dev costs.
- Some of the old timers hate being known as the "Halo" company and departing means that they don't have to just be the "Destiny" company. These designers, from Jason, down to the tester who makes sure you dont get nausea from an ingame fall, care more about the art and experience than the microtransaction potential. They would rather build new IP that sold itself than something that keeps you on the treadmill.
- The culture there was easily the best in the industry for a studio of its size. They put a serious effort to bring everyone to the table, from the Pentathlon and playing some random Wii game with a Senior Executive and getting a bit tipsy, to having lunch and probing questions with Jason as he mowed down a bowl of frozen peaches and quinoa. Bungie did what it could to make you feel like you were a part of the family, even if you didnt work on HaloX or if you were just a Tester, or if you were just a tester. When I was there, I never felt like I was a part of Activision, and from what I gathered in the years since, that hasn't changed much. Artists, designers, and engineers always came before the marketing and profiters.
I know they are building something new, and given the frustrations they had with Activision and the lessons learned on Destiny2, its going to be a piece of fun art.
[+] [-] dasKrokodil|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dragonai|7 years ago|reply
Did you ever check out the Anniversary Edition mod? It's a massive community-made enhancement to the base game that adds a ton of fixes alongside a really dope mod framework. The reason I bring this up is because it allows for stuff like Oni Team Arena[0], a fake multiplayer mode that lets you basically play team deathmatch with bots. It's super fun and when I first played it, it breathed a whole new life into the game for me.
[0]: https://wiki.oni2.net/AE:OTA
[+] [-] ebg13|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikdaheratik|7 years ago|reply
I've recently read some of Glen Cook's "Chronicles of the Black Company" and I think that was very much in line with the story in Myth in some ways. It was kind of like reading a novelisation of the game, only to find out the novel was written 15+ years ahead of the game!
[+] [-] matchbok|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hannasanarion|7 years ago|reply
There isn't anybody in the US government who was there for the 1970s, but the US is still fundamentally the same entity that does the same things the same way
[+] [-] m0zg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javagram|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bliblah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monocasa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javagram|7 years ago|reply
A decent number still at bungie, a lot have moved on to other places of course.
[+] [-] skilled|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aromasin|7 years ago|reply