Bungie: Our Path Forward

[Gamernyc78]

Bungie.net

www.bungie.net

This has been one of the most difficult weeks in our studio’s history, as we’ve parted ways with people we respect and admire. We’ve spent this week supporting one another, including those who are at the studio, as well as friends and colleagues who no longer are.

We want to acknowledge the feedback and concerns you have about Lightfall and recent Seasons, as well as your responses to the reveal of The Final Shape. We know we have lost a lot of your trust. Destiny needs to surprise and delight. We haven’t done this enough and that’s going to change.

To us the path forward is clear: We need to make The Final Shape an unforgettable Destiny experience. We want to build something that will be regarded alongside the best games we’ve ever made – a fitting culmination that honors the journey we’ve been on together for the past ten years. Forsaken, The Witch Queen, and The Taken King – these are the standard bearers we aim to live up to.

We are intensely focused on exceeding your expectations for The Final Shape. Destiny 2 has more than 650 dedicated teammates pouring all their energy and expertise into delivering this epic moment and its subsequent Episodes.

In the weeks ahead, you’ll be hearing more from us about what’s next on the short-term horizon, beginning with our next Season in late November. Afterwards, we’ll begin to unpack our team’s bigger, bolder, and brighter vision for The Final Shape, as well as the bridge we plan to build to take us all out of this Darkness and into the Light.

See you starside,

The Destiny 2 Dev Team

 

[Bryank75]

Just as I thought, they want to deliver something really special to cap off this (basically) ten year journey in Destiny.

The cuts couldn't be avoided, they grew a lot and they are still bigger than they were a few years ago.

The music is recorded and it's hard to justify an in house composer and team these days.

Costs have to be managed and they have to focus the team around delivering what the player needs.....

The players don't necessarily know what the inputs are to get what they want... they just see cuts and think that they will get less as a result, which isn't necessarily true at all.

As someone was saying.... all the community managers stopped communicating with fans due to toxicity and it was all rolled into the official Destiny account... so obviously those roles became redundant, that should have been an obvious outcome. Why would a company keep a huge team on when they made a case for their positions to be eliminated?

I do have a problem with them cutting people in art and other important roles though and seeing Sony buy yet another useless cloud company today... I'd have preferred to keep 20-30 people at Bungie than see Sony buy that dogshit.

 

[Vertigo]

The seesaw in quality of expansions is a bit annoying. Expectations were way bigger for Lightfall with Witch Queen being their best expansion, raid, year and player engagement. Thus Lightfall hit all time peak launch numbers. It didn’t do what it needed to and there are consequences.

There is no resolve until content actually starts dropping. We’ve been here before with Year 1 D2.

But the revenue issue is also somewhat unrelated. Surely tied to player engagement but their a la carte model bloats into a bigger monstrosity year after year.

Annual pass was the best way to do it out of all the things they’ve tried. Not seasons a a la carte but forced to buy all 3 content drops etc. for the year. I think they NEED to make previous content (at least campaigns) thru at least witch Queen f2p. Not having campaign content available in the free to play version is dumb as fuck.

These changes usually come just in time so it always feels like the same story every few years. Maybe it is….

 

[AllBizness]

I play Destiny 2 everyday, love this weeks nightfall strike.

 

[nongkris]

Phew, I don't remember any Playstation studio having to issue an apology letter like this to the public. Is this the type of company Sony wanted to integrate with when they can't seem to manage to their own community properly.

 

[flaccidsnake]

As somebody who checked in on Destiny here and there since the D1 launch, it feels like nobody is ever completely happy with this game. I heard some good things about The Witch Queen, but that's pretty much it. Massively popular, massively successful 6/10 game that occasionally hits 8/10.

 

[Danja]

Rooting for Bungie and I'm sure they'll get it together in the end.

 

[Bryank75]

As somebody who checked in on Destiny here and there since the D1 launch, it feels like nobody is ever completely happy with this game. I heard some good things about The Witch Queen, but that's pretty much it. Massively popular, massively successful 6/10 game that occasionally hits 8/10.

The gameplay is really incredible and could be even better... I think they took out some of the best movement, back when there was titan skating.
The shooting is incredibly satisfying and the multiplayer.

Unfortunately as @Vertigo was saying, there is a seesaw of quality between expansions... and the seasonal stuff for me is incredibly repetitive usually. Boiling down to a room full of bad guys to shoot within some parameters.

The problem for someone like me is that the multiplayer was left to rot, basically. They probably had to make a choice about where to use resources and they choose to stop making or recycling maps and content for PVP and I imagine that many people like me just drifted away... especially since I like to play PVP casually.... just jumping in to have a bit of fun. Not for the sweaty stuff. The skill based matchmaking was also a problem that kept creeping in.

There is definitely too much to the Destiny model.... it's intimidating and overly monetized. They need to streamline, as I said before.
Find a nice middleground and just get everyone in on the same level.

Even if that means making the base game 60 or 70 instead of 50. Just have everything included in one package. Campaign, dungeons, seasons...everything.

 

[Vertigo]

The gameplay is really incredible and could be even better... I think they took out some of the best movement, back when there was titan skating.
The shooting is incredibly satisfying and the multiplayer.

Unfortunately as @Vertigo was saying, there is a seesaw of quality between expansions... and the seasonal stuff for me is incredibly repetitive usually. Boiling down to a room full of bad guys to shoot within some parameters.

The problem for someone like me is that the multiplayer was left to rot, basically. They probably had to make a choice about where to use resources and they choose to stop making or recycling maps and content for PVP and I imagine that many people like me just drifted away... especially since I like to play PVP casually.... just jumping in to have a bit of fun. Not for the sweaty stuff. The skill based matchmaking was also a problem that kept creeping in.

There is definitely too much to the Destiny model.... it's intimidating and overly monetized. They need to streamline, as I said before.
Find a nice middleground and just get everyone in on the same level.

Even if that means making the base game 60 or 70 instead of 50. Just have everything included in one package. Campaign, dungeons, seasons...everything.

In its worst of times … now. PvP is the only thing that keeps the game together honestly.

It’s doing just that again. The checkmate PvP playlist is the best thing they’ve done. Primary gunfights and ability uptime lowered significantly. And no sbmm (for now) It’s a shame it’s debuted in a season with non stop drama otherwise I would’ve been a bit more optimistic.

The player engagement thing is such a mixed issue of discussion that it needs to be addressed from numerous angles. Getting weapon craft blueprints shouldn’t be vendor lottery but thru the activity. Thus no reason to ever play new activity after first two weeks when you can just slam vendor engrams just like slamming token in year 1 d2.

Or that the best content this season (returning and remixed Crota raid) so far is free and doesn’t even require the season purchase. So why should you?

Then there’s the talent and resources they waste making eververse sparrows and ghosts. I’m fine with MTs as long as it’s not stupid shit. Bungie doesn’t bank on eververse as much as people think. They mostly fail at it. It’s the dlc, expansions and seasons that do it.

Depends if Salvatori is replaced by AI. Then they’re fucked

 

[shrike0fth0rns]

Bungie.net

www.bungie.net

This has been one of the most difficult weeks in our studio’s history, as we’ve parted ways with people we respect and admire. We’ve spent this week supporting one another, including those who are at the studio, as well as friends and colleagues who no longer are.

We want to acknowledge the feedback and concerns you have about Lightfall and recent Seasons, as well as your responses to the reveal of The Final Shape. We know we have lost a lot of your trust. Destiny needs to surprise and delight. We haven’t done this enough and that’s going to change.

To us the path forward is clear: We need to make The Final Shape an unforgettable Destiny experience. We want to build something that will be regarded alongside the best games we’ve ever made – a fitting culmination that honors the journey we’ve been on together for the past ten years. Forsaken, The Witch Queen, and The Taken King – these are the standard bearers we aim to live up to.

We are intensely focused on exceeding your expectations for The Final Shape. Destiny 2 has more than 650 dedicated teammates pouring all their energy and expertise into delivering this epic moment and its subsequent Episodes.

In the weeks ahead, you’ll be hearing more from us about what’s next on the short-term horizon, beginning with our next Season in late November. Afterwards, we’ll begin to unpack our team’s bigger, bolder, and brighter vision for The Final Shape, as well as the bridge we plan to build to take us all out of this Darkness and into the Light.

See you starside,

The Destiny 2 Dev Team

The best scenario is Eric lamprey who sits on the board rallies the other members and force Pete out then they restructure the buy agreement to give Sony direct control and integrate binge under ps. Release marathon as a multiplat as planned other bungie ip don’t release on xbox fck’em.

 

[Yurinka]

So this confirms they fired or lost people, makes both the Final Shape supposed delay and Lightfall supposed underperformance sound true.

The best scenario is Eric lamprey who sits on the board rallies the other members and force Pete out then they restructure the buy agreement to give Sony direct control and integrate binge under ps. Release marathon as a multiplat as planned other bungie ip don’t release on xbox fck’em.

Sony always had full control of Bungie since the day Sony bought the 100% of the Bungie shares.

Sony gave Bungie full creative freedom in the same way that each team from the PS Studios has full creative freedom.

Bungie to continue publishing under their own publishing label helps to differentiate:

• Games published under Bungie label will continue publishing all their games in other platforms (including rival consoles) day one
• Games published under PS Studios label (iwth MLB as exception), aren't released on rival consoles and only some of them get ported to PC years after their original PS release (in the future some of their GaaS may be an exception and be released day one on PC)

Sony wants extra revenue coming from non-PS platforms, from rival platforms but specially PC and mobile and from GaaS. So they won't stop publishing Bungie games outside PS, specially when Bethesda's acquisition didn't help MS with Xbox or GP and CoD iwll continue on PS during at least 10 years and ABK games may be on PS cloud gaming or game subs for at least 15 years.

As someone was saying.... all the community managers stopped communicating with fans due to toxicity and it was all rolled into the official Destiny account... so obviously those roles became redundant, that should have been an obvious outcome. Why would a company keep a huge team on when they made a case for their positions to be eliminated?

As someone who worked as manager of a CM team for GaaS of a big publisher, I have to mention that the main role of the CMs on a project like that is to collect and report the feedback, suggestions and issue reports from the players for the dev team, and to communicate and explain (what can be communicated and explained) the dev team decisions to the players, and to reply what can be replied.

Many of that feedback often can't be implemented due to lack of time or resources, or because would break something in the game, or because to address something else has more priority for the team, or because would need some too expensive structural changes that make more sense to keep it for a sequel.

Regarding toxic players and trolls are better banned or ignored, is important to don't feed them.

Even in very successful GaaS, after several years the revenue starts to decline, so there's less revenue to pay servers, devs to keep updating the game and CMs to keep replying. The later stage is called sunset stage, where there's a minimum team of devs taking care of server stability and a minimal CM team checking the minimual things.

Destiny 2 doesn't seem to be in sunseting stage (650 people working on it is insanely huge number even for being even just after release), but maybe started to scale down the team and started to move it to other projects if available.

I assume their plans were to keep heavily supporting Destiny 2 until the 2024 Final Shape release, the last big update, a release that would be focused on adding a great end game stuff to depend less on game updates, same year where they planned to release Marathon so could move most of the CM team from Destiny 2 to Marathon.

But seeing that now firings and Final Shape delay may be real, maybe the Marathon delay is real too. That may mean that many CMs could be without work during many months, so maybe they decided to fire a good portion of them and will hire CMs later when needed.

But well, this is just a theory. This Bungie communication mentions to have episodes after The Final Shape, not sure if this means small updates after it or if they now thought about to continue making more big Destiny 2 expansions, or if they are talking about a different Destiny game as could be Destiny 3 or a spinoff.

 

[shrike0fth0rns]

So this confirms they fired or lost people, makes both the Final Shape supposed delay and Lightfall supposed underperformance sound true.

Firing ppl sucks but I never fault a studio or publisher for delaying a game to make it better. If the delays help the games I’m fine with it.

 

[BroodCorp]

Is Destiny that damn good to warrant all this drama? Jfc

 

[Bryank75]

In its worst of times … now. PvP is the only thing that keeps the game together honestly.

It’s doing just that again. The checkmate PvP playlist is the best thing they’ve done. Primary gunfights and ability uptime lowered significantly. And no sbmm (for now) It’s a shame it’s debuted in a season with non stop drama otherwise I would’ve been a bit more optimistic.

The player engagement thing is such a mixed issue of discussion that it needs to be addressed from numerous angles. Getting weapon craft blueprints shouldn’t be vendor lottery but thru the activity. Thus no reason to ever play new activity after first two weeks when you can just slam vendor engrams just like slamming token in year 1 d2.

Or that the best content this season (returning and remixed Crota raid) so far is free and doesn’t even require the season purchase. So why should you?

Then there’s the talent and resources they waste making eververse sparrows and ghosts. I’m fine with MTs as long as it’s not stupid shit. Bungie doesn’t bank on eververse as much as people think. They mostly fail at it. It’s the dlc, expansions and seasons that do it.

Depends if Salvatori is replaced by AI. Then they’re fucked

Agree with everything you said here. 100%. You know the game inside out.

 

[Bryank75]

Is Destiny that damn good to warrant all this drama? Jfc

Of course it depends who you are but IMO, the gameplay and universe are worth it... honestly with a good cross-media startegy, it could absolutely dominate other IP's like Star Wars, especially these days.

 

[Darth Vader]

I'm just here to laugh at those saying this was all a big lie and astroturfing.

 

[Vertigo]

seeing how they need both long and short term revenue streams sorted …

Repeating the f2p and steam launch is the way to go. The only thing the game has for the casual player are the campaigns and only really just that. Make the campaigns thru Witch Queen f2p and if anything sell an “endgame pass” for any related dungeon/raid content and their loot tables. This will solve much of the pricing concerns and l’d assume most older pieces of content ran their course at “retail” for the most part.

Calling destiny f2p always feels deceptive since any hardcore player drops $100 a year minimum for content and even more deceptive calling it such post the orignal content vaulting. There are no campaigns and only having old d1 raids for non PvP players is asking them to go straight into endgame as a noob. Like what? It’s more representative of a launcher at this point.

Now you have players advocating more vaulting and sunsetting. We’ve come full circle. Does that need to happen? Yes, from both power creep and data angles.

I’m more concerned with the data. This is also why I suggest taking all those campaigns f2p. To eventually vault those campaigns from player hard drives. They say they engineering a solution. I believe having “retired” campaigns playable and other easily streamable data using cloud is that at the moment.

Long term is wait and see. They’ve already announced seasons are over when Final Shape launches and they’ve announced the 3 episodes following. I imagine it’ll be six episodes total as Marathon launch will replace destiny expansion revenues and more hopefully that year.

Leap froggin the two games for yearly revenues should mirror destiny’s earlier expansion drops across teams.


Here’s the original leaked development slide. Now obsolete because of change of 4 seasons to episodes and recently assembled PvP strike force team would be its new thing as well.

The giant blurb under lightfall may also be the beginning of the episodic content being made. These are development timelines… so messier to interpret. The four smaller redacted items are assumed to be this year’s seasons not those for final shape’s year.

Also, events like what just happened could shake everything up where they change course altogether. I say this because that’s usually what happens so I’ll be surprised if they stick to any of their plans. I think they will and just delayed timelines on all of it.

 

[Gamernyc78]

seeing how they need both long and short term revenue streams sorted …

Repeating the f2p and steam launch is the way to go. The only thing the game has for the casual player are the campaigns and only really just that. Make the campaigns thru Witch Queen f2p and if anything sell an “endgame pass” for any related dungeon/raid content and their loot tables. This will solve much of the pricing concerns and l’d assume most older pieces of content ran their course at “retail” for the most part.

Calling destiny f2p always feels deceptive since any hardcore player drops $100 a year minimum for content and even more deceptive calling it such post the orignal content vaulting. There are no campaigns and only having old d1 raids for non PvP players is asking them to go straight into endgame as a noob. Like what? It’s more representative of a launcher at this point.

Now you have players advocating more vaulting and sunsetting. We’ve come full circle. Does that need to happen? Yes, from both power creep and data angles.

I’m more concerned with the data. This is also why I suggest taking all those campaigns f2p. To eventually vault those campaigns from player hard drives. They say they engineering a solution. I believe having “retired” campaigns playable and other easily streamable data using cloud is that at the moment.

Long term is wait and see. They’ve already announced seasons are over when Final Shape launches and they’ve announced the 3 episodes following. I imagine it’ll be six episodes total as Marathon launch will replace destiny expansion revenues and more hopefully that year.

Leap froggin the two games for yearly revenues should mirror destiny’s earlier expansion drops across teams.


Here’s the original leaked development slide. Now obsolete because of change of 4 seasons to episodes and recently assembled PvP strike force team would be its new thing as well.

The giant blurb under lightfall may also be the beginning of the episodic content being made. These are development timelines… so messier to interpret. The four smaller redacted items are assumed to be this year’s seasons not those for final shape’s year.

Also, events like what just happened could shake everything up where they change course altogether. I say this because that’s usually what happens so I’ll be surprised if they stick to any of their plans. I think they will and just delayed timelines on all of it.

It'll make them better hopefully.

 

[8BiTw0LF]

 

[KiryuRealty]

Just as I thought, they want to deliver something really special to cap off this (basically) ten year journey in Destiny.

The cuts couldn't be avoided, they grew a lot and they are still bigger than they were a few years ago.

The music is recorded and it's hard to justify an in house composer and team these days.

Costs have to be managed and they have to focus the team around delivering what the player needs.....

The players don't necessarily know what the inputs are to get what they want... they just see cuts and think that they will get less as a result, which isn't necessarily true at all.

As someone was saying.... all the community managers stopped communicating with fans due to toxicity and it was all rolled into the official Destiny account... so obviously those roles became redundant, that should have been an obvious outcome. Why would a company keep a huge team on when they made a case for their positions to be eliminated?

I do have a problem with them cutting people in art and other important roles though and seeing Sony buy yet another useless cloud company today... I'd have preferred to keep 20-30 people at Bungie than see Sony buy that dogshit.

Oh Bryan.


“Useless cloud company”


Are you for real? The company they bought developed a new compression technology for video streaming which not only helps with game and video streaming directly, but Sony now owns that company’s IP and patents.

Not only will they be able to offer higher-quality video in game and movie streams, that tech can be licensed out to other companies and become a great revenue stream for as long as the patents last.

They made a deal that has broad applications across multiple branches of the corporation and provides a new revenue stream, but you’re here whining about it as if they fucked up somehow.

SMH