Destined to Fail?
It’s time to get your s&!t together, Bungie.
Like most people who gamed in the 2000s, I was a big fan of the Halo series. I remember setting up enormous LAN parties with my fraternity brothers, playing against each other on Xboxes hooked up to projectors in different buildings of our alma mater, Ursinus College. Since then, times have changed, but my friends and I still find time to play together. But it’s a crying shame we still don’t have a true successor to the Halo series to enjoy.
After the resounding success of the first Halo, Microsoft quickly gobbled up the studio that created it, Bungie Inc. A few years later, Bungie split back off from Microsoft in order to develop a new game series, Destiny. Destiny is, in most respects, the spiritual follow-up to the original Halo trilogy. Although the lore is completely different, the fundamental shooting mechanics in Destiny are very similar to Halo, and quite solid.
Unfortunately for us Destiny players, although Bungie has proven themselves more than capable of building a tight, satisfying shooter, they have done an abominable job with virtually every other aspect of the Destiny experience. Critics rightfully shredded the game at launch for, among other things, its repetitiveness and complete lack of any semblance of a plot. And though Bungie has released expansions since launch which have ramped up the storytelling (especially the latest, The Taken King), in the end they have a long way to go to redeem themselves with this game.
That being the case, you might expect Bungie to be focused on regularly releasing content for Destiny to backfill its missing story and patch up the game’s other missing elements. But you’d be wrong. After releasing The Taken King (TTK), Bungie has apparently decided not to drop in any more meaningful content until God-knows-when. Instead, for many months now, we players have been treated to cutesy mini-events involving activities like collecting useless Halloween masks and racing hoverbikes. There have been no more raids or other endgame content released since TTK, and evidently none are on the horizon.
Now, again, you might think that given how the studio has been treating its player base, they would at least have the decency to explain what they are planning, and when we can expect more substantive content. But sadly, you would again be mistaken. Bungie has all but shut down communication with its players of late. We have no reason to expect that anything of note will be added to the game until fall or winter of this year (or possibly even early 2017), at which time Destiny 2 will likely be released.
In other words, then, we’re evidently meant to repeat the same TTK content for a year or more. Mind you, TTK was a great addition to the game, but even World of Warcraft’s (WoW) expansions — which feature drastically more content — don’t stay fresh for a whole year. Blizzard, the makers of WoW, said in 2013 that they wanted to accelerate their release schedule to avoid just this kind of player burnout. But more than two full years later, Bungie hasn’t learned the same lesson, and is letting its game stagnate without any explanation. This has left several publications urging their readers to abandon the game.
I have seen commentary that blames Bungie’s lack of communication on its contractual relationship with its publisher, Activision. The idea being that Bungie can’t communicate with us by virtue of the fact that Activision has the legal right to disclose all new content first. While this may indeed be the case, I find it nearly impossible to believe that their contract extends as far as things like bug/balance patches, which have apparently gone by the wayside. Several of the weapon archetypes in the game (e.g. hand cannons and pulse rifles) were neutered by the last major patch to the point of virtual unusability. Players have complained about this for months now, and Bungie has said almost nothing (and done absolutely nothing) to rectify the problem. So no matter what Bungie’s proponents may claim, the problems here simply cannot all be Activision’s fault.
For my part, I’m not yet willing to entirely write off Bungie and Destiny, but I must admit that I’m getting closer and closer to reaching the point of no return. Bungie has received quite a bit of leeway from its players, many of whom (like me) fondly remember the halcyon days of Halo. But gaming, like life, often comes down to the question of “what have you done for me lately?” And Bungie is running out of time to come up with a compelling answer.
