OPINION – Jason Schreier from Kotaku said the best a week or two ago the best in a news for Destiny’s major expansion The Taken King: “Destiny, a yearlong beta for a video game that will be released this September, is getting some major overhauls that we should probably talk about”.

A bit of history

Destiny to me was the game that would bring light into the oversaturated videogame market of magic, and swords. I anticipated its launch with fever, and could not wait to finally enjoy a first class quality content from the creators of the Halo series. Yet unfortunately behind all the hype, and marketing that Activision threw against the wall, and towards the media / players, it seems that someone messed up real bad.
A game (or franchise) that was invested in the amount of 500 million dollars, had less content than a middleware game. While it is true that the development was troubled (Main story writer Joe Staten left / Martin O’Donnel let go), the game was still on track for a 2014 release. Both the alpha, and the beta were a resounding success, hell I loved it, and enjoyed what was offered to me.

A small snippet of two or three campaign missions, voiced by Peter Dinklage, a lot of Star Trek science talk, and excellent gunplay. However one fear was starting to creep at the back of our skull, and that we did not know how big the final game would be. We hoped, and “prayed” that we would have more to do on Earth. The game finally shipped, the reviews were in, and it seemed for many of us that 2014 was a failure in terms of grand projects for the new generation of consoles. Watch Dogs, AC Unity, and now Destiny, all rode the hype into the consumer’s wallet, with the sweet serenade of awesome features, great graphics, story, and unique gameplay… none of them actually delivered on the promised. While Ubisoft learned from the past year’s mistake (or so it seems). Bungie’s  ‘master piece’ has become a sort of anomaly, or a trainwreck to watch.

Not because of how bad the game is, and in fact I would argue that the game’s actual core mechanics of shooting, and killing stuff is unbelievably satisfying. The problems came up, that besides, killing and shooting everything else lacks or is non-existent within the game.

Yet here we are, a year later celebrating the newest expansion for Destiny, called The Taken King.

As a year one player, and as a video game critic, I am torn on the issue of Destiny. On the one hand I saw the potential in it. On the other hand, I have seen how Bungie handled the game , and have decided to minimize playing the actual game (Not just in terms of patching, but how they handle the community).

The game, and the franchise as a whole is in a weird state of limbo. It is a highly successful series in terms of monetary gain. However in terms of reputation it has seemed to diminish Bungie, and has less content than a Call of Duty game. Not just content, but many of the design decisions, and comments from the development team have been baffling. The issues range from an incoherent storyline, connectivity issues, weapon balancing (or the lack of one), content gating, too much grinding, and the lack of official matchmaking on all endgame/story content, or the million other tiny things that drove the community to a standstill.

Borderlands has a gazillion guns, Destiny has a gazillion excuses

The troubles start with the game, when a person tries to define it in terms of genre. Is it

a MMOFPS, is it a co-op game like Borderlands series? The answers from the developers, and fans are usually: No! it is an entirely new experimental game!, and that “there is no text book on developing Destiny” (paraphrasing from a Destiny developer, from a viddoc).

While it certainly seems that there is no official rule on how to develop the game, or even advance it further, it certainly could have used one. As the game was relaxed in terms of development strategy, a lot of mistakes were made. There was no coherent gear ascension planned, or defining how the gear defense and damage numbers were supposed to be handled. This resulted in massive revisions for the player’s gears, and weapons over the course of seven months, two bloody times. The first problems arose with The Dark Below, the first DLC. With the DLC new damage and defense limit was raised, however the exotic weaponry had to be re-levelled, again from scratch, in order to fully maximize the output of these weapons. This meant that players had to regrind all their experience and materials for their weapons.

The outcry was massive, and Bungie listened to the fans, to not repeat the same mistake for the release of their next expansion the House of Wolves. In this expansion, a new item, Etheric Light was announced that would allow the player to upgrade the armor and weapon stat to the maximum of Year One. This was praised by many of the players, including me, and it allowed for all of our favorite legendary, and exotics to be brought forward into the new content.

The Taken King was announced, and as the information was slowly dripped like a junkie asking for another fix, we the community ended up with a bad trip: All year one content grind was deemed to be pointless (excluding exotics, but hey we will get to that), and Bungie shat the bad so bad that players were actively making threads on their forums that they decided to quit the game. It was a sight that I marveled at, and was also amazed at the way Bungie responded: By ignoring the entire problem that they decided to cause.

Well….. to be exact their community manager did respond on Twitter by saying: “Year Two is a new beginning”
Ah yes, a new beginning, a fresh start, Tabula Rasa, a New Hope… and on and on and on it goes with Bungie. While I agree that older content needs to be phased out, in order to give way to the new gear of an expansion pack, Destiny did not allow the community to actually experience the gear due to a number of reasons:

• After the base game release, three months later with the first DLC, messes up the gear progression. Most notably as mentioned above the exotics.
• Acquiring certain gears require the player to re-run entire endgame contents for months to get their desired weapon. Loot is entirely RNG based, but so much that, you’ll end up winning on a Vegas slot machine than getting Gally.
• House of Wolves introduced Etheric Light, which fixed a lot of issues, plus also allowed Legendaries to be rerolled for perks. A resounding success in the community.
• Yet all these huge changes took place within 7 months, which in my opinion is not enough for the community to experience all the provided content. Especially when the devs change up the economy two times, and also remove perks from weapons based on player feedback.  (Also gaining Etheric Light required you to log on and use Looking for Group sites).

Now a year after its release Bungie is again revamping the entire system for the release of The Taken King, and they have decided to leave all Year One legendaries behind. Plus some exotics will be only upgraded later in Year Two (Which implies even more gated content for your favorite weapons). Bungie really should have mapped out gear progression better, as now many fans are feeling that they have wasted their time with the game (me included). I hope that for Year Two and its expansions we will have a better progression for our gears.

Is it an MMO or NOT?!

Fans, and haters of the game like to justify Destiny’s pros, and cons on the following: It is an MMO or No it is not an MMO.

I will take the side of the haters on this, as it seems to me the fans of Destiny have been flip-flopping in order to justify their stance on defending the game

• When someone complains about the lack of matchmaking, social features abundantly missing from the game, some of the fanbase will say: this is not an MMO, ergo such features are not needed (mandatory). Or they’ll go on a tirade on how it would be difficult playing with a bunch of random people, and afkers etc etc…
• Yet when someone complains to Bungie about how weapons should not be left behind, especially Legendary weapons. They’ll say: “This is an MMO, a natural progression of gear. It happens with every other MMO, otherwise Power creep would happen” (Gear that had its leveling system retuned two times in seven months)

Look I played MMOs, and Destiny is not an MMO, it lacks severe support that a usual MMO has such as monthly fixes, or even a normal dedicated server system. The entire loot system is so RNG based that many players were not able to acquire certain weapons / armor (some were even bugged, and not many were able to get), for months! It seems however Bungie has decided to finally fix this by giving new players who buy the Taken King (or get the new update) a more generous system. Hopefully the fix will be good. Speaking of fixes….

I.O.U one patch in six months from now – Note to player from Destiny dev team.

Destiny! The game that recouped its development cost in a few weeks! Destiny.. the game that is successful and has at least above 15 million users, and millions play it daily… barely gets a balance patch. The feedback forums literally burn with posts and threads on what is broken, and Bungie seems to be blind, deaf, and mute (with the occasional, we’re listening posts from the community managers). Nothing is done for months, unless there is a new DLC or expansion pack is about to be released (at least that is the perception they have given to the consumer). Do not get me wrong Bungie actually supported their game with patches for the first three or four months pretty actively.

However after The House of Wolves, everything seems to have fallen onto a metaphorical train tracks. A weapons balance patch wrecked a weapon class. The servers have been absolutely abysmal in PVP including the more endgame parts such as Iron Banner, or Trials of Osiris. Lag is so horrible, that I was shocked that this game had worse lag than Call of Duty games on a bad day. Since there are no dedicated servers, the sessions are handled on a p2p basis. This can result in cases where I loaded an entire magazine into an enemy player, and nothing happened. However instead of admission from the devs or even acknowledgement that there will be some kind of fix for this, the only thing that was presented to the players was: We will ban lagswitchers, and people who try to cheat on PVP. A noble gesture, but it still will not fix most of the problems.

The lack of weapon balancing will be finally addressed on the 8th of September 2015, when we will get finally a patch that makes sweeping changes to all weapon classes. Let’s just hope it will not ruin an entire weapon class again.

The Taken Fix – low expectations, small drops

Destiny lacked a lot of thing including story, and a reasonable grind system. Both of which seems to be getting a massive overhaul The entire voice work of Peter Dinkleage has been overwritten, and Nolan North will be taking over to tighten up the narrative of the base game. The grind system is also getting a reworked, and will offer more consistent rewards to players.

Yet it feels (just as a pure personal opinion) that this is wrong on some level. I could go into what more detail on what is being “fixed”, but that is already being shoved down everyone’s throat as the next godsend. In fact the more I read these changes, the more it seems to be streamlined, to entice new players to join Destiny’s world. Which is fine, but when I look at these updates, the twitch streams, and weekly updates, my mind is raising the following red flags about The Taken King:

• None of the reveal footage, and new details were focused too much on the Taken King. Most of it was focused on fixes, and revamps of the economy
• The actual amount of new missions is eight, plus a series of “quests”, plus one raid
• Factions will also have “quests” but to be honest those look like kill X and Y stuff
• Endless talk about how Year One was a learning experience.

That is what Taken King seems to be, a giant band aid on a sinking ship. Bungie has collected all the data, feedback and is now applying a giant fix to all of it, plus some new content. We will have to wait and see on the whole questifying part of the game, but I do not have too much hope on it being good enough.

Lalalalala we cannot hear you…..

Even though it is a giant fix, Bungie is really good at ignoring, or just pissing off their community. There many forum posts, that even give Bungie valid, heavily informed critiques, and ideas on how to improve the game. Not much is done with these, there are many still pending problems with Destiny. Whenever Bungie is asked for an ETA on patches or if a feature will ever be implemented. This has caused quite a ruckus with the community, and while promises are made, individual comments from the dev team and even the community managers have resulted in bitter flame wars on the forums.

The most heavily debated issue is the lack of matchmaking on endgame content, which will probably not fixed in Destiny 1’s life cycle. Even though it is one of the most heavily requested features, and has been implemented on the Weekly Heroic Strike list. What baffles me that Bungie defends their design decision by saying basically: Use an LFG site. Now this has resulted in me adding countless new players (some of whom have become really good friends) to my PSN friend list. Sadly however there are times when I have no opportunity to play with any of them, and I have to go on to search on three-four different sites.

The reply from Bungie, and some of the fans are: Go out and make friends, or join a clan.
My response is: even the most basic Co-op game has Matchmaking features, stop with the excuses 

A brave community, and end notes.

I would like to commend on how Brave, and yet foolish the community is of Destiny. It is one of the most patient, yet sheepish one of all. Hoping that the developers will listen to their feedback yet, most of the weekly updates are just one sided communications. Some of the fans post (even I did this at one point), post pages upon pages of fixes and ideas.

Not much is done with them, maybe other development teams roam the forums, and take the community’s ideas to implement into their upcoming game. Bungie seems to enjoy the unbelievable monetary success they had with Destiny, but I wonder how long that steam will go on. Especially considering how, while Destiny did not have a big competitor in 2014, many great, and better games will come out by the end of 2015, and next year in 2016.

The Taken King will launch on the 15th of September 2015, and it will be the make it or break it for Destiny in terms of community. In terms of profit, I am sure it will be a smashing hit. However I do have one advice for Bungie, do not make Year Two a learning experience again, a community cannot take another year of mishaps.

-Dante-