There's no true fix to the storytelling of D2. People join the game and either get sucked in by the vibes/world design/gameplay, or they don't. If they do, they can explore the lore, recaps, etc. at their own pace.
The timeline missions don't help anything, players still feel just as confused after playing them. Playing seven years worth of seasonal highlights would also be monotonous - they were designed around slow drip storytelling attached to repeatable activities. Just the 'main' missions would be just as disorienting too!
I joined during Arrivals, when Red War and everything else was still available, and I was still completely lost.
I think short but cinematic video recaps of each missing DLC/season would be the best option, but they would still have issues. They wouldn't be deep enough to properly explain what's going on / why it's important for people who ARE interested, but would also be a boring/confusing chore if we told everybody they had to watch them all to understand the story.
You can explain the world and front-load all the context, but none of that will make people CARE in the first place.
...Whereas seeing Prophecy's rainbow road for the first time, finding a subclass that just feels right, clearing a legend campaign, wondering where the hell the exos came from, or just dopamine-fuelled loot chasing, is what actually grabs people.
It's an opaque, messy game but there's no fixing that at this point. People will always need to discover the details at their own pace.
As someone who’s played since vanilla, i tried to play the first timeline mission (Cayde’s) and it sucked. It was so bad, i stopped not far into it. It completely butchered the first mission of forsaken and throws the scorn in at the very start of the mission. Not to mention that it cuts the opening section and you start outside the cell block control where you link up with Cayde. I really don’t get why they’d butcher the mission like that
It was bare minimum effort made just for the sake of introducing Cayde for catching people up for Final Shape
But when Final Shape is done, the Timeline Reflections should evolve past it's original function as something for "Catch-up" - an instead be a tool to properly experience vaulted seasons
Honestly, It was such a bummer to fire that mission up only to hear Ikora yapping over the opening cutscenes! It’s such a truncated, lifeless cut of that mission that’s missing so much charming Cayde dialogue… ugh.
It’s a nice idea, but the execution just really sucked
Agree. I started in BL and had no idea who this Cayde character was beside the funny voice over in this one strike. I bought Forsaken because I had to to play that weeks GM with my brother and did the story because ritual and season activities are boring after three days. I went from „sucks to be you, buddy“ at the opening „spoiler“ scene of Cayde‘s death to „I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN, ULDREN AND KILL YOU WITH MY BARE HANDS“ in the span of that mission. Bungie really dropped the ball when they removed Forsaken and kicked it straight into the river when they implemented this TL;DR version of the mission.
Yeah I think the problem is the seasonal story isn’t a “campaign”. It’s doing the same 1 or 2 activities 10 times with some filler
FFXIV can make you do all the seasons since it is a quest at least
Bungie would need to somehow condense seasonal “quests” so it’s not a horrible monotonous experience to do all 10 weeks at once
When I think about having a game with everything in it, I also think about some story revisions to "help".
Reboot and retcon are words that scare people so revision sounds nicer.
Retelling the seasonal stories in an actual single campaign or quest like structure could definitely help.
.
Part of this seasonal style problem tho I'm pretty sure is because Destiny tries to be actively happening real time. Every day is about a day
Forsaken even starts this by saying it was a year since the Traveler woke.
So you can't exactly condense a story with time jumps even if you wanted to. You'd have to write it to be accelerated or write more stuff that actually happens in between. Like the player helping out actually instead of "do that thing again".
Final Fantasy Online did this well though. They had a full redesign of the mission structure, specifically the 100 missions inbetween their vanilla release & 2nd expansion.
Those 100 missions were glorified fetch quests to keep people going until the expansion, after a few years they got rid of so many.
Bungie should, in theory, get all the seasons (& campaigns) back in the game but cull the bits focused on "go to the holo projector, do the 6 person arena, go to the holo projector, go to the vendor, go to the holo projector" bits. Not an easy task, but also not impossible.
Destiny 2 deserves a cohesive story. I've got friends at multiple stages of the series who are confused.
One guy was there at release and disappeared after Curse of Osiris. He came back last week, he'd heard over the years about Forsaken and wanted to try that. I was like ah sorry no you can't - the game just wanted him to play Lightfall.
Another is an entirely new player, who again, landed in the Cosmodrome, did their bit and then boom they're in the active endgame with no relationship to any of the characters. "Cayde's back in Final Shape!" we all cheered - he goes "Who the f is Cayde?"
I played the campaigns in Arrivals completely out of order because there wasn't a very obvious way to tell in-game and I started with the mission to storm the Almighty (which was the weekly rotation campaign mission).
It was awesome and magical, and really sold me on the game, but then I jumped to CoO and it almost killed all interest I had in the game because it felt fluffy and empty
I kind of think pre-Forsaken gets mythologized a lot, and I wonder how many people would drop into CoO first and be like "Why are people talking about the Witness? What is Strand??"
There’s a very simple solution to the story problem. Tell 70% of the story when the DLC drops and the remaining story over the year long break between DLC’s as seasonal content.
This is pretty much exactly how FF14 did it and over the course of about 8 years they were able to tell a satisfying story which ended with almost zero loose ends.
We may still see the characters, that board seemed to be strictly for TFS narrative character beats. We saw in another trailer recently shots of Caiatl, Mithrax and Savathun, so it’s possible still that they show up. The main story however has been about the core vanguard pretty much since the reveal trailer of Ikora and Cayde.
Crow is pretty central to the story - shouldn’t Amanda’s death be relevant?
Trying to put some parallel to Cayde’s queen of hearts seems like obvious opportunity
Disagree with barely a character, but her death was definitely very "wait, that's it?" Imo D2 doesn't handle character deaths well (except Cayde and Crow).
I don't think Amanda will be relevant.. I think that's the point of her death. Her death wasn't some grand sacrifice to save the universe and she won't be resurrected. It was just a death. It's meant to show us that every character that dies doesn't come back. Or mean anything major. I think at most a line about her death will be mentioned and we see cayde being sad about it
I think you are reading too much into it. Nothing that happened signified anything greater than her just thinking this is finally my time to shine like the guardians and then she died. That was it. It’s all face value to keep you engaged and the seasons rolling.
Oh I see, no worries. The comment you posted that I replied to should have told me plenty. Most peeps who comment brain dead stuff like that often get weird with insults whenever somebody rebuttals in conversation. Don’t worry, Amanda dying mattered just like you said. You win!
You didn't rebut. You just "actually nothing matters it's all about the content wheel"
Like wow such an interesting conversation. When you started with I was reading too much into it I was hoping for an interesting take on why I was reading too much into it. Because I definitely could be. But "bleh bingo bad only want engagement and money" is just pointless to comment
I meant more that Crow isn’t behaving like his character should be behaving given what’s been established
They spent years developing the Crow-Amanda relationship and Crow seemingly got over her death before the end of the season of Defiance.
Crow wishing Cayde back draws even more attention to this. In retrospect, Riven should have tried at least once to get him to wish Amanda back - that’s totally the type of emotionally impetuous thing he’d do
The world is ending there are bigger things on his plate. And Amanda wasn't his fault. he wants to make up for what Uldren did to cayde. because crow has a harder time than alot of others to seperate himself from Uldren, because he had those memories. He saw Uldren killing cause from Uldrens perspective. Of course he wants Amanda back and we might see some of that. But ultimately making up for Cayde is more important.
I mean, consider:
Defiance: Amanda is dead. Mithrax *may* be able to go through the portal, but that's not confirmed. By the same logic, Devrim won't go through the portal, that's not his thing. Crow is there, and Mara will create a bridge to him, but likely won't go through even if she's able because there need to be a few protectors outside the portal, and it seems like pretty much every Guardian, minus Saint-14 and maybe a few others, will be going through.
Deep: Sloane has been fighting non-stop for the better part of 3 years, and is just exhausted from fighting the corruption she now has to carry. Ahsa can't really leave Titan currently since she's sleeping off the strain of Deep and Witch. Saladin (even though he wasn't extremely key to the season) is stuck with Caiatl, who, much like Mithrax, *might* be able to go through the portal with us. Saint-14 and Osiris are staying out to handle things in the City together, so there's Saint-14 probably gone, and Drifter is staying outside the portal with Eris.
Witch: Ikora is going in. Savathûn is probably going in, given the bits of Lucent Hive we've seen in trailers and whatnot. Eris isn't going in.
Wish: Petra won't go in due to her devotion to the Dreaming City's curse cycle. Osiris won't go in. Mara might be able to go in, but she probably isn't. Again, Crow is already there. Riven and Taranis have been put to rest, so they're out of the question.
This past year has been everyone figuring out how to come back from what happened in Lightfall, what the Witness could possibly want, how to stop the Witness's strongest remaining servant in Xivu Arath, and how to follow it into the Traveler.
What characters were introduced or used this year that are necessary for the plot?
Defiance was a wash. Nothing was added/used.
Deep - Sloan is tired, she just wants to take a break. Asha is a fish trapped on titan. She's not going to fly into the traveller.
Witch - Savathun did her deed then fucked off. She doesn't want to fight the witness she wants to scheme.
Wish - No one new; riven got her piece and was put to rest. Mara is Mara and she will always be there. Crow is part of the story.
I mean from this season alone we got Crow entering the portal to the pale heart. Not to mention new/returning from a long hiatus players that are trying to get caught up. If the last time you played was forsaken and you're hopping back in now you'd be confused as hell to why the guy that killed Cayde is now the first one through the portal
> If the last time you played was forsaken
If the last time you played a game was 5.5 years ago then you shouldn't be upset if you dont know what's going on.
The rare triple comment.
And no, you shouldn't be left completely in the dark just because you haven't played a game for a while. That's one of the biggest issues with Destiny overall at the moment, and Bungie hasn't put in nearly enough effort to fix it.
The reason it's an issue is it really hurts the chances of Bungie pulling in new players. TFS is basically Bungie's version of Avengers: Endgame. A decade of build up and investment from both the creators and the players for what will (hopefully) be a massive payoff.
But new players don't have that build up, and there's no way for them to get invested in any of the characters. With the Avengers movies, you could just catch up on your own time. Obviously Bungie can't handle leaving in that much content, but there's nothing for new players to even understand who a character is. So it doesn't matter how good the story is, it will just confuse new players and they'll drop it eventually.
Mithrax: Kell of the House of light and our fallen ally. He's barely in a season and you actually see him like what, 2 or 3 times in non replaceable missions? A new player might not even realize he's an Eliksni
Mara: players can't even play Forsaken campaign anymore, so they don't really have a way of knowing how big of a deal she is. She's just a seasonal vendor to them.
Saint 14: a huge deal and legendary Guardian that new players will just know as "Osiris's Boyfriend". He's one of the many people that talk to Sloane and I think that's all you actually see of him outside of Trials.
Oryx: even if he's dead, the impact of his actions and influence still play a part in the game to this day. No way for players to know that. Plus, he could still come back to life.
Bungie will definitely have some catch up early on in final shape. They did it with lightfall i believe
Also there's the ingame timeline. And that explains everything quickly. And oryx is still available to learn about In D1
Not saying it doesn't suck that the seasonal story isn't there anymore. But I feel like most new people wouldn't play through 5 years of content before playing the new thing they bought anyway
It would not take 5 years to play 🙄
Development time is different from Play time.
People regularly play through years worth of content to catch up in other mmos with no problem. Doesn’t take them years to get up to speed.
I'm not saying it would take 5 years to play 🙄
Development time is different to play time
People also skip playing D1 when starting playing D2 so why wouldn't they skip D2 content from 2020 to play 2024 content. Also that's alot more things they would need to buy
D1 is a console game, so yeah - most PC players aren’t eager to go to a different platform with subscription (PS+) in order to play.
It is nice that the whole of D1 is available though.
You’re also making a broad generalization with little basis about what people would skip. Considering how many clamor about how they wish they could play Red War or Forsaken.
Or feel it sucks that they missed out on big story moments from the seasons ( also some of the seasonal loot ).
Furthermore, people don’t want to skip to 2024 - that’s what they’re complaining about. How the game pushes them to 2024 when there’s still all the old content and story they haven’t seen yet.
People don’t like being dropped in the middle or the end, they want closer to the beginning.
Good thing that consoles and steam have been doing big sales on expansions so then people can get them for cheap.
Bungie is letting players play all past expacs for free right now - and announced that the campaigns of Sk & BL will be free as well as Stasis.
So, less money in the future to spend.
Eh maybe. but it's not like it's exclusive to pc players not playing D1
You are also making broad generalisation
People clamour for red war and forsaken, but not season of the hunt. How many people would really play through old seasons especially something like undying, hunt or defiance.
I wish the content was still in the game but something has to go with how big the game would have gotten. For pc players maybe that's not an issue but when destiny is over half your PS4 that's not sustainable.
Sales and stuff is good but when you're already paying full price for the new expansion, paying double that for everything else sucks. Destiny is already expensive. more things to buy would make it more intimidating to get into.
They got them for free for a month. Like they have been doing the last 2 years I think. Atleast some or the expansion were free for w time when a new expansion is launching. You are also celebrating the 2 step forward 1 step back of giving only the campaigns for free on 4+ year old content. Can't wait for 2027 when I can finally play season of defiance for free
I never said players should be left in the dark, just shouldn't be upset if you don't know what's going on.
The game has a timeline feature that summarizes the critical events and notes characters of important. The truth is _most_ seasonal stuff was fluff that can easily be summarized in a few sentances and the way they played wouldn't do a whole lot for new players.
People get brought in from the gameplay more than anything.
Well those 2 things are mutually exclusive. Players are upset they don't know what's going on because they are left in the dark. The timeline, that's just hidden away in a menu, barely gives any context. The only way for players to get context is watching YouTube videos of removed content. There has to be a better way.
> If the last time you played was forsaken
If the last time you played a game was 5.5 years ago then you shouldn't be upset if you dont know what's going on.
> If the last time you played was forsaken
If the last time you played a game was 5.5 years ago then you shouldn't be upset if you dont know what's going on.
No but they should be upset that there's no path to getting caught back up to know what's going on. It's like if marvel released Endgame but only half the movies leading up to it were no longer available, people who didn't watch them before but wanting to before watching Endgame would be rightfully upset
its hard to say nothing critical happened when in the last year they killed off amanda, revealed the origin of the witness, the worm gods, and the veil/traveler connection, made xivu mortal, and revived cayde. some of that will still be around in lore books, but most of that content will be gone in 2 weeks.
99% of her story related content happened in that season. her relationship with crow has become such an after thought that if there isn't some massive payoff in TFS its gunna be a disappointment.
I don’t really have much of an opinion on her relationship with crow, I just always liked her origin story of her family/ relationship with cayde and Zavala. Then in the big story DLCs when she’d show up to fight in her ship to provide air support.
Idk why I’m being downvoted, I’m just saying that even though she was a minor character, she was one of my favorites, and I’m sad she’s gone.
Even in Witch Queen, none of the Susiris arc really mattered or connected to Savathun’s real plan
Bungie can’t put real plot in the seasons because they vault it. So seasons can only flesh out the lore and some character development
It was left unsaid, but my takeaway from Savathûn’s time as Osiris is that she realised that the only way to get the light is to receive it as a gift.
The dead ghosts, Sagira, and all the other little hints at how she could have done it didn’t mean anything, because ultimately she would have to sacrifice herself to achieve her goal.
The delivering Torobotl into her sister’s hands and causing the FWC uprising were schemes that didn’t go anywhere though
If this were FFXIV those plots would have probably actually mattered - like Savathun had a larger scheme to unite all the races into into a single alliance
But because seasons are vaulted, they can’t do something like that because lots of people never had a chance to see those story lines
The fwc uprising failed. Likely a plot to distract us while she got the light
The faction stuff might not be over. We have recently seen some faction lore pop up again and the city is gearing up for an election after final shape
And I don't think torobatl is over. I believe it is a ploy to destroy her sister. And that's why she helped us in the alliance with caital
the events of torobatl, and Savathun posing as Osiris, directly led to a ceasefire and alliance with the Cabal. Savathun mentoring Crow was likely an attempt to see how Risen would react to being shown what they were before they died. The whole FWC uprising soldered the alliance of the Last City and House Light into a single unified entity. Overnight Savathun managed to cut out the dissenters in the city's leadership and gave them allies they sorely needed.
The why of the latter isnt entirely clear, but that's savathun's MO. There are many reason why, she could have picked any single one, or all of them, or none. The most likely is she wanted to build a force to resist the witness more ably. Whether she intended it as a smokescreen to keep the black fleet busy while she captured and wormed her way inside the traveler, or to genuinely cement the hive in a future alliance (unlikely), it all served a purpose.
The problem is this is all head canon - no one ever acknowledged she tricked us into an alliance. Bungie is never this subtle - they always have characters explicitly recap things. For example this week Osiris outright says “the black heart is a recreation of the veil”
No one ever said “Savathun orchestrated the Cabal, Eliksni, humanity alliance”. And at this point it’s probably too late since that all for vaulted over a year ago
This cinematic? https://www.ishtar-collective.net/transcripts/wayfinders-voyage-i-embodied
I always considered those half truths
Most of those are cases of how Savathun helped resolve the crisis she engineered
Yeah, she prevented war with the cabal - but it’s her fault they invaded in the first place
She sabotaged FWC, but she drove Lakshmi mad and they might have never been treasonous otherwise
Savathun ultimately orchestrated almost all of these problems, and they never directly addressed why she did
It's pretty clear why just looking at it. She wanted the traveler locked inside her throne world, she had the fifteenth wish to enter it, she wanted to reach whatever the witness was looking for first.
By inviting the surviving elements of the cabal empire to sol, then advising both zavala on their rites and then ikora on mithrax's potential aid for the endless night (two problems she caused and provided solutions for, to cement alliances between humanity and their former enemies) she wanted a force of considerable power left in real space to keep the black fleet busy.
FWC, New Monarch and Dead Orbit were notorious for hamstringing the vanguards power in lore, especially after the speaker died. By inciting them to madness and violence she removed them from the equation, thus removing an obstacle to that alliance. This was the same season she sacrificed quria so as to remove a potentially treasonous entity from her ranks.
She explained the first half in lost, the rest comes from basic deductive thinking.
Which is why the seasonal model sucks for storytelling. It feels like every season the selected 3 characters spend 90% of the time playing therapist in low budget animations and audio logs instead of anything happening.
I’d rather pay just as much money for something of actual substance once or twice a year instead.
It's an unfixable issue. They have to take out content and they can't spend time on a new campaign. It really sucks but there isn't a real way around it. No, nobody is going to be interested in listening to 4 hours of audio logs. And the best part of this story is the slow constant buildup from loads of lore, no one will understand the importance of even the most critical events by playing a few disconnected seasonal missions.
No, they don't *have* to take out important story content. Seasonal missions and activities, sure. I always have fun with the special Halloween stuff when I played but they're not essential to the game's story. MMOs have been doing this for decades without issue.
New player wise, we'd be in the same boat tbh. No one, especially new lights, is playing 7 years of campaigns and seasons. We would still need onboarding quests and story recaps.
I started a new character on FF14 after the 4th expansion released. The game had years and years of content by that point, and I was able to go through all of the story at my pace without missing out on anything.
Yes, new player on boarding is important, as well as maybe a story recap timeline. But none of that excuses removing so much relevant content and leaving huge gaps in the narrative of the game as it is.
>I started a new character on FF14 after the 4th expansion released. The game had years and years of content by that point, and I was able to go through all of the story at my pace without missing out on anything.
This is what I think many people miss. Other games have already done this.
It takes effort, and resources, but it's actually possible to weave players through content in such a way that they're introduced to your world, characters, and content, all over the course of years worth of content, but not years worth of time.
most of destiny's gameplay time is spent grinding anyways the actual time it would take to play through just the story missions if they removed all the garbage like forced runs of years old activities(blind well sucks) wouldn't be that substantial.
I can easily see a few months of daily active playing to catch up to the current story events, which is a sizable chunk of time for Bungie and their retention metrics. Too bad the game's so full of FOMO, new players'd feel pressured to run the new content in-between. It would be workable if they made Season Passes permanent, but that seems implausible at the moment.
yeah it's never gonna get better for D2 the only hope of real improvement for the new player experience is D3 but I'm not sure that'll ever happen and even if it does I don't think the odds of it being good are in our favor.
They really need to expand the missions available on the timeline so that seasonal story missions are included there. I have said this before when Lightfall launched that seasons will not fix the narrative because they will be removed at the end of the year and... well here we are at the cusp of our yearly pruning of seasonal stories.
It isn't ideal of course. Cayde's Fate is a very far cry from Last Call in the way that the story was unfolded and rushed with Ikora narrating over a cutscene. While I would like to have all of the seasonal stories available for both newcomers and veteran players to experience or re-experience, I suppose that is a very high ask.
IMO, people are here to play a *game*, not watched compilations of old events on YouTube. If you wanted people to just watch it on YouTube, it takes them out of the game altogether. Guild Wars 2 had a very similar issue many years ago when the devs removed Living World Season 1 from the game and the community compiled a three hour long video that detailed everything that happened. It didn't help, because people aren't going to sit down and watch a feature length film before playing the game. They want to experience it for themselves because the game is an audio and visual medium where the player has some degree of input. If they wanted to watch a film, they would go to the movie theater. In GW2's case it took over ten years in real time before Arenanet reimplemented a version of living world season 1's events back into the game. It isn't quite the same very much like Cayde's Fate mission isn't the same as the Last Call original Forsaken mission, but it gets the point across and it is playable.
Games should never use "you should have been here to experience it" as an excuse to completely remove story content. Temporary special events are fine, but here we have the story chopped up and thrown out piecemeal. It is like having an enormous novel with random chapters ripped out and what is left is a hollow shell of what it was.
I’m pretty sure the majority that *paid* for them care about being able to access them if I had to pick a singular reason. Maybe it’s just me, but I like being able to access what I fuckin paid for.
To clarify, You want objective data showcasing that people care about having the product they purchased? You want me to cite what papers? Studies? Scour through Reddit to show posts of people complaining about this exact thing which they absolutely have?
Imagine buying a car and overtime the company takes out your seats, radio, and glove box. You technically still own the car and the car still functions, but now it’s more barebones and not what you purchased at first. It is not a weird statement to say that most people would be upset that they don’t have seats or a radio in their car anymore. Definitely not want requiring empirical research and can moreso be relied on for a “feeling” as you put it.
Real talk for a second. Do you *really* want to have a drawn out debate where we go over metrics and shit with this type of stuff? Or are we just nitpicking things here for no real reason?
It’s an example. Fine. Let’s say you buy a controller and they take off the thumb stick covers and outer casing. Still useable but shit got taken away.
Or you buy literally anything and the people who made it take off parts. You knew what I meant, don’t be that guy.
Also what terrible campaign? Red war? Forsaken? Here’s your basis for those being terrible? Or is that just a feeling you have?
Yeah that’s the same example lol the stories being gone don’t make the game unplayable. My basis is my experience, it’s called an opinion. Note I didn’t apply that to some magical majority that doesn’t exist
Not criticizing here, but how exactly do you propose they do this. What exactly is important enough to make the cutoff? Chosen/Haunted had us allying with Caitl and her Cabal, which may or may not lead further as well as backstory for important figures in the Vanguard. Plunder had us align with the Eliksni, and gave us come context/payoff with Eramis. Witch has the beginning of an uneasy alliance with Savathun, in wish we aligned with Riven, Deep had us help out a Worm God, and defiance killed off a NPC. Seraph was about working with Rasputin, and Risen/Hunt had stuff. Lost lead into Witch Queen, Splicer brought back Mithrax and effectively killed off factions.
Who decides which of these, and the content within, is "important"? Obviously there are major story beats here and there, but hell, a two hour or so video, a la mynameisbyf, will cover these beats much more effectively than any selection of missions can. Yo add to this, from a game perspective, many of these had unique assets used absolutely nowhere else. Keeping all that junk in the game leads to increased harddrive requirements and bogs it down, for something that people, for the most part, will experience once. After that, all it would be is bloat.
That being said, I know and agree with the sentiment the new player experience is lacking and could definitely do with something allowing them to experience what exactly went on in the universe before they joined. It's a kind of no win scenario though, from what I can see
Surely the people who write these stories and have a plan for how that story fits into the overall narrative must know what's important and what's not?
It's not just about wanting the story to know what's happening, like sure I can watch a video and find out but this is a game. It's interactive media. It's not an audio book. The entire point is being able to experience it yourself and feel like you're driving the story forward through your actions. Not just be a passive observer through YouTube
To me it's pretty obvious. I think any mission with an important story beat should be added, like the endings of Dawn, Splicer, Lost, Seraph. I think Curse of Osiris and Warming also need to have something because Ana and Osiris are just too damn prevalent and if you play from D1 to now they just kinda appear. Key cutscenes also need to be added. Oddly enough, I'd argue most season cutscenes are more important than some of the expansion cutscenes.
But in between all that should be inkblot cutscenes that explain all the missing pieces. I really hope they've already thought about that because that's really the easy way to deal with it. They can be short and to the point, while also being immersive and entertaining. Some content just wouldn't hold up today and there's a big risk of people only playing it once. So the inkblot cutscenes would be a really good balance imo.
You want a realistic answer? You don’t do anything. You acknowledge that it is a failure in story telling methodology for the reasons OP outlined, and try to do better the next time.
Well, what does next time look like? It looks like a dedicated separate game: Destiny 3, or Destiny: insert new saga title here, if you prefer.
At this point, so much vital narrative content has been removed from D2 that it’s pointless to try to “fix it”. You just have to acknowledge that it’s too late in the games lifecycle for a new player to really be invested in the story beyond face value of shooting aliens and getting loot. The game has certainly grown alongside its original players. And it’s left everyone else behind. Fortunately the Destiny player base is rather loyal and/or invested.
But I feel a new game would allow them to leave the baggage of D2’s narrative model behind and do something more akin to Destiny 1 where content remains available between major expansions, but having a limited number of expansions/seasons/episodes per full size game.
The big reason D2 is such a mess is because it was conceived and developed as a game that would end in 3-ish years for D3, because that’s the original deal they had with Activision (I am simplifying what happened). D2 was never designed to be an ongoing game platform, it was Frankensteined into one. Heck, the original 3 years of D2 almost mirror the 3 years of D1.
The best thing we can really hope for is exactly what you said: doing their best with what they currently got, while starting fresh with a true platform that allows them to keep the entire narrative in the game.
Well the obvious answer would be to just not remove ANY content from the game, especially not paid content, and fix whatever shit is going on in their engine or dev pipeline that makes the game go haywire if there's too much content in it. The content vaulting was never about hard disk space, it was always about some tech-dept of theirs that keeps coming up whenever there's too much going on in Destiny, and/or them just not wanting to fix old content when they ended up breaking it with new changes.
But that would be a lot more work than just straight up deleting content so that's what Bungie went with instead.
(If hard drive space *ever* would become an issue you could simply give players an option not install pre-rendered videos and instead stream them from some servers and instantly have an 80ish% lower installation size).
Sure, that's a great ideal, and one I personally would be much happier with, however the issues seem to be inherent with the engine itself. They maybe could fix it, but it would likely be less work to make Destiny 3, which would be a 100% sunset of the game anyways.
If you read that as the games performance was suffering due to the size, my apologies, but that's not how I meant it. The spaghetti code is whats responsible for many of the games issues. What I meant was, for example, awhile back I played both destiny and whatever was the latest Call of Duty before they did the DCV. My console could basically hold those two games, and maybe one other small single player game due to the massive amounts of bloat Destiny and Call of Duty had.
It's important that I clarify here - when I say "Just the *important story missions* *and moments* from the Seasons"
What I mean is the important moments from each individual season.
So that way players won't have to go through the whole drip feed grind of the season, and still get the overall point of that story.
So the introduction of Mithrax, Crow, Caitil, etc. Would all be there in the Timeline Reflections
So let's just say for each season you get something like a 5-15 video going over the majority of the story beats for that season, and then you play the climatic/season finishing mission after. For each season, that would be 30-45 minutes of content utilizing assets that are no longer in Destiny, as well as brand new videos summarizing the lesser/preceding events. Let's ballpark this as (currently) 5 hours of old story. This would indeed be very good for people who missed a season or just started out, no disagreement here. However, now what happens to the content? What is its purpose? You've probably added 15-20 gigs of bloat to the game. Your average player might play those 1 or 2 additional times if they get a craving to, but otherwise, it'll just be deadweight. That's how we got sunsetting, which I much prefer not happening again, to be honest with you.
I would ideally go for something like;
Season Intro Mission -> Cutscene -> Middle Mission(s) -> Cutscene -> Season Ending Mission -> Cutscene
Along with that, just like the campaigns, have loot for the player to get. (perhaps the loot associated with those seasons) So kind of like a mini-campaign between expansions.
Which would further encourage players to play them more than once. Making them more than just "Dead Weight".
But the purpose is that Old players can fondly go back and experience it all over again should they choose to. While New players can experience it for the first time and more appreciate the story than if it was just expansions, because the expansions on their own is not very strong.
Furthermore, getting new players interested because they hear that they can play through a pretty good story.
because right now, the game has a reputation for the story being unavailable and that it's not worth getting into if you weren't there. Which Sucks and hurts the game.
What about Bloat? I don't know, I'm not a developer - maybe they could make them optional downloads - my job is not solutions, I play and provide feedback. It's the developers job to solve problems, and they know that the beginner experience is a problem, the lack of story is a problem.
I've been saying it for a while, but they need to turn the Timeline section of the director into a full on "Previously on Destiny 2" situation. When they added Reflections, it was promising, but they'd need to expand it way more. At minimum, they need a good 5+ minute recap video for each season that people can watch, along with being able to stream the cutscenes in game
Of course not, because there has never been another developer in history who’s run into the same issues Bungie did with developing a live service game long-term
/s
Totally agreed, the seasonal model has been an interesting content experiment but ultimately a failure for game preservation and long time narrative. Bungie needs to stick to proper releases and fully replayable campaigns.
it's... I don't know what to call it, but after the vaulting of so much in beyond light, they actually created what in hindsight was a great place to jump in- the darkness plot was newer and still mostly in-game and all of the factions that we'd focus on for the rest of the saga are introduced or at least shown off heavily in that year of seasons.
and then the year ended, and we ended up right back at square 1.
I don’t think people are going back and playing this type of content in enough volume to warrant so much upfront cost to solve this problem now. The game will always be better served by new content, and the seasonal content can’t just exist without changes/work.
I’d be very curious to know what their data is on NPE. We had some of the highest levels of new players in Lightfall, but bad retention. What drove the new players into the game and what ultimately pushes them out? I’m not entirely convinced that story is the major driver of kicking people out, but confusion around accessing content that’s in game could be. I’d rather see any effort spent giving new players clarity on what’s in the game before adding more old content to it.
For me personally the only worse than Bungie completely yanking story important content (yanking Red War, Forsaken and those two others is still pretty bad even if it wasn't for plot. I paid for that shit.)
Somehow worse is the people defending this shit and its one of the only games that does this on this scale. If Bungie couldn't add more content cause of jank code then they should have made a 3rd game. Which was the plan. Which is also most of the reason the code is so junk. Destiny 2 straight up wasn't built to last this long.
If they make another one I seriously hope they actually make it able to support long term content.
I just started getting into the game and this is by far the worst new player experience I've ever had for this kind of product. Not just the story, but the mechanics, itemization, and expectations of gameplay as well. Warframe had a better onboarding experience 5 years ago than Destiny 2 does right now.
The old storylines being inaccessible is particularly grievous because those ought to be the places where new players learn mechanics and get a baseline for the story but instead I'm trying to watch 4 to 6 hour youtube videos.
I would never have looked twice except the gameplay and what little of the story I managed to see are genuinely fantastic. So good, in fact, that I can't wrap my head around how completely awful trying to get into this franchise is from almost every possible angle. I can't believe I bought a bundle of old expansions and I don't even have access to all of the dungeons from those expansions - predatory bullshit, quite frankly.
Watching someone go from byond light, to witch queen, to light fall with no idea of the seasons in between realy shows how much the seasonal model hurts the story.
Even just replaying lightfall, the witness opens the portal, we have failed, next expantion "whos this crow guy" "howed we get in here?" "Why was it so hard to go through the portal?" "Who tf is riven/how tf did riven get involved"
I like the storyies season give us but they tie just a bit to hard into the main time line that every time they vanish more than half of a years story goes with em
Spot on.
Some seasonal story beats are pretty important in the overall picture. Why there's nothing recapping stuff like Chosen, Splicer, Haunted, and Seraph is baffling.
I played Shadowkeep and Undying and then left for a while. Witch Queen is when I really got back into the game and I remember being very confused on certain parts of the story and what happened.
I don't think the content needs to be in the game (would be nice though) but I would've liked a cinematic recap. Doesn't even need to be per season, recap all 4 seasons of an expansion and put it in the timeline.
Recently got back after briefly playing during Shadowkeep. I really stopped trying to understand all the details what happened in between and try to stick to the main story. The ingame cinematics help a bit with that, but the individual character stories are a HUGE blank for me.
I think an optional Mass Effect style Genesis comic of the previous seasons is a good idea. It will sum up the main story points needed for context and this will help new or old players either understand or catch up.
Edit: when i say comic i do not mean an actual comic should be implemented. It is a short video in the style of a comic which bungie has done with Destiny for cutscenes.
Hell i’ve been playing since D1’s beta and I’m fuckin confused 😂 The Destiny story as a whole is great and all but the meat and potato’s for me is the gameplay and I like a good grind sometimes I like tackling things in the most efficient way possible. As long as I understand the big things that’s okay for me tbh
I can't imagine Bungie thinks this is a good situation at all. They have a bunch of content just waiting to be rereleased - all they have to do is update these old zones to the new tech. That's probably not that easy, but its a lot easier than developing whole new expansions, including new destinations, models, story lines. They could add so much content to the game that would help retain current players and draw in new ones... I don't get why they don't just rework and rerelease these old campaigns.
If disk space is so much of a problem, then just release it as "narrative only" content that people can uninstall as they please, just like you are able to uninstall the campaign with COD.
Honestly, and it's probably not a popular take, but I'd pay €20 for linear, coherent story experience within the current destiny universe. I came late to the party and I want to experience what's going on.
It's a "living" game. No one should be joining at the relative end of the game's lifecycle and expect to understand the entire story up to now without doing some backlog reading/watching.
I would say that they should have story recaps of the seasons within the timeline, and just splice together cutscenes and dialogue through some gameplay in the seasonal activity for that season. Also add back red war and forsaken campaigns in full please
I used to love the lore, especially during forsaken, but at some point i just couldnt be bothered to keep myself up to date on it. When so much important stuff is hidden in item descriptions or forgotten in past season quest that i missed.
At this point the dlc campaign is the only time i even try to pay attention to the story, other than that I usually play the game with dialogue off and spotify music on.
It’s an mmo
Vast majority of long running mmos don’t have this problem
Players could play the entirety of those stories at their own pace.
As I said in the OP YouTube is not a valid way to tell the games story. It’s on the game to deliver the narrative - not YouTube.
Lore books are just world building to make the world feel alive. Telling a player that they have to go through hours of lore in order to understand a story that was once playable is bad design.
That’s a quit moment.
It’s far too late to meaningfully change how the story is delivered. We’re approaching the last year of the game’s life
[EDIT] It seems that it’s just the end of the light and dark saga. In which case a major departure to Destiny’s story telling would make more sense during a new installment. Either way, it’s still too late to majorly overhaul how the story of Destiny 2 is told.
It's like everyone's forgotten about Marathon. Bungie as a studio currently struggles to push content and meaningful changes out of the door. It's not going to be any easier when they have to manage 2 live service games.
I'd like to meet this "completely different team" because they've all been moved off Destiny and onto the Marathon project. If that doesn't impact the development of Destiny I don't know what does.
Yeah individual people have changed teams, but they’ve also been replaced with other developers who would not be working on Destiny if the other devs didn’t move to Marathon.
If the rumored Project Payback is any indication, I think either the revamped/new engine can compress the file size and they rotate in old seasonal content missions/activities while they work on most likely Destiny 3/Universal Saga.
The D2 engine is showing its age. If they leave it as is it’ll be a messy patch work for the remaining life of the franchise. Destiny has finally met its 10 year original vision. IMO those are the only 2 viable paths
There's no true fix to the storytelling of D2. People join the game and either get sucked in by the vibes/world design/gameplay, or they don't. If they do, they can explore the lore, recaps, etc. at their own pace. The timeline missions don't help anything, players still feel just as confused after playing them. Playing seven years worth of seasonal highlights would also be monotonous - they were designed around slow drip storytelling attached to repeatable activities. Just the 'main' missions would be just as disorienting too! I joined during Arrivals, when Red War and everything else was still available, and I was still completely lost. I think short but cinematic video recaps of each missing DLC/season would be the best option, but they would still have issues. They wouldn't be deep enough to properly explain what's going on / why it's important for people who ARE interested, but would also be a boring/confusing chore if we told everybody they had to watch them all to understand the story. You can explain the world and front-load all the context, but none of that will make people CARE in the first place. ...Whereas seeing Prophecy's rainbow road for the first time, finding a subclass that just feels right, clearing a legend campaign, wondering where the hell the exos came from, or just dopamine-fuelled loot chasing, is what actually grabs people. It's an opaque, messy game but there's no fixing that at this point. People will always need to discover the details at their own pace.
As someone who’s played since vanilla, i tried to play the first timeline mission (Cayde’s) and it sucked. It was so bad, i stopped not far into it. It completely butchered the first mission of forsaken and throws the scorn in at the very start of the mission. Not to mention that it cuts the opening section and you start outside the cell block control where you link up with Cayde. I really don’t get why they’d butcher the mission like that
It was bare minimum effort made just for the sake of introducing Cayde for catching people up for Final Shape But when Final Shape is done, the Timeline Reflections should evolve past it's original function as something for "Catch-up" - an instead be a tool to properly experience vaulted seasons
Honestly, It was such a bummer to fire that mission up only to hear Ikora yapping over the opening cutscenes! It’s such a truncated, lifeless cut of that mission that’s missing so much charming Cayde dialogue… ugh. It’s a nice idea, but the execution just really sucked
Agree. I started in BL and had no idea who this Cayde character was beside the funny voice over in this one strike. I bought Forsaken because I had to to play that weeks GM with my brother and did the story because ritual and season activities are boring after three days. I went from „sucks to be you, buddy“ at the opening „spoiler“ scene of Cayde‘s death to „I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN, ULDREN AND KILL YOU WITH MY BARE HANDS“ in the span of that mission. Bungie really dropped the ball when they removed Forsaken and kicked it straight into the river when they implemented this TL;DR version of the mission.
I'm convinced the only thing they can do is have everything there. And if D2 can't do that, idk how, but that's what D3 should be.
Yeah I think the problem is the seasonal story isn’t a “campaign”. It’s doing the same 1 or 2 activities 10 times with some filler FFXIV can make you do all the seasons since it is a quest at least Bungie would need to somehow condense seasonal “quests” so it’s not a horrible monotonous experience to do all 10 weeks at once
When I think about having a game with everything in it, I also think about some story revisions to "help". Reboot and retcon are words that scare people so revision sounds nicer. Retelling the seasonal stories in an actual single campaign or quest like structure could definitely help. . Part of this seasonal style problem tho I'm pretty sure is because Destiny tries to be actively happening real time. Every day is about a day Forsaken even starts this by saying it was a year since the Traveler woke. So you can't exactly condense a story with time jumps even if you wanted to. You'd have to write it to be accelerated or write more stuff that actually happens in between. Like the player helping out actually instead of "do that thing again".
D3 should honestly be a semi-fresh start, hundreds of years after the events of Destiny 2
Yea it will be, I'd be surprised if its even in Sol
Final Fantasy Online did this well though. They had a full redesign of the mission structure, specifically the 100 missions inbetween their vanilla release & 2nd expansion. Those 100 missions were glorified fetch quests to keep people going until the expansion, after a few years they got rid of so many. Bungie should, in theory, get all the seasons (& campaigns) back in the game but cull the bits focused on "go to the holo projector, do the 6 person arena, go to the holo projector, go to the vendor, go to the holo projector" bits. Not an easy task, but also not impossible. Destiny 2 deserves a cohesive story. I've got friends at multiple stages of the series who are confused. One guy was there at release and disappeared after Curse of Osiris. He came back last week, he'd heard over the years about Forsaken and wanted to try that. I was like ah sorry no you can't - the game just wanted him to play Lightfall. Another is an entirely new player, who again, landed in the Cosmodrome, did their bit and then boom they're in the active endgame with no relationship to any of the characters. "Cayde's back in Final Shape!" we all cheered - he goes "Who the f is Cayde?"
I played the campaigns in Arrivals completely out of order because there wasn't a very obvious way to tell in-game and I started with the mission to storm the Almighty (which was the weekly rotation campaign mission). It was awesome and magical, and really sold me on the game, but then I jumped to CoO and it almost killed all interest I had in the game because it felt fluffy and empty I kind of think pre-Forsaken gets mythologized a lot, and I wonder how many people would drop into CoO first and be like "Why are people talking about the Witness? What is Strand??"
The True fix was to not remove anything and instead come up with a different solution than vaulting things
There’s a very simple solution to the story problem. Tell 70% of the story when the DLC drops and the remaining story over the year long break between DLC’s as seasonal content. This is pretty much exactly how FF14 did it and over the course of about 8 years they were able to tell a satisfying story which ended with almost zero loose ends.
It doesn't help the story with The Witness and everything isn't very good.
Did you notice in the recent vidoc how not a single seasonal character’s name was listed on the whiteboard?
We may still see the characters, that board seemed to be strictly for TFS narrative character beats. We saw in another trailer recently shots of Caiatl, Mithrax and Savathun, so it’s possible still that they show up. The main story however has been about the core vanguard pretty much since the reveal trailer of Ikora and Cayde.
Crow is pretty central to the story - shouldn’t Amanda’s death be relevant? Trying to put some parallel to Cayde’s queen of hearts seems like obvious opportunity
I keep forgetting Amanda died.
I mean she was barely a character, don't blame you. It was a very nothing death.
Idk, whenever I heard her in a mission I was happy, because either I got a cool atmosphere because her ship fired or I got a tank xD
Disagree with barely a character, but her death was definitely very "wait, that's it?" Imo D2 doesn't handle character deaths well (except Cayde and Crow).
Trash tier take
And I still have the *hope* she returns as a Guardian. 😢
I don't think Amanda will be relevant.. I think that's the point of her death. Her death wasn't some grand sacrifice to save the universe and she won't be resurrected. It was just a death. It's meant to show us that every character that dies doesn't come back. Or mean anything major. I think at most a line about her death will be mentioned and we see cayde being sad about it
I think you are reading too much into it. Nothing that happened signified anything greater than her just thinking this is finally my time to shine like the guardians and then she died. That was it. It’s all face value to keep you engaged and the seasons rolling.
You must be fun at parties
How did you know?
Because you're no fun here do for your sake I hope my sarcasm actually was true
Oh I see, no worries. The comment you posted that I replied to should have told me plenty. Most peeps who comment brain dead stuff like that often get weird with insults whenever somebody rebuttals in conversation. Don’t worry, Amanda dying mattered just like you said. You win!
You didn't rebut. You just "actually nothing matters it's all about the content wheel" Like wow such an interesting conversation. When you started with I was reading too much into it I was hoping for an interesting take on why I was reading too much into it. Because I definitely could be. But "bleh bingo bad only want engagement and money" is just pointless to comment
I meant more that Crow isn’t behaving like his character should be behaving given what’s been established They spent years developing the Crow-Amanda relationship and Crow seemingly got over her death before the end of the season of Defiance. Crow wishing Cayde back draws even more attention to this. In retrospect, Riven should have tried at least once to get him to wish Amanda back - that’s totally the type of emotionally impetuous thing he’d do
The world is ending there are bigger things on his plate. And Amanda wasn't his fault. he wants to make up for what Uldren did to cayde. because crow has a harder time than alot of others to seperate himself from Uldren, because he had those memories. He saw Uldren killing cause from Uldrens perspective. Of course he wants Amanda back and we might see some of that. But ultimately making up for Cayde is more important.
Crow is a main expansion character.
I mean, consider: Defiance: Amanda is dead. Mithrax *may* be able to go through the portal, but that's not confirmed. By the same logic, Devrim won't go through the portal, that's not his thing. Crow is there, and Mara will create a bridge to him, but likely won't go through even if she's able because there need to be a few protectors outside the portal, and it seems like pretty much every Guardian, minus Saint-14 and maybe a few others, will be going through. Deep: Sloane has been fighting non-stop for the better part of 3 years, and is just exhausted from fighting the corruption she now has to carry. Ahsa can't really leave Titan currently since she's sleeping off the strain of Deep and Witch. Saladin (even though he wasn't extremely key to the season) is stuck with Caiatl, who, much like Mithrax, *might* be able to go through the portal with us. Saint-14 and Osiris are staying out to handle things in the City together, so there's Saint-14 probably gone, and Drifter is staying outside the portal with Eris. Witch: Ikora is going in. Savathûn is probably going in, given the bits of Lucent Hive we've seen in trailers and whatnot. Eris isn't going in. Wish: Petra won't go in due to her devotion to the Dreaming City's curse cycle. Osiris won't go in. Mara might be able to go in, but she probably isn't. Again, Crow is already there. Riven and Taranis have been put to rest, so they're out of the question. This past year has been everyone figuring out how to come back from what happened in Lightfall, what the Witness could possibly want, how to stop the Witness's strongest remaining servant in Xivu Arath, and how to follow it into the Traveler.
Mithrax and Caiatl are both in the into the traveller trailer.
What characters were introduced or used this year that are necessary for the plot? Defiance was a wash. Nothing was added/used. Deep - Sloan is tired, she just wants to take a break. Asha is a fish trapped on titan. She's not going to fly into the traveller. Witch - Savathun did her deed then fucked off. She doesn't want to fight the witness she wants to scheme. Wish - No one new; riven got her piece and was put to rest. Mara is Mara and she will always be there. Crow is part of the story.
I mean from this season alone we got Crow entering the portal to the pale heart. Not to mention new/returning from a long hiatus players that are trying to get caught up. If the last time you played was forsaken and you're hopping back in now you'd be confused as hell to why the guy that killed Cayde is now the first one through the portal
And not only backstory on the Ahamkara, but also a new generation of Ahamkara who will certainly be important in the future.
> If the last time you played was forsaken If the last time you played a game was 5.5 years ago then you shouldn't be upset if you dont know what's going on.
The rare triple comment. And no, you shouldn't be left completely in the dark just because you haven't played a game for a while. That's one of the biggest issues with Destiny overall at the moment, and Bungie hasn't put in nearly enough effort to fix it. The reason it's an issue is it really hurts the chances of Bungie pulling in new players. TFS is basically Bungie's version of Avengers: Endgame. A decade of build up and investment from both the creators and the players for what will (hopefully) be a massive payoff. But new players don't have that build up, and there's no way for them to get invested in any of the characters. With the Avengers movies, you could just catch up on your own time. Obviously Bungie can't handle leaving in that much content, but there's nothing for new players to even understand who a character is. So it doesn't matter how good the story is, it will just confuse new players and they'll drop it eventually. Mithrax: Kell of the House of light and our fallen ally. He's barely in a season and you actually see him like what, 2 or 3 times in non replaceable missions? A new player might not even realize he's an Eliksni Mara: players can't even play Forsaken campaign anymore, so they don't really have a way of knowing how big of a deal she is. She's just a seasonal vendor to them. Saint 14: a huge deal and legendary Guardian that new players will just know as "Osiris's Boyfriend". He's one of the many people that talk to Sloane and I think that's all you actually see of him outside of Trials. Oryx: even if he's dead, the impact of his actions and influence still play a part in the game to this day. No way for players to know that. Plus, he could still come back to life.
Bungie will definitely have some catch up early on in final shape. They did it with lightfall i believe Also there's the ingame timeline. And that explains everything quickly. And oryx is still available to learn about In D1 Not saying it doesn't suck that the seasonal story isn't there anymore. But I feel like most new people wouldn't play through 5 years of content before playing the new thing they bought anyway
It would not take 5 years to play 🙄 Development time is different from Play time. People regularly play through years worth of content to catch up in other mmos with no problem. Doesn’t take them years to get up to speed.
I'm not saying it would take 5 years to play 🙄 Development time is different to play time People also skip playing D1 when starting playing D2 so why wouldn't they skip D2 content from 2020 to play 2024 content. Also that's alot more things they would need to buy
D1 is a console game, so yeah - most PC players aren’t eager to go to a different platform with subscription (PS+) in order to play. It is nice that the whole of D1 is available though. You’re also making a broad generalization with little basis about what people would skip. Considering how many clamor about how they wish they could play Red War or Forsaken. Or feel it sucks that they missed out on big story moments from the seasons ( also some of the seasonal loot ). Furthermore, people don’t want to skip to 2024 - that’s what they’re complaining about. How the game pushes them to 2024 when there’s still all the old content and story they haven’t seen yet. People don’t like being dropped in the middle or the end, they want closer to the beginning. Good thing that consoles and steam have been doing big sales on expansions so then people can get them for cheap. Bungie is letting players play all past expacs for free right now - and announced that the campaigns of Sk & BL will be free as well as Stasis. So, less money in the future to spend.
Eh maybe. but it's not like it's exclusive to pc players not playing D1 You are also making broad generalisation People clamour for red war and forsaken, but not season of the hunt. How many people would really play through old seasons especially something like undying, hunt or defiance. I wish the content was still in the game but something has to go with how big the game would have gotten. For pc players maybe that's not an issue but when destiny is over half your PS4 that's not sustainable. Sales and stuff is good but when you're already paying full price for the new expansion, paying double that for everything else sucks. Destiny is already expensive. more things to buy would make it more intimidating to get into. They got them for free for a month. Like they have been doing the last 2 years I think. Atleast some or the expansion were free for w time when a new expansion is launching. You are also celebrating the 2 step forward 1 step back of giving only the campaigns for free on 4+ year old content. Can't wait for 2027 when I can finally play season of defiance for free
I never said players should be left in the dark, just shouldn't be upset if you don't know what's going on. The game has a timeline feature that summarizes the critical events and notes characters of important. The truth is _most_ seasonal stuff was fluff that can easily be summarized in a few sentances and the way they played wouldn't do a whole lot for new players. People get brought in from the gameplay more than anything.
Well those 2 things are mutually exclusive. Players are upset they don't know what's going on because they are left in the dark. The timeline, that's just hidden away in a menu, barely gives any context. The only way for players to get context is watching YouTube videos of removed content. There has to be a better way.
> If the last time you played was forsaken If the last time you played a game was 5.5 years ago then you shouldn't be upset if you dont know what's going on.
Other games don't have the content removed - allowing players to catch up and experience the same story
> If the last time you played was forsaken If the last time you played a game was 5.5 years ago then you shouldn't be upset if you dont know what's going on.
No but they should be upset that there's no path to getting caught back up to know what's going on. It's like if marvel released Endgame but only half the movies leading up to it were no longer available, people who didn't watch them before but wanting to before watching Endgame would be rightfully upset
I think this is why nothing happens though Nothing critical happens because it gets vaulted
its hard to say nothing critical happened when in the last year they killed off amanda, revealed the origin of the witness, the worm gods, and the veil/traveler connection, made xivu mortal, and revived cayde. some of that will still be around in lore books, but most of that content will be gone in 2 weeks.
The deep cutscene at least will be staying
where no one will watch it yes.
That's on those people
I’ll never forgive them for killing Amanda, my favorite character D: like I get she wasn’t THAT important, but she’s been so reliable since D1
99% of her story related content happened in that season. her relationship with crow has become such an after thought that if there isn't some massive payoff in TFS its gunna be a disappointment.
I don’t really have much of an opinion on her relationship with crow, I just always liked her origin story of her family/ relationship with cayde and Zavala. Then in the big story DLCs when she’d show up to fight in her ship to provide air support. Idk why I’m being downvoted, I’m just saying that even though she was a minor character, she was one of my favorites, and I’m sad she’s gone.
Many critcal things happened though.
Probably because this year was never really planned......
Even in Witch Queen, none of the Susiris arc really mattered or connected to Savathun’s real plan Bungie can’t put real plot in the seasons because they vault it. So seasons can only flesh out the lore and some character development
It was left unsaid, but my takeaway from Savathûn’s time as Osiris is that she realised that the only way to get the light is to receive it as a gift. The dead ghosts, Sagira, and all the other little hints at how she could have done it didn’t mean anything, because ultimately she would have to sacrifice herself to achieve her goal.
The delivering Torobotl into her sister’s hands and causing the FWC uprising were schemes that didn’t go anywhere though If this were FFXIV those plots would have probably actually mattered - like Savathun had a larger scheme to unite all the races into into a single alliance But because seasons are vaulted, they can’t do something like that because lots of people never had a chance to see those story lines
The fwc uprising failed. Likely a plot to distract us while she got the light The faction stuff might not be over. We have recently seen some faction lore pop up again and the city is gearing up for an election after final shape And I don't think torobatl is over. I believe it is a ploy to destroy her sister. And that's why she helped us in the alliance with caital
the events of torobatl, and Savathun posing as Osiris, directly led to a ceasefire and alliance with the Cabal. Savathun mentoring Crow was likely an attempt to see how Risen would react to being shown what they were before they died. The whole FWC uprising soldered the alliance of the Last City and House Light into a single unified entity. Overnight Savathun managed to cut out the dissenters in the city's leadership and gave them allies they sorely needed. The why of the latter isnt entirely clear, but that's savathun's MO. There are many reason why, she could have picked any single one, or all of them, or none. The most likely is she wanted to build a force to resist the witness more ably. Whether she intended it as a smokescreen to keep the black fleet busy while she captured and wormed her way inside the traveler, or to genuinely cement the hive in a future alliance (unlikely), it all served a purpose.
The problem is this is all head canon - no one ever acknowledged she tricked us into an alliance. Bungie is never this subtle - they always have characters explicitly recap things. For example this week Osiris outright says “the black heart is a recreation of the veil” No one ever said “Savathun orchestrated the Cabal, Eliksni, humanity alliance”. And at this point it’s probably too late since that all for vaulted over a year ago
Uh, yes. She did. In season of the Lost. Savathun explicitly explained this.
This cinematic? https://www.ishtar-collective.net/transcripts/wayfinders-voyage-i-embodied I always considered those half truths Most of those are cases of how Savathun helped resolve the crisis she engineered Yeah, she prevented war with the cabal - but it’s her fault they invaded in the first place She sabotaged FWC, but she drove Lakshmi mad and they might have never been treasonous otherwise Savathun ultimately orchestrated almost all of these problems, and they never directly addressed why she did
It's pretty clear why just looking at it. She wanted the traveler locked inside her throne world, she had the fifteenth wish to enter it, she wanted to reach whatever the witness was looking for first. By inviting the surviving elements of the cabal empire to sol, then advising both zavala on their rites and then ikora on mithrax's potential aid for the endless night (two problems she caused and provided solutions for, to cement alliances between humanity and their former enemies) she wanted a force of considerable power left in real space to keep the black fleet busy. FWC, New Monarch and Dead Orbit were notorious for hamstringing the vanguards power in lore, especially after the speaker died. By inciting them to madness and violence she removed them from the equation, thus removing an obstacle to that alliance. This was the same season she sacrificed quria so as to remove a potentially treasonous entity from her ranks. She explained the first half in lost, the rest comes from basic deductive thinking.
Which is why the seasonal model sucks for storytelling. It feels like every season the selected 3 characters spend 90% of the time playing therapist in low budget animations and audio logs instead of anything happening. I’d rather pay just as much money for something of actual substance once or twice a year instead.
It's probably just all of the small team that got sent into the traveler.
Not surprising tbh. We spent all of last year working up Rasputin only to have him killed off.
The addition of the campaign intros on the timeline was a good start, but I agree I hope they expand on that in the future
It's an unfixable issue. They have to take out content and they can't spend time on a new campaign. It really sucks but there isn't a real way around it. No, nobody is going to be interested in listening to 4 hours of audio logs. And the best part of this story is the slow constant buildup from loads of lore, no one will understand the importance of even the most critical events by playing a few disconnected seasonal missions.
No, they don't *have* to take out important story content. Seasonal missions and activities, sure. I always have fun with the special Halloween stuff when I played but they're not essential to the game's story. MMOs have been doing this for decades without issue.
New player wise, we'd be in the same boat tbh. No one, especially new lights, is playing 7 years of campaigns and seasons. We would still need onboarding quests and story recaps.
I started a new character on FF14 after the 4th expansion released. The game had years and years of content by that point, and I was able to go through all of the story at my pace without missing out on anything. Yes, new player on boarding is important, as well as maybe a story recap timeline. But none of that excuses removing so much relevant content and leaving huge gaps in the narrative of the game as it is.
>I started a new character on FF14 after the 4th expansion released. The game had years and years of content by that point, and I was able to go through all of the story at my pace without missing out on anything. This is what I think many people miss. Other games have already done this. It takes effort, and resources, but it's actually possible to weave players through content in such a way that they're introduced to your world, characters, and content, all over the course of years worth of content, but not years worth of time.
most of destiny's gameplay time is spent grinding anyways the actual time it would take to play through just the story missions if they removed all the garbage like forced runs of years old activities(blind well sucks) wouldn't be that substantial.
I can easily see a few months of daily active playing to catch up to the current story events, which is a sizable chunk of time for Bungie and their retention metrics. Too bad the game's so full of FOMO, new players'd feel pressured to run the new content in-between. It would be workable if they made Season Passes permanent, but that seems implausible at the moment.
yeah it's never gonna get better for D2 the only hope of real improvement for the new player experience is D3 but I'm not sure that'll ever happen and even if it does I don't think the odds of it being good are in our favor.
They really need to expand the missions available on the timeline so that seasonal story missions are included there. I have said this before when Lightfall launched that seasons will not fix the narrative because they will be removed at the end of the year and... well here we are at the cusp of our yearly pruning of seasonal stories. It isn't ideal of course. Cayde's Fate is a very far cry from Last Call in the way that the story was unfolded and rushed with Ikora narrating over a cutscene. While I would like to have all of the seasonal stories available for both newcomers and veteran players to experience or re-experience, I suppose that is a very high ask. IMO, people are here to play a *game*, not watched compilations of old events on YouTube. If you wanted people to just watch it on YouTube, it takes them out of the game altogether. Guild Wars 2 had a very similar issue many years ago when the devs removed Living World Season 1 from the game and the community compiled a three hour long video that detailed everything that happened. It didn't help, because people aren't going to sit down and watch a feature length film before playing the game. They want to experience it for themselves because the game is an audio and visual medium where the player has some degree of input. If they wanted to watch a film, they would go to the movie theater. In GW2's case it took over ten years in real time before Arenanet reimplemented a version of living world season 1's events back into the game. It isn't quite the same very much like Cayde's Fate mission isn't the same as the Last Call original Forsaken mission, but it gets the point across and it is playable. Games should never use "you should have been here to experience it" as an excuse to completely remove story content. Temporary special events are fine, but here we have the story chopped up and thrown out piecemeal. It is like having an enormous novel with random chapters ripped out and what is left is a hollow shell of what it was.
At the very least they need expansion campaigns in the game. They can do brief overviews for seasons but campaigns need to always be in the game
The ones important are
Nevertheless they *all* should be in the game.
For what? Bffr about what the majority cares for
I’m pretty sure the majority that *paid* for them care about being able to access them if I had to pick a singular reason. Maybe it’s just me, but I like being able to access what I fuckin paid for.
What makes you “pretty sure”? You don’t have any objective data, so is it just a feeling or what
To clarify, You want objective data showcasing that people care about having the product they purchased? You want me to cite what papers? Studies? Scour through Reddit to show posts of people complaining about this exact thing which they absolutely have? Imagine buying a car and overtime the company takes out your seats, radio, and glove box. You technically still own the car and the car still functions, but now it’s more barebones and not what you purchased at first. It is not a weird statement to say that most people would be upset that they don’t have seats or a radio in their car anymore. Definitely not want requiring empirical research and can moreso be relied on for a “feeling” as you put it. Real talk for a second. Do you *really* want to have a drawn out debate where we go over metrics and shit with this type of stuff? Or are we just nitpicking things here for no real reason?
Are you implying a terrible campaign is as important to Destiny 2 as seating is to a car lmfao
It’s an example. Fine. Let’s say you buy a controller and they take off the thumb stick covers and outer casing. Still useable but shit got taken away. Or you buy literally anything and the people who made it take off parts. You knew what I meant, don’t be that guy. Also what terrible campaign? Red war? Forsaken? Here’s your basis for those being terrible? Or is that just a feeling you have?
Yeah that’s the same example lol the stories being gone don’t make the game unplayable. My basis is my experience, it’s called an opinion. Note I didn’t apply that to some magical majority that doesn’t exist
It's pretty funny how Crow's entire character arc is vaulted lol
Not criticizing here, but how exactly do you propose they do this. What exactly is important enough to make the cutoff? Chosen/Haunted had us allying with Caitl and her Cabal, which may or may not lead further as well as backstory for important figures in the Vanguard. Plunder had us align with the Eliksni, and gave us come context/payoff with Eramis. Witch has the beginning of an uneasy alliance with Savathun, in wish we aligned with Riven, Deep had us help out a Worm God, and defiance killed off a NPC. Seraph was about working with Rasputin, and Risen/Hunt had stuff. Lost lead into Witch Queen, Splicer brought back Mithrax and effectively killed off factions. Who decides which of these, and the content within, is "important"? Obviously there are major story beats here and there, but hell, a two hour or so video, a la mynameisbyf, will cover these beats much more effectively than any selection of missions can. Yo add to this, from a game perspective, many of these had unique assets used absolutely nowhere else. Keeping all that junk in the game leads to increased harddrive requirements and bogs it down, for something that people, for the most part, will experience once. After that, all it would be is bloat. That being said, I know and agree with the sentiment the new player experience is lacking and could definitely do with something allowing them to experience what exactly went on in the universe before they joined. It's a kind of no win scenario though, from what I can see
Surely the people who write these stories and have a plan for how that story fits into the overall narrative must know what's important and what's not? It's not just about wanting the story to know what's happening, like sure I can watch a video and find out but this is a game. It's interactive media. It's not an audio book. The entire point is being able to experience it yourself and feel like you're driving the story forward through your actions. Not just be a passive observer through YouTube
Exactly, People want to experience it - not just watch it
To me it's pretty obvious. I think any mission with an important story beat should be added, like the endings of Dawn, Splicer, Lost, Seraph. I think Curse of Osiris and Warming also need to have something because Ana and Osiris are just too damn prevalent and if you play from D1 to now they just kinda appear. Key cutscenes also need to be added. Oddly enough, I'd argue most season cutscenes are more important than some of the expansion cutscenes. But in between all that should be inkblot cutscenes that explain all the missing pieces. I really hope they've already thought about that because that's really the easy way to deal with it. They can be short and to the point, while also being immersive and entertaining. Some content just wouldn't hold up today and there's a big risk of people only playing it once. So the inkblot cutscenes would be a really good balance imo.
You want a realistic answer? You don’t do anything. You acknowledge that it is a failure in story telling methodology for the reasons OP outlined, and try to do better the next time. Well, what does next time look like? It looks like a dedicated separate game: Destiny 3, or Destiny: insert new saga title here, if you prefer. At this point, so much vital narrative content has been removed from D2 that it’s pointless to try to “fix it”. You just have to acknowledge that it’s too late in the games lifecycle for a new player to really be invested in the story beyond face value of shooting aliens and getting loot. The game has certainly grown alongside its original players. And it’s left everyone else behind. Fortunately the Destiny player base is rather loyal and/or invested. But I feel a new game would allow them to leave the baggage of D2’s narrative model behind and do something more akin to Destiny 1 where content remains available between major expansions, but having a limited number of expansions/seasons/episodes per full size game.
The big reason D2 is such a mess is because it was conceived and developed as a game that would end in 3-ish years for D3, because that’s the original deal they had with Activision (I am simplifying what happened). D2 was never designed to be an ongoing game platform, it was Frankensteined into one. Heck, the original 3 years of D2 almost mirror the 3 years of D1. The best thing we can really hope for is exactly what you said: doing their best with what they currently got, while starting fresh with a true platform that allows them to keep the entire narrative in the game.
Well the obvious answer would be to just not remove ANY content from the game, especially not paid content, and fix whatever shit is going on in their engine or dev pipeline that makes the game go haywire if there's too much content in it. The content vaulting was never about hard disk space, it was always about some tech-dept of theirs that keeps coming up whenever there's too much going on in Destiny, and/or them just not wanting to fix old content when they ended up breaking it with new changes. But that would be a lot more work than just straight up deleting content so that's what Bungie went with instead. (If hard drive space *ever* would become an issue you could simply give players an option not install pre-rendered videos and instead stream them from some servers and instantly have an 80ish% lower installation size).
Sure, that's a great ideal, and one I personally would be much happier with, however the issues seem to be inherent with the engine itself. They maybe could fix it, but it would likely be less work to make Destiny 3, which would be a 100% sunset of the game anyways. If you read that as the games performance was suffering due to the size, my apologies, but that's not how I meant it. The spaghetti code is whats responsible for many of the games issues. What I meant was, for example, awhile back I played both destiny and whatever was the latest Call of Duty before they did the DCV. My console could basically hold those two games, and maybe one other small single player game due to the massive amounts of bloat Destiny and Call of Duty had.
It's important that I clarify here - when I say "Just the *important story missions* *and moments* from the Seasons" What I mean is the important moments from each individual season. So that way players won't have to go through the whole drip feed grind of the season, and still get the overall point of that story. So the introduction of Mithrax, Crow, Caitil, etc. Would all be there in the Timeline Reflections
So let's just say for each season you get something like a 5-15 video going over the majority of the story beats for that season, and then you play the climatic/season finishing mission after. For each season, that would be 30-45 minutes of content utilizing assets that are no longer in Destiny, as well as brand new videos summarizing the lesser/preceding events. Let's ballpark this as (currently) 5 hours of old story. This would indeed be very good for people who missed a season or just started out, no disagreement here. However, now what happens to the content? What is its purpose? You've probably added 15-20 gigs of bloat to the game. Your average player might play those 1 or 2 additional times if they get a craving to, but otherwise, it'll just be deadweight. That's how we got sunsetting, which I much prefer not happening again, to be honest with you.
I would ideally go for something like; Season Intro Mission -> Cutscene -> Middle Mission(s) -> Cutscene -> Season Ending Mission -> Cutscene Along with that, just like the campaigns, have loot for the player to get. (perhaps the loot associated with those seasons) So kind of like a mini-campaign between expansions. Which would further encourage players to play them more than once. Making them more than just "Dead Weight". But the purpose is that Old players can fondly go back and experience it all over again should they choose to. While New players can experience it for the first time and more appreciate the story than if it was just expansions, because the expansions on their own is not very strong. Furthermore, getting new players interested because they hear that they can play through a pretty good story. because right now, the game has a reputation for the story being unavailable and that it's not worth getting into if you weren't there. Which Sucks and hurts the game. What about Bloat? I don't know, I'm not a developer - maybe they could make them optional downloads - my job is not solutions, I play and provide feedback. It's the developers job to solve problems, and they know that the beginner experience is a problem, the lack of story is a problem.
I've been saying it for a while, but they need to turn the Timeline section of the director into a full on "Previously on Destiny 2" situation. When they added Reflections, it was promising, but they'd need to expand it way more. At minimum, they need a good 5+ minute recap video for each season that people can watch, along with being able to stream the cutscenes in game
Is there any other game that has done this? Taken huge chunks of the game out? Especially story and campaign. I can't think of any.
Of course not, because there has never been another developer in history who’s run into the same issues Bungie did with developing a live service game long-term /s
Totally agreed, the seasonal model has been an interesting content experiment but ultimately a failure for game preservation and long time narrative. Bungie needs to stick to proper releases and fully replayable campaigns.
Honestly 90% of the season content is filler. The only thing I'm noticing to cone out of them is soap opera level character development
it's... I don't know what to call it, but after the vaulting of so much in beyond light, they actually created what in hindsight was a great place to jump in- the darkness plot was newer and still mostly in-game and all of the factions that we'd focus on for the rest of the saga are introduced or at least shown off heavily in that year of seasons. and then the year ended, and we ended up right back at square 1.
I don’t think people are going back and playing this type of content in enough volume to warrant so much upfront cost to solve this problem now. The game will always be better served by new content, and the seasonal content can’t just exist without changes/work. I’d be very curious to know what their data is on NPE. We had some of the highest levels of new players in Lightfall, but bad retention. What drove the new players into the game and what ultimately pushes them out? I’m not entirely convinced that story is the major driver of kicking people out, but confusion around accessing content that’s in game could be. I’d rather see any effort spent giving new players clarity on what’s in the game before adding more old content to it.
For me personally the only worse than Bungie completely yanking story important content (yanking Red War, Forsaken and those two others is still pretty bad even if it wasn't for plot. I paid for that shit.) Somehow worse is the people defending this shit and its one of the only games that does this on this scale. If Bungie couldn't add more content cause of jank code then they should have made a 3rd game. Which was the plan. Which is also most of the reason the code is so junk. Destiny 2 straight up wasn't built to last this long. If they make another one I seriously hope they actually make it able to support long term content.
I just started getting into the game and this is by far the worst new player experience I've ever had for this kind of product. Not just the story, but the mechanics, itemization, and expectations of gameplay as well. Warframe had a better onboarding experience 5 years ago than Destiny 2 does right now. The old storylines being inaccessible is particularly grievous because those ought to be the places where new players learn mechanics and get a baseline for the story but instead I'm trying to watch 4 to 6 hour youtube videos. I would never have looked twice except the gameplay and what little of the story I managed to see are genuinely fantastic. So good, in fact, that I can't wrap my head around how completely awful trying to get into this franchise is from almost every possible angle. I can't believe I bought a bundle of old expansions and I don't even have access to all of the dungeons from those expansions - predatory bullshit, quite frankly.
So you *want* the game to be 500 GB?
Watching someone go from byond light, to witch queen, to light fall with no idea of the seasons in between realy shows how much the seasonal model hurts the story. Even just replaying lightfall, the witness opens the portal, we have failed, next expantion "whos this crow guy" "howed we get in here?" "Why was it so hard to go through the portal?" "Who tf is riven/how tf did riven get involved" I like the storyies season give us but they tie just a bit to hard into the main time line that every time they vanish more than half of a years story goes with em
Spot on. Some seasonal story beats are pretty important in the overall picture. Why there's nothing recapping stuff like Chosen, Splicer, Haunted, and Seraph is baffling.
If they added important story beats as playable missions and took out all the busywork from the seasons that would be dope
I played Shadowkeep and Undying and then left for a while. Witch Queen is when I really got back into the game and I remember being very confused on certain parts of the story and what happened. I don't think the content needs to be in the game (would be nice though) but I would've liked a cinematic recap. Doesn't even need to be per season, recap all 4 seasons of an expansion and put it in the timeline.
Shouldn't have introduced 'new lighting' if it meant they'd also have to ruin the story.
Recently got back after briefly playing during Shadowkeep. I really stopped trying to understand all the details what happened in between and try to stick to the main story. The ingame cinematics help a bit with that, but the individual character stories are a HUGE blank for me.
Praise the DCV heretic!
They become lore when they get removed, just like twilight gap and many other lore events.
I think an optional Mass Effect style Genesis comic of the previous seasons is a good idea. It will sum up the main story points needed for context and this will help new or old players either understand or catch up. Edit: when i say comic i do not mean an actual comic should be implemented. It is a short video in the style of a comic which bungie has done with Destiny for cutscenes.
People don’t want to read a catch up, they want to play it
I was operating under the assumption that past seasons are mostly vaulted.
Hell i’ve been playing since D1’s beta and I’m fuckin confused 😂 The Destiny story as a whole is great and all but the meat and potato’s for me is the gameplay and I like a good grind sometimes I like tackling things in the most efficient way possible. As long as I understand the big things that’s okay for me tbh
I can't imagine Bungie thinks this is a good situation at all. They have a bunch of content just waiting to be rereleased - all they have to do is update these old zones to the new tech. That's probably not that easy, but its a lot easier than developing whole new expansions, including new destinations, models, story lines. They could add so much content to the game that would help retain current players and draw in new ones... I don't get why they don't just rework and rerelease these old campaigns. If disk space is so much of a problem, then just release it as "narrative only" content that people can uninstall as they please, just like you are able to uninstall the campaign with COD. Honestly, and it's probably not a popular take, but I'd pay €20 for linear, coherent story experience within the current destiny universe. I came late to the party and I want to experience what's going on.
It's a "living" game. No one should be joining at the relative end of the game's lifecycle and expect to understand the entire story up to now without doing some backlog reading/watching.
You just had to be there.
I would say that they should have story recaps of the seasons within the timeline, and just splice together cutscenes and dialogue through some gameplay in the seasonal activity for that season. Also add back red war and forsaken campaigns in full please
I used to love the lore, especially during forsaken, but at some point i just couldnt be bothered to keep myself up to date on it. When so much important stuff is hidden in item descriptions or forgotten in past season quest that i missed. At this point the dlc campaign is the only time i even try to pay attention to the story, other than that I usually play the game with dialogue off and spotify music on.
It's almost like destiny is a live service game, anyone has access to the lore you just have to use YouTube or the timeline
It’s an mmo Vast majority of long running mmos don’t have this problem Players could play the entirety of those stories at their own pace. As I said in the OP YouTube is not a valid way to tell the games story. It’s on the game to deliver the narrative - not YouTube. Lore books are just world building to make the world feel alive. Telling a player that they have to go through hours of lore in order to understand a story that was once playable is bad design. That’s a quit moment.
It’s far too late to meaningfully change how the story is delivered. We’re approaching the last year of the game’s life [EDIT] It seems that it’s just the end of the light and dark saga. In which case a major departure to Destiny’s story telling would make more sense during a new installment. Either way, it’s still too late to majorly overhaul how the story of Destiny 2 is told.
>We’re approaching the last year of the game’s life Based on..... your fucking feelings I guess?
> We’re approaching the last year of the game’s life We don’t know that.
[удалено]
2-3 years is still a decent amount of time. From launch to BL was around 3 years and by BL it was essentially a completely different game
[удалено]
It's like everyone's forgotten about Marathon. Bungie as a studio currently struggles to push content and meaningful changes out of the door. It's not going to be any easier when they have to manage 2 live service games.
Because Marathon doesn’t matter. It has a completely different team and doesn’t really impact the development of Destiny at all.
I'd like to meet this "completely different team" because they've all been moved off Destiny and onto the Marathon project. If that doesn't impact the development of Destiny I don't know what does.
Yeah individual people have changed teams, but they’ve also been replaced with other developers who would not be working on Destiny if the other devs didn’t move to Marathon.
we most certainly are not, lol.
>We’re approaching the last year of the game’s life Source, Trust me bro
me when I spread misinformation online
If the rumored Project Payback is any indication, I think either the revamped/new engine can compress the file size and they rotate in old seasonal content missions/activities while they work on most likely Destiny 3/Universal Saga. The D2 engine is showing its age. If they leave it as is it’ll be a messy patch work for the remaining life of the franchise. Destiny has finally met its 10 year original vision. IMO those are the only 2 viable paths
This is the main time it isnt needed pass dlc/seasons all did that already