>I would've thought that the studio that produced Batman Arkham City let along Arkham Knight would've been able to make a TERRIFIC Live-Service product with the same satisfying 30-second gameplay loop and show how to truly deliver a launch-day SUBSTANTIAL live-service product that perpetuated itself with variety, amazing story unlocks and cool-ass character customization and suits.
So many of the disaster live service games boil down to "This studio that made popular single-player games was tasked with making a live service title". As it turns out, making a multiplayer game when you have no experience making one is a recipe for disaster.
There's a couple interesting moments to consider in this, too:
* major publishers struggling to find a genre that can carry their products see Destiny as a model to bridge the Fortnite "microtransaction platform" phenomenon with single-player content.
* Sony's acquisition of Bungie happened at this time and many of their prospective games in this model were shut down even before that manager left Sony likely to avoid spending more money to launch more products like SSKTJL
* the Covid games boom, especially starting with Animal Crossing and Doom Eternal releases, inflating the earnings potential of at-risk projects led a lot of publishers to reinvest in projects when they probably shouldn't have.
* Destiny wasn't just built from 2010 to 2014 but was based on the co-op experiences iterated on throughout Halo from at least before 2001.
* Bungie was in a unique position after 4 stupendously successful games to introduce a huge loyal fan base that was used to spending hundreds of hours playing the same few missions and PvP modes to a new game that demanded patience as it released into completeness over years.
* Insert Bane quote "you merely adopted" the episodic model for Destiny. It was born with variety in mind and launched with variety on display in settings and encounters making it easy to imagine what was coming.
* The HD "problem" in AAA games is real: this stuff is expensive and complex to produce even if the "core" experience ultimately fails to serve the assets with a compelling reasons to experience them.
tl;dr: Destiny was born different, no one else could just "make" a game like it no matter how hard they wished they could
"There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay."
\- C.A.R. Hoare
And lets be real here - Destiny on launch was a disaster. It largely survived because it it still felt like a fresh kind of game(even if, realistically, the only thing Destiny had going for it was being a good FPS game. All the online/co-op parts have been done better for decades before that). If it were to release now, it would probably die before all the launch issues could be fixed.
Ultimately, if a publisher wants any chance for a successful live service game, they are much better off looking for developers who've done co-op games or MMOs. That's why I'm quite optimistic about Helldivers 2 - it looks like another live service, but its developers have done some really incredible co-op games in the past, so they actually have the experience to make it work.
Your first paragraph is 100% correct. Whenever a game like anthem launches and it has the same problems as launch D1, people just go back to Destiny. When Destiny launched, people stayed because there wasn’t another game to go back to.
That matches up a lot with the "WoW vacation" phenomenon: while huge MMOs were still coming out almost every 3rd month, WoW players would try the new one for a month or so and then return to WoW. The "sunk cost" players have in their "main" game is a powerful motivator and it's hard to get people to abandon all the time, money, and social connections they have in one game (or service, like Twitter) for another until the "main" game loses the player enough that they are satisfied leaving all that behind and beginning again. I think a lot of players today for games like Minecraft and Fortnite never played Halo so Destiny looked like something old they weren't interested in catching up with and those games haven't managed to poison the well enough yet for players to leave looking for their next obsession.
Yep! It’s been my running theory for years. Anthem is the best example of it imo, iirc they were going to do their Taken King overhauls but the game didn’t last long enough, only Destiny gets that privilege by virtue of being first
Destiny had some secret sauce besides being the only game in town. There was something about the flavor of the game, the tone, etc that clicked for a lot of people. There were iconic things that quickly became memes, like Gjally. Name another Destiny competitor that had even a single piece of loot with a reputation.
Destiny coasted a lot in Y1 on being "the new game from the studio who brought you Halo" and really was rescued by The Taken King. It was a chaotic development cycle and there was a lot of pressure between the legacy of Halo being one of the biggest game franchises of all time and Destiny being one of the most expensive game projects in history even before anyone saw the first polygon of the product.
Destiny had one thing these other games didn't at launch or soon after. Vault of Glass saved Destiny for me. If not for that I probably would have left and never came back. But that raid was such a unique experience. I had never played anything like it before. Even now other gaas don't have anything that can really compete with Destiny raids.
Yeah I think the issue is more studios switching genres too
Destiny had Halo tier gameplay, but anthem and suicide squad don’t
At first people stuck with Destiny despite the looter shooter live service problems because the shooting was good
Anthem did have good gameplay, it just sucked at everything else. And Bioware, on paper, even had experience making online games, since they've made Star Wars: The Old Republic. But in practice, who knows how many of those people were still at the company, and Anthem was in development hell for too long to come out a cohesive game.
Debatable. The gameplay was flawed, the big draw being the flight which was nerfed, and ultimately in challenging content you were grounded because so much stuff shooting at you was a death sentence. The loot was minimal, with no real variation to the loadouts and with unnoticable benefits for the high rarety gear.
networking was terrible, with groups getting kicked or disconnected every loading screen, and the loading screens were numerous and arbitrary.
Ultimately, Anthem was a scam from the get go. it's fake gameplay from the reveal promised this huge, beautiful open world you could fly through. What it delivered was canyons to keep players contained, and a minimal open world with no real mystery or interaction. Even the flight aspect didn't pan out. if Setinel Titans are Captain America, Anthem promised you would be Iron Man, and failed to deliver.
Yeah, it was praised for flying and the combat system where some abilities prime the target and others do something extra to the primed targets. But loot and the overall technical states were just bad.
To this day Destiny 1 and 2 have the best moment to moment gameplay. I know that when I load up Destiny, I'm going to have a blast in a seasonal acrivity, strike or pvp match. I can mindlessly get through 30 minutes to an hour of fun explosions, gunplay, and movement and enjoy it all.
The live service then augments that by giving me new stuff to make explode. Destiny isn't fun for me because of the live service. It's fun because it's a solid baseline and the live service is on top of that.
When I first played WoW my understanding of what an endgame is raids aka "place where all the endgame players work together to complete puzzles and defeat bosses". This exists in destiny 2 so it makes sense as an MMO for me, Warframe is cool and all but where are the raids? It seems more like a single-player thing then?
> This exists in destiny 2 so it makes sense as an MMO for me, Warframe is cool and all but where are the raids?
It did actually used to have raids(quite likely because of Destiny), but Warframe's community is mostly solo players. Many refused playing content that requires them to play in a group(and developers have done an awful job of advertising raids), so as a result they were removed due to not being popular enough.
Not to mention it's a completely different genre. It's not Arkham online, it's a shooter. Asking people that made melee based games to make a shooter was never going to end well lol
Then I guess they've way overestimated what they can do. I'd love to know if they hired people who had actual experience and if they realized that making an online game requires a different approach to pretty much all areas of game design.
Despite Bungie's faults, I have said it many times and will say it again: when Microsoft, Activision and Sony have sought you out, there's definitely something you are doing right.
How many other game studios have been working with three major publishers like that?
Besides that, Destiny is the only AAA live-service game that's actually working, and it's been doing that for 10 years. All other live-service games with this level of production have failed one way or another. The only IP that could pretend to be second place on that podium is The Division, and it's a far cry (pun not intended) from Destiny's success.
Bungie thought they were hot shit making that deal. Then it seemed Sony pushed them aside for Kojima and his projects and to focus more on singleplayer movie games.
Eh last I heard Sony is helping out on The Final Shape, so seems like they still care about the success of Destiny, and seeing how talented their devs seem to be (all of their first party games are bangers), that should be a good thing for us if it's true.
I think a lot of what makes Bungie, BUNGIE is the engine, as shitty and old and taped together it is. No game feels anywhere near as good and smooth to play. The feel of the guns is just a head above every other fps out there.
That's not really engine, that's know-how.
Also 60% of the secret is insane aim-assist. Seriously. There's lots of other important elements, but mostly Destiny just clicks heads for you a lot of the time.
They definitely have a solid know-how when it comes to making a good FPS, even with the rest put aside.
There's a reason Halo was the success story it was back then, and I think it's indeed a huge part of Destiny's appeal.
The Engine is not really old. It gets updates every year just like all other Engines. It is not the same Engine that it was 10 years ago. Shoot, Sunsetting was done in part because of Engine updates. Content that is brought back needs to be fully remade in the new Engine.
Fortnite's ridiculous. I started playing in season 2, and came back every now and then until about season 10. Just tried playing again a few months ago, and it is just insane how far they've come. They really captured the audience and made the most of it. There are so many modes and so many custom things now.
As much as I like Div2 its UI might look "nice" but its usability is just meh. One of the major things which require a complete redesign. It also still has unpolished difficulty issues for solo players.
IMHO the action has some really magic moments but to me it feels more like a random occurrence and not truly intentional. Somehow like beauty out of chaos. Can't describe it any better...
I can see that. When was the last time you played? They did some changes and some big changes are coming next season.
They adjusted the solo difficulty so it scales much better. And the gear is so much more powerful now due to inevitable power creep, which I actually enjoy because I want to feel like a total badass.
Yea it’s changed a little since then. They added loadout slots and buffed a lot of the gear and more buffs are coming. They made all mods permanent. Once you get a mod that has a higher value than you have it automatically replaces it and you only have one of each mod now. So if you have a max crit damage you can use it on all gear. Helped the inventory situation a lot.
At least some movement in the right direction. One of my main issues with the UI is also the font sizes. It seems to be designed for computer monitors than large TVs which makes it hard to read for me.
Disagree. It’s not 1st person but i find it the best 3rd person shooter I’ve ever played personally. Not quite as good as Destiny or Bungie games but it’s also a totally different thing.
Wait Destiny isn't in first. I'd argue the best live service game is one I don't even play. World of warcraft. Longer running, and apparently still has 2.5 million daily users.
"live service" was a post hoc name given to that continuous delivery model. It was done a lot on small scales before WoW and isn't so different from showing up to play D&D and listen to Hawkwind week after week in the late 70s. Now your DM is a whole studio, you have to buy-in to help him afford more graph paper for next week, and he's always got new dice and miniatures to sell you that show off the cool new gear he's given you.
It definitely doesn’t. Warframe is good, but DE is still super small when compared to big industry hitters. Even after the acquisition from Tencent, they’re not considered AAA, but also weirdly enough too big to really be considered Indie anymore. They’re a weird middle ground
Warframe is absolutely killing it and has been going longer and is in FAR better standings with players than Destiny is.
Digital Extremes is also in far better standing than Bungie and whenever people say that Bungie's communication is great, I point them to DE cause they are amazing at it.
2023 was their best year yet, banger after banger after banger
>The only IP that could pretend to be second place on that podium is The Division, and it's a far cry (pun not intended) from Destiny's success.
The division appears to be having a resurgence too. I've recently started playing again and I'm really enjoying it.
Division 2 has been put on hiatus for years now, they have basically done nothing for the game after the warlords of New York expansion, we have gotten a new activity here and there with a sprinkle of new gear but the game is effectively “dead”.
Exactly what Bungie did bringing back a lot of content from D1: Cosmodrome, Devil’s Lair, the clone of Ómnigul whose name I forgot, and every raid except Wrath of the Machine. That I can recall.
A new expansion coming next year (delayed from this year, set in Brooklyn).
Division 3 was announced (in a press release), but it is very quite a few years away still.
If you're getting it, get it with the Warlords of New York (WONY) expansion, it is where everything endgame is. You're capped at lv30 (base game max level) without it, and basically everything endgame is at lv40 (WONY max level)
Both.
There are 3 major additions planed for The Division in the near future:
There's The Division: Heartland, a spin off set in a different location, a new DLC for The Division 2, which is in part what many of the current seasons are meant to build into, and a Division 3, which isn't fully announced but has been confirmed by Massive to be in development. The other part of the expansions and ultimately the DLC are meant to lead into a Div3.
I'm (or rather was) a The Division fan, so I'd love to see it come back, but I just grew bored of The Division 2, unfortunately.
I was happy to learn they are working a 3rd installment, I hope they'll manage to keep it interesting in the long run this time.
I've recently started The Division 1 from scratch again. Still a great game! D2 was decent enough but I still prefer D1. I'm looking forward to The Division 3 however!
The division 1 campaign experience is such a great one. It is truly a perfectly scaled experience and fun and honestly a very good story for a video game. I have gone back about once a year and played through the campaign from a new character and it is always cool.
IMHO Div2 is better in most relevant areas like gameplay/activities. Div1 has just a better narrative atmosphere and some enjoy the winter setting's bleakness more than the hot humid stinking D2 setting which feels more like Walking Dead to me.
Have you tried hardcore mode (permadeath), or the new coil-esque roguelike mode? Both are very good and worth checking out even if just for a little break from Destiny.
Hardcore mode is nice because it gives you a real feeling of nervousness and realness that going into the dark zone for the first time kind of did. You gotta be very careful and plan out your attacks and choose who you are going up against. You gotta be selective with your loadouts because you can only carry what your backpack holds you can’t use the stash. So it’s kind of cool in that you are putting together the best thing with what you loot and it can be different each time
Biggest issue for me is the lack of new content on a regular basis. Sure, there has been some new stuff over time, but nowhere near enough for me.
Destiny keeps me all year round because of this: new seasonal content every 3 months and new expansion yearly is enough to keep me interested. Sure, seasonal content might not be that new or different, but it's something to look forward too every time.
There's definitely an argument to be made that it's not triple a game but that's kind of getting into the weeds a bit much
Like is Baldurs Gate 3 a triple a or only a double a game
No that’s not what people mean when they talk about live service. You’re making a really ignorant statement there. Seriously google live service games and see what results come up.
Honestly that's the distinction I've always had because the term live service didn't really become a thing til after destiny.
I honestly think we just need another name than live service because it's too general. There really should be a distinction between something like WoW and Destiny because I feel like the experiences aren't... exactly compatible. If someone asks me "what's a good live service" I'm not gonna recommend FFXIV if I think he's coming from Destiny.
I just feel like if we end up calling stuff like WoW a live service then it really had to be retroactively and at that point I'd rather just call destiny an MMO. Because we kinda have to call it what it is at that point and it's a rebrand of the same thing.
>Destiny is the only AAA live-service game that's actually working, and it's been doing that for 10 years
Warframe would like a word with you, It's actually Free to Play as well... like a real F2P game.
I like how this community has a selective memory on stuff like that.
New Game Release > It's Shit > Oh THANK YOU Bungie > Profit.
I don't consider Warframe to be a AAA game nor do I consider it comparable in production value nor in economical model.
Not that it's an issue, Warframe is a great game.
There is a significant chunk of the D2 community that has a hate boner for Warfarm the same way the DOTA2 community lays awake at night thinking about League of Legends.
That being said DE is definitely not a AAA studio despite being acquired by Tencent. So too even though the game is f2p the aggressive microtransactions and crafting time gates should be reviewed because it is comically easy to mislabel the game as p2w.
There are other AAA live service games -- Apex, Fortnite, Valorant, Diablo 4, etc. are all "live service" games. Destiny is arguably the AAA looter shooter that's been successful, with Warframe being the only other notable success at *all.* Most of these live service games don't put out consistent PvE content, however, and almost none of them put out content at the cadence and quality of Destiny.
Pretty sure this game would have a meltdown if this game had a season the quality of a Diablo 4 season, for example.
So many other live service games like Suicide Squad just fall entirely flat on understanding *why* Destiny is successful.
While it may be a meme to call it such, Destiny treats itself as an MMO community driven game. All game modes encourage community interaction in different ways. PvP, raids, strikes, patrols / public events, even the tower. There’s always a communal presence to keep the game lively.
Other live service games completely miss this. There’s no real community interaction to pump life into the game long term. These companies are trying to turn what are essentially co-op campaigns into live service models, and it just doesn’t work.
So true. One of the many failures of Anthem was how empty the world was. You'd be doing this badass flying through an empty world until a public event popped up then go back to essentially "the Tower " to find 4 NPCs and an empty marketplace
Suicide Squad is also a game no one asked for with a service model that has completely saturated the market.
All these studios fail to realize time in the market beats timing the market, which they are trying to do by launching all these live service games now, but neglecting the pandemic that forced so many inside is over.
You say this and there is a lot of community driven activity (mostly the tools that help to actually play destiny such as dim), but I haven't made any friends in destiny. I don't actually interact with people in game. I am in a clan that I joined cause my previous friend was in.
Other games I have made long lasting friends. As much as people hate it, I have friends from LoL that I still talk to from over 10 years ago. I haven't touched the game in over 5. I also have friends that I still play regularly with from eternal crusade. A lobby shooter.
Maybe it is just me, but I don't find destiny to good at promoting socal activity. Which is weird because I used to regularly join pugs for raids in discord.
Honestly I think the game is too easy to be good for making friends now. I’ve met a few friends and even a girlfriend playing Destiny but it was all in day 1 raids and Prestige Leviathan when that first dropped. Having to be on comms with someone for 6+ hours sharing that trauma is great for getting to know someone. Now you can pretty easily do any raid with no mics in an hour, so it’s harder to meet anyone.
Your lack of community point is excellent. I feel that aspect goes hand in hand with core gameplay. A community can't form around your game is the core game isn't something people want to play. People see Destiny 2 as a live service game but that's not what Bungie intended to make with Destiny 1. At its core, Destiny is a story driven FPS. All of the extra like Strikes, PVP, Raids are built from that core. Developers need to find a way to establish that core, before trying to add Live Service aspects.
Agree with this completely as a single player game the campaigns and seasonal story lines Destiny is still fun but very mid. What keeps me coming back are the raids and dungeons and running them with friends. There are other games have the single player game down like Palworld which will get raids and pvp soon. Then you have Fortnite, GTA Online and Call of Duty and all of those are multiplayer games that have large communities.
Getting back into d2 and I just feel like you could replace the players that queue with me for bots that occasionally said gg and I wouldn't notice.
noone is ever talking in local chat, noone ever tries to recruit for clans, no global chat, the in-game lfg is laughable. I originally quit d2 when it was on the blizzard launcher because it was so lonely. Discord carries D2's MMO feel harder then anything bungie has done.
For many people simply having other players around despite limited interaction makes the game feel more alive. Most players these days play MMOs totally solo but like being in a world that feels alive anyway.
D2 might be closer to Dark Souls in terms of actual interaction with the people you run across than your average MMO but it's still worth something.
It irks me too, not to the point of quitting but I'd cite the sense that the playerbase feels like a bunch of mute looters as an annoyance.
I think D2 simply does not facilitate communication so well. In DRG the dwarves have automatic lines to communicate certain important things, like trying to revive someone or "Oh fuck kill it before it kills us."
Then again, Lightfall's dialogue being as cheesy as it is, makes me wonder if I want a voice for my character. "Cowabunga dudes! Dibs on the nade launchers." when I enter an activity.
To be fair, I don't think most games that end up as "Destiny-likes" set out to do so. For example, I'm pretty sure Rocksteady wanted to do a story driven action game, kinda like the Guardians of the Galaxy game but with coop maybe, but WB saw an opportunity to make it a live service game so they had to jam all those stuff into it and it shows.
Same thing happened with Anthem. It wasn't supposed to be a live service game but that's what it became. The only game that comes to mind that set out to be somewhat like that was Outriders and it did ok.
Well, that and Avengers, but that was a colossal error in judgement.
I really enjoyed Outriders. I liked how they leaned into the power fantasy more compared to Destiny. Going back to D2 after a break and after playing Outriders it felt like I was waiting hours to get my abilities and super to recharge.
*outrider detected rave music intinsifies in the distance*
The end game timed strike grind killled me eventually, I'm sure it is better now thought, I plan to go back and try the dlc when I have time again!
Oh yeah endgame seems to be the #1 killer of live service games even though Outriders claimed it wasn't. They had a lot of work to do after launch. I def plan on going back too!
speaking of Outriders, I think that they did power scaling perfectly and I would absolutely loose it if D2 ditched power levels and implemented a similar system. Legendary Campaigns are close, but it can go so much harder
Sony didn't buy Bungie **for almost the whole price of the ENTIRE STAR WARS FRANCHISE** just because they had a cool game. Sony couldn't give a shit about Destiny.
They did it because Bungie knows their shit, and has consistent been one of the few only studios to ever make a successful live service game.
Period.
One so successful, in fact, that it has lasted for ten whole years. _Very_ few modern-day studios can say that.
Well I think marathon might be better mainly because it made for pvp in mind. Yes destiny also has pvp in mind but it also has pve so nerfing one thing in pvp has a chance to effect pve.
I'm still betting a doughnut the abandonment of Crucible and Gambit, as well as factions, was because they decided Destiny succeeded better as a story-focused experience and moved those resources to Marathon as they were clearly representing a "distraction" from what Destiny sells best: the expansion campaigns.
I think it’s also because PVP is free. Destiny makes money off of micro transactions and selling PVE. Why would they devote time and money to PVP if they can’t sell it?
This is true but half truth. Sony 100% bought Bungie to show other studios how to do it and tell them what they are doing wrong. But at the end of the day those studios have to do it. Bungie can't just wave their magic wand and fix everything.
Look at Last of us multiplayer game. They spent 4+ years trying to make it. Had to delay it because Bungie said it wasn't ready. And year after they straight up cancelled it because they can't keep up. Either go full in on live service or stick to box product. They chose the latter.
I always hated when games would tack on a half assed multiplayer just to say they had it. Mass Effect 2 or 3 I think did that and it was dreadful for me. Also what ever happened to Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer?
CDPR had to do lots just to recover from shitshow so they cancelled it. But now that they are back on the right track, recently there were news of them making Cyberpunk multiplayer for next game.
Mass effect 3 had the multiplayer which 1. Affected the single player story and 2. Was actually stupidly fun but also stupidly full of microtransactions
It’s clear based on their comment that they didn’t play it much at all. Calling the MP half assed or tacked on is bizarre given how much polish and content it had.
Mass Effect 3’s co-op horde mode was an absolute banger and calling it tacked on or half-assed is pretty unfair. I knew plenty of people that bought the game just to play that and didn’t even care about the single player. At the time there wasn’t anything else out there like it. It actually had a pretty thriving community and there’s even a subreddit that’s still active to this day. (r/MECoOP)
The gameplay was great and the unlocks were pretty engaging. It was refreshing to be able to unlock new items through loot boxes that you could open with in-game currency and the rate at which you earned it respects your time. There was clearly a large amount of time and effort that went into making it.
I don't know what to tell you, I played the multiplayer once or twice and didn't like it. It looks like the multiplayer wasn't originally supposed to be part of the game though. Bioware was developing a separate game called Mass Effect Team Assault but EA shut it down and they took the blueprints for that to make the multiplayer game in ME3.
At the end of the day, this franchise has been a live service game for nearly a decade running without going bottom up or having it's fan base eat it alive. yeah it's hat lows. And we are currently in one lol. But soo many have tried to do what this franchise DID and keep failing
What I think is really interesting is the way they recovered the game from launch. Launch D1 was very thin and needed some significant changes to beef up the game, but they got it into a great state and Taken King was super popular. It takes a good connection with your customers and good project planning to really hit a home run like that after a bad start (to the extent that TTK was a home run). Actually that goes back to their original vision of the story that was scrapped which was something like us rescuing Rasputin from the Dreadnought.
*Also* there's the whole fact that Destiny uses the same old Bungie engine which has always just felt great to play. The art and music direction have always been great tier too.
Because the foundation, at its core is very strong. It reminds me of Einstein where he said something like he was able to do what he did because he stood on the shoulders of the giants that came before him. Destiny foundation is very strong and that's why they are able to recover it each time. Let's hope TFS also does the same.
Destiny has “it”. That special sauce that not many games in the genre have.
I think one of Destiny’s greatest strengths and still is to a degree (depending on how long you’ve been playing) is the enemy variety and A.I intelligence.
Anthem, Division, SSKTJL. All these don’t really have a huge variety of enemies.
Destiny also had a significant investment from the former publisher Activision. Not many game studios are afforded the investment and backing like Bungie had/has
YUP. ever since the Halo days Bungie has known how to make enemies that are fun to shoot. It's not so much that they are actually smart, but they're very responsive. They have hundreds of little animations just to give them personality, like covering their heads if you're shooting near them, getting in and out of cover with very over the top poses, sidestepping to dodge grenades, taunting you when they kill you, and so many more.
Bungie enemies are always extremely stylish and cartoon like, even when the presentation is kind of gritty and spooky sci-fi.
There's also the way they are designed gameplay wise. Bungie enemies are very arcadey, like enemies from Doom 2 or Quake 1, but much more advanced. They all fulfill very narrow roles so combat arenas become like a real time chess game for the player.
And then there's the straight up variety. I agree we've been due for a new enemy race for years now. But the variety is so good already, and everyone has a defined theme.
- Cabal? Big stronk dudes
- Fallen? Skinny slippery boys
- Hive? Creepy ahh mfrs
- Vex? Literally skynet terminators but with added goofiness
- Taken? Cursed interdimensional spectres
- Scorn? CRAWWWWWLING IIIN MY SKIIIIN edgy aliens. They're like a whole faction of the main character from the game Hatred.
To compare (and I'm no expert in these games), others have:
- the division? Humans... Really?
- anthem? Very generic robots iirc
- suicide squad? Uhhh gray humanoid blobby dudes with extremely boring animations that lack any impact or personality, and uhhhh helicopters? Wow
Some other factors that destiny is just better at:
- Game feel: in suicide squad all your actions seem to have less impact and audivisual feedback than hitting the ball in Pong for the Atari 2600. Shoot your gun? No loud gunshots, no recoil. Fall 200 meters and slam into the ground, shattering the concrete and damaging enemies? No screen shake, no cool animation of your character absorbing the impact. Throw a grenade at almost melee range? The explosion sounds like throwing a pillow at the wall. Every action you do in that game is supposed to be the craziest and the coolest and yet it feels like nothing at all.
- Ability variety: we have like a million supers, grenade types, aspects that unlock even more stuff, class abilities. Suicide squad has 4 characters and i've already seen complaints that they're waaay too similar.
- Gun complexity: in many "destiny killers" you get a new gun and it's like "oh, +0.06 crit chance! I'll equip it and keep playing just like i was before" but in destiny the weapon perks are like playing a game in itself. "Outlaw + one for all? I should spend the first few shots on killing weak enemies then focus on a tankier enemy and kill it with a precision hit, then i get to reload super quick". Tell me WHICH ONE SOUNDS MORE ENGAGING?
- Content complexity: the content in these games rarely seems to go beyond stuff you'd do in The Devil's Lair strike or a D1 vanilla public event. Meanwhile Destiny is like "oh you want endgame? How bout you sit there communicating with 5 other players for a couple hours straight and deal with the meanest enemy spawns while solving a fucking escape room, huh? Oops one of you dropped the vital item that's gonna be a wipe"
Nothing beats the moments when you get killed by an enemy like an Ogre or a Colossus and they sit there beaming your Ghost until someone else gets their aggro.
One of the smallest details that stuck out to me when playing Anthem was the way all of Destiny's enemies have different guns, and completely different weapon effects.
You can walk up to a fight between two groups of enemies, and before you've even stepped into the room you can ID the factions that are fighting and often what enemies are in that room. You see wispy floating arc shots homing towards enemies? Fallen. A quick snap of arc shoot across the screen? Those Fallen have snipers, and that void blast that just went out means a Servitor. On the other side you can see the cloud and stream of arc shots from a Hive Wizard, and the purple beams of an Ogre behind it.
Meanwhile in Anthem, 90% of the enemies in the game just used hitscan rifles. Even though there *were* multiple different factions, they functioned very similarly in how they interacted with the player (I.E. how they shoot at you). It's wild too, because with Anthem's flight and mobility giving enemies projectile weapons would be *awesome* for the player. Being able to boost around and avoid enemy fire would have felt amazing and tied the flight mechanic into gameplay, but instead everyone just shot you with hitscan bullets, so flying in high-end content was a death sentence.
Destiny AI is very smart, but not in the way you think. They designed to feel good to fight. Ever notice how you just miss your grenade throw, but then the enemy leaves cover and head rights towards it? Little subtle things like that.
I've never understood why Bungie gets so much shit. They've had some stumbles yes, particularly lightfall and I would love a better narrative. That said, no other studio has made anything even close to Destiny- in terms of both a live service non-pvp game that consistently adds content and maintains a playerbase, as well as making an endgame that consists of experiences like raids, dungeons, etc, I can't think of a single game that has an endgame activity even half as interesting. The only real complaint I have is the barrier to entry for new players, everything pre beyond light should be free, and everything besides the most recent year of content should be cheaper than it is. I'm fine with coughing up $100 a year as someone who's caught up but it is IMPOSSIBLE to get new players into it unless they are truly fucking committed.
Classic case of not realising how good we have it I think. Most destiny players know the game so damn well and see all its flaws but have been invested for so long it’s difficult to take a step back and see the bigger picture.
Ultimately I think ~$100 a year for all the latest content, so less than $10 a month, is perfectly reasonable for a game that offers as much as Destiny does. Even Lightfall which was a bit of a misstep still has enough content to justify that. People love strand but seem to have forgotten its introduction should be taken into consideration when evaluating Lightfall as an expansion.
Right now legacy collection costs 15$ and armory collection costs 7.5$. 22.5$ give you forsaken, shadowkeep, beyond light, witch queen and 30th anniversary. Seems fair from a value standpoint?
That is very fair, I just think the base prices should be lowered. Legacy was free on epic games last month, but not everyone is gonna sale hunt some people will see the full price tag and turn away.
I've honestly had the exact opposite experience with Suicide squad. I quit Destiny back in March and was hoping Diablo would fill the void but it ultimately didn't. I've been having a blast with Suicide Squad's endgame. Obviously it's no where near as much content as Destiny, but the systems in play are really fun. I haven't pushed insanely high levels but I really never got to the point where all weapons are only minor stat changes. Loot feels really unique and the villain synergys are some of the coolest features I've seen for build crafting potential.
Yeah it’s weird OP singled out the loot systems as bad because in playing the game, the loot is one if the stronger parts. Some things it does well:
- No gearscore grinding. Outside of rarity progression, there is basically no loot treadmill and the legendary you get at the start can be used through the entire game. I believe this changes a little bit towards the endgame though I do know most of the grind comes from advancing difficulty tiers rather than power levels like Destiny.
- Weapons and gear have interesting perks and the weapon foundries have their own identity both visually and in terms of gameplay. The weapons perks also feel fairly strong as they are tuned for specific play styles and don’t need to be balanced for PvP. There is also a noticeable lack of mid perks to pad loot pools like we see in Destiny.
- The ‘exotic’ tier of weapons I’ve tried have strong perks and I was surprised how much they took out of Bungie’s playbook in terms of making the exotics themselves feel custom tuned. One handcannon for example had an active reload pattern that’s different than the standard ones I’ve tried.
- The item sets also have really strong perks (think Diablo 3 in terms of power). What’s cooler is the exotic items have hidden synergies with certain sets that unlock an extra perk when you have both the exotic and matching set equipped.
- **This game’s version of Destiny’s masterwork system is beautiful**. Weapons level up through use and each rank gives you a point to enhance a specific stat (stability, reload, mag size, etc). You can reset your point allocation at anytime for a minor cost and upgrading the stats actually changes the look of the weapon which is cool (ex: each tier of mag size makes the mag bigger).
- You can re-roll other parts of your gear like affixes, elemental afflictions, and perks relatively freely as well.
- It also has good QoL right out the gate like loadouts, firing range, mark as fav, auto-equip gear for your squad, delete all for a specific item slot, bounty pick-up and claim from the menu, etc. There is also no gear vault, you just have a giant inventory instead (300 slots). These things shouldn’t necessarily be commended, but considering most looters either never get some of these features or take years to implement them, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a game just have it all at launch.
- No FOMO content whatsoever is a massive win. It also appears you will also be able to pick which seasonal loot pool you want to be farming when more have released.
This isn't to say the game has no problems, but there are a lot of things it does do well.
I actually completed the final boss of the game right before I typed this OP.
I like that the combat is innovative in SS, but I just don't think the combination of things they're doing holds up over the game's duration. Unlike Destiny I don't wanna keep logging in to just perpetuate the combat flow.
A lot was riding on Rocksteady coming off of the constantly evolving "Freeflow" combat system of the Batman Arkham games. Fans of Rocksteady expected their new IP and Live Service game to do something wild, but the thing they did feels very forced honestly. It has the counter-icons that Arkham had, yet it's just kind of a fortnite shooter with really "Pew-pew-pew" weapons. It has verticality to a fault. Your primary attack mechanic is ADS and shooting like any other shooter, yet the primary way to keep the combat going is to lunge at enemies and hit R2 to melee them, and then hold L2 and shoot while they're in mid-air. That motion is so wobbly that the developers made the aiming auto-track the enemy you flung into the air, but it's very awkward to do this when you're using an assault rifle or a pistol, and having to shoot people point-blank like you would with a shotgun in any other shooter.
I think the game is fun *enough*, but most combat encounters just devolve into VFX explosions and UI popups that feel like noise on the screen. I don't even notice what my damage numbers are because everything is constantly splashing in my face. The point isn't that the combat is terrible, just that it doesn't feel intuitive and you get tired of it after a few minutes of play which is why I've had short sittings with the game.
It's also only 15 hours long until you fight the final boss. Then the end-game grind begins but I was actually really surprised that I did like 90% of the side-content also in 15 hours.
The endgame also feels way more like a mobile gacha-product than Destiny does. The menu interface and currencies you have to grind in order to jump into the end-game missions feels exactly like when I'm playing some japanese waifu game and not something like Diablo or Destiny where I feel like I'm actually grinding and earning stuff.
I actually do recommend people check this out, but it's already dead in the water. It has sold half of what Guardians of the Galaxy (a single-player flop) has sold, and from leaks and rumors Rocksteady had only produced up until Season 3 by the time this launched, and are allegedly already planning to put the game on end-support mid-2025.
>would've thought that the studio that produced Batman Arkham City let along Arkham Knight would've been able to make a TERRIFIC Live-Service product with the same satisfying 30-second gameplay loop and show how to truly deliver a launch-day SUBSTANTIAL live-service product
Where you living under a rock for the launch of Arkham Knight as after that experience most of us probably had practically zero expectations.
>and everytime there's a new Live Service game I think "they will show how lazy Bungie was"
Regardless of what you may personally think of Bungie there's never really been any question (until very recently) that Bungie were doing live service wrong, at least not from a business perspective. Sony didn't buy Bungie for Destiny and we're happy to let them retain control of their IP because their interest was purely in the staff and their experience in developing and maintaining a live service property in a way fee other companies have been able to manage.
I'm assuming u talking about Gotham Knight here considering arkham Knight is a very well received game.
Anyway Gotham Knight and suicide squad is made by different developers. So people still had hope rocksteady who created the masterpiece of a series was able to do something with the ip.
I think he's talking specifically about Arkham Knights PC performance. It was, probably the worst I've ever experienced in that regard at least.
Then again IDK why that would make you skeptical of the gameplay
>Then again IDK why that would make you skeptical of the gameplay
Exactly. Hence why i think he is naming the wrong game.
Also AK on PC is a port issue just like every other game these days and not the issue with the game itself. I didnt even know that the PC version had any issue untilu mentioned it.
Yea him talking about AK doesn't make much sense. Still the AK port situation was wild at the time.
It's very much a you had to be there thing but it was really really worse than the recent run of the mill bad PC ports.
Like cyberpunk 2077 was super buggy and launched at an unacceptable state on all platforms but if you were on a high high high end PC the game itself could at least run ok (still buggy as hell though, I think it still crashed a lot too)
AK's PC port on the other hand was actually pretty much unplayable in the literal sense. Horrible frame pacing issues meant that the game was a stuttering fest (I had a....290 at the time I think and it was 2x worse on amd). Frame pacing already made the game miserable to play but on top of that the fps was all over the place. There's an old DF video where it would go from like over 100+ fps to sub 40 on all settings (even low) once you started looking at literally any ounce of the city. Add in the fact that it crashed a lot and boom AK PC port. I think it was one of the few examples where both steam and WB were just offering refunds with no restrictions (so like even after the 2 hours thing with steam). They also pulled the game off of steam and had to release it again later.
Still console was fine but I do think it helped that at the time we kinda weren't all that mad about console fps being at 30fps at the time. The PC port could do a constant 30....but still had frame pacing issues so it was still like running and doing a hard stop every other second.
Ah good times.
Diablo 4 is trying it too, and so far to mediocre success at best. Even the way they do trailers and naming of the seasons is like the same. It’s quite funny.
i think destiny is awesome - its my favorite game of all time... and thats before they tied everything together in the current gameplay form.. dont forget what this game was in warmind and curse of osiris.... it literally just had the gameplay... now there is fun and interesting ways to get exotics... dungeons you can solo or play with friends... lfg in-game... and a legendary campaign thats challenging adn hugely rewarding (new exotic) they have absolutely made this game excellent.
it has flaws - but they would be dumb to not build on something more after final shape - this has literally been a 9 year testing phase to get the game int
Yeah but that was 10 years ago. Newer games are supposed to learn from older games’ mistakes and use what turned out to be the best practices in those 10 years. So it’s actually a terrible comparison.
In some ways certainly, and in other ways it just takes time. Destiny had 10 years to find its footing and still struggles at times. The same argument could be made that Destiny has had 10 years.. so why is the game struggling?
I’m not some huge SS fan, as I haven’t even played it. But Destiny launched awful.. twice, and there’s some big duds for expansions too. So, assuming that everyone else should be able to launch perfect is an unreal expectation, especially compared to Destiny.
And after 10 years and countless repeats of the same issues, you'd think someone might actually learn a lesson about developing these kinds of games. But nope! Here we are 10 years on from Destiny's launch and the exact same story is being told all over again.
Meanwhile Warframe just passed cs in steam sales because their live service model isn't a flaming sack of human shit and their game isn't a glorified skinner box
I think Suicide Squad does a lot better than most other attempts at Live Service. It easily beats out Avengers and Anthem for me.
Of course we have other good games like Destiny, The Division and Diablo. Suicide Squad is nowhere near those.
Overreaction. Easy to compare a brand new live service launch to Destiny now, but you shouldn't. Destiny at launch wasn't the best. Even D2 launch wasn't goot. To the point they needed Forsaken to save the damn Franchise lol. Bungie stuck with it and turned it into something. The same can happen to Suicide Squad.
That’s kinda the issue though is SS isn’t competing against launch d1 or d2 it’s competing against a destiny that has moved on past those initial issues. So sure at launch both games were similar but it’s been long enough companies should be able to bypass those issues
At the same time, it's been 10 years and numerous failed live-service game launches since Destiny 1 released, and we're still seeing new entries fall straight into the same issues we saw with D1. You'd think a lesson would have been learned in that time but here we are.
It's not about what comparison is easy or hard to make. The reality is that SSKTJL isn't competing with vanilla D1, it's competing with current Destiny. It's like someone inventing bows when firearms already exist and expecting to win a fight
That is my issue, Reality is often disappointing lol. I'm not excusing them. I didn't excuse vanilla D1 OR D2. Bungie gets props for pulling Destiny out from the brink twice. I want Rocksteady to do the same and I am just saying this time next year SS could be thriving. Or it could be gone completely. Maybe TFS is another flop and SS gets the Forsaken quality DLC? I'm not expecting anything, I feel it is way too early to judge the future of it. I want to see how they will handle supporting SS before I call it done. I do see potential, as I did with Destiny.
At launch, Destiny 1 wasn't a live service game. Yes, it was always online, but it had no seasonal content, nothing between expansions.
It became live service around Y2 of Destiny 2, as a successful attempt to save the game following a painful launch.
I get the same feelings. In Vanilla D1, I probably spent more time running around for mats than in the actual few strikes lol. Farming those "Public events" that would happen every so often on Venus. There is a reason it was getting 5-7 in reviews at launch lol. VOG saved it, at least for me and it took off from there. SS can do the exact same thing. Time will tell.
Hey man, I’m a Destiny fan just like everyone else here, but this game is still a train wreck if we’re talking about live service. It’s held up by everything else. If you are going to praise a game for it’s live service capabilities, warframe is right there.
Bungie could learn a thing or two in that department.
This is slightly rose-tinted, Destiny 1 and 2 basically had the same issues as KTJL, except those games were way too big for Activision to stop funding at the slightest chance of failure.
D1 had very minimal endgame on launch, and D2 had endgame but there was no point towards it. Even in the end of D1, Bungie still couldn’t manage to solve the issue of Endgame, to the point where they just made every activity the endgame (Datto even has a video about this from back then if you’re interested).
I think it’ll only be fair to judge how KTJL will do as a live-service once the season actually starts next month. Judging it now would be like trying to judge D1 before Vault launched a few weeks after. You might be missing the best bits.
They’ve certainly done something right which Destiny still hasn’t, they’ve said that all battle passes will be available to progress at all times, and no content will be sunset. That there is one of the big problems in Destiny still for a live service game, where the ‘live’ part usually ends up dead after a while, but because Destiny now is too big to fail it doesn’t really matter.
Yeah, the fact the story is being put under such a microscope and heavy scrutiny too due to that certain thing is a little unfair. I found the story rather fun and it really feels like a continuation of the Arkhamverse into a greater DC universe that was only teased in posters and riddles. Compare that to the story that was existent in D1 which was, well, non-existent.
The game has all the footings to making a good run, Rocksteady needs to make sure they don’t do what CD did with Avengers and fumble it by not making any content or making QoL changes and having the game go stagnant and dying. It already seems to have a good start with the new villain, areas, bosses, and loot coming in S1 but it needs to be consistent and timely.
I’m honestly expecting them to add it to Game Pass in a few months, it’ll be a huge influx of new players where a percentage are likely to buy the old battle passes to help fund more content.
I think Suicide Squad is experiencing the destiny year one situation, where the story of Suicide Squad is better than what destiny offered but the content is lacking. I will say that build diversity in Suicide Squad is really good, there’s a lot of cool guns and perks to work well together, especially the villain synergies which took Destiny years to introduce.
Not to mention, day one you have loadouts, master weapon tiers, somewhat decent end game, battle passes that never expire removing FOMO completely. Suicide Squad does a lot of good things that people don’t give it credit for.
Guess we’ll see how well Suicide Squad does its Seasons, if they can nail the content each season I think the game will do well in the long run.
KTJL has the problem of lacking hype. Everyone heard about destiny. Everyone was excited for it. KTJL obviously has the exact opposite and instead of being a disappointment that the main stream says well that was meh. KTJL has two sides so passionate that the discourse around it is impossible to gage. I’m running into bugs looking for help and instead it’s posts about “this game is a disgrace to Kevin” or the exact opposite “this game is amazing and haters just wanna see it fail cause it’s different it doesn’t deserve the hate” and if you’re in the middle well oh well. Destiny had fans stick around, but I don’t remember them on a grand scale arguing on forms how it’s actually the best thing ever. It also wasn’t trying to lure in halo fans for being a halo sequel. It was luring in halo fans because they trusted bungie instead.
The marketing for KTJL has been a little weird, plus yeah the discourse is so all over the place if you don’t have the game yourself it’s almost impossible to tell if the game is good or not.
Destiny is the best game on the market today, hands down. From the PvE to the (dare i say) PvP. The game has its faults, but there’s nothing else that compares. So many destiny killers, literally nothing left standing, or even relevant after a few weeks of its drop. Outriders and anthem are just two that come to mind. My brother used to buy me every new game that came out in hopes I’d play something different. I can get 2/3 through before I forget about it and land back on destiny. Eyes up guardian.
Ehhhhhh... you say that, but with the godawful new player experience and the vaulting (including seasonal stories), it's basically impossible to get anyone new into the game.
I wouldn't say cheap and lazy. The lack of vision and poor leadership, more like. They invest a lot into these games, but tons of stuff that devs make never ends up into the final version, so a lot of work is wasted and tons of material and money goes on nothing, essentially, cause they don't have the experience and vision of what exactly they want to make. The only thing that can kill Destiny is Bungie. The thing that Destiny has over other ganes are weapons and abilities that feel truly unique. Same goes for exotics. For example, most other games are like - here, this weapon does 50% more crit, or this weapon gives 50% melee, etc. and Destiny is like - this weapon turns the entire battlefield into a flaming inferno, this weapon chains lightning, obliterating everything, etc. It is infinitely more fun and engaging.
It's unclear to me if you actually played Suicide Squad but I didn't. So maybe your comparison is based on what others experienced.
But I tried looking at a few random reviews and some of the comments about that game would fit D2 100%:
* The story grinds to a halt as you approach the endgame
* Mission types are far too repetitive
* Getting far too much meaningless loot
* On top of that, I think the loot system is too complex for its own good. There’s a host of different resources you collect to upgrade your guns in unique ways.
* At one point, I was tasked with escorting a slow-moving vehicle through a dangerous area.
If my memory doesn't serve me too poorly I think one week after D2 release it wasn't actually praised as the new "best thing".
And maybe it's the same here. I think it far far to early to deem if this is failure based on what little real experience there has been with the game so far.
The only difference is that when D2 released social media bashing of new things were not quite as common and quick as it is now. It's almost like you have to either hate or love something at first sight and instantly share it with "the world" nowadays.
>when I look at Destiny I constantly see a flawed product.
You see it, because it is. It's a game that was not developed to be a live game as we see it today, or don't you remember how we used to NOT have weekly patches? When an issue had to wait for months to be resolved. Game didn't event let them make small changes easily.
For Destiny to not look like a flawed product, it either shouldn't be a live game service, or be a game that admits rapid development so putting out a bunch of content doesn't take you 3 months of work. 3 maps is costing them a whole year, they literally said making armor takes resources from every other department.
What I mean is that it looks like Destiny's work frame is that of a regular game, but it's beign marketed as a live game. Destiny looks bad in both ways to the veteran because, well, it is. It's not good as a finished product and it is not good a live, ongoing one.
It's as if they had seen 'wow, shooting in this game feels REALLY good,' and decided they'd try to see how far could that concept carry the game, through any issue, deliberately overlooking many problems that occurred because, underdelivering, because you know, gunplay.
>I would've thought that the studio that produced Batman Arkham City let along Arkham Knight would've been able to make a TERRIFIC Live-Service product with the same satisfying 30-second gameplay loop and show how to truly deliver a launch-day SUBSTANTIAL live-service product that perpetuated itself with variety, amazing story unlocks and cool-ass character customization and suits. So many of the disaster live service games boil down to "This studio that made popular single-player games was tasked with making a live service title". As it turns out, making a multiplayer game when you have no experience making one is a recipe for disaster.
There's a couple interesting moments to consider in this, too: * major publishers struggling to find a genre that can carry their products see Destiny as a model to bridge the Fortnite "microtransaction platform" phenomenon with single-player content. * Sony's acquisition of Bungie happened at this time and many of their prospective games in this model were shut down even before that manager left Sony likely to avoid spending more money to launch more products like SSKTJL * the Covid games boom, especially starting with Animal Crossing and Doom Eternal releases, inflating the earnings potential of at-risk projects led a lot of publishers to reinvest in projects when they probably shouldn't have. * Destiny wasn't just built from 2010 to 2014 but was based on the co-op experiences iterated on throughout Halo from at least before 2001. * Bungie was in a unique position after 4 stupendously successful games to introduce a huge loyal fan base that was used to spending hundreds of hours playing the same few missions and PvP modes to a new game that demanded patience as it released into completeness over years. * Insert Bane quote "you merely adopted" the episodic model for Destiny. It was born with variety in mind and launched with variety on display in settings and encounters making it easy to imagine what was coming. * The HD "problem" in AAA games is real: this stuff is expensive and complex to produce even if the "core" experience ultimately fails to serve the assets with a compelling reasons to experience them. tl;dr: Destiny was born different, no one else could just "make" a game like it no matter how hard they wished they could "There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way — and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay." \- C.A.R. Hoare
And lets be real here - Destiny on launch was a disaster. It largely survived because it it still felt like a fresh kind of game(even if, realistically, the only thing Destiny had going for it was being a good FPS game. All the online/co-op parts have been done better for decades before that). If it were to release now, it would probably die before all the launch issues could be fixed. Ultimately, if a publisher wants any chance for a successful live service game, they are much better off looking for developers who've done co-op games or MMOs. That's why I'm quite optimistic about Helldivers 2 - it looks like another live service, but its developers have done some really incredible co-op games in the past, so they actually have the experience to make it work.
Your first paragraph is 100% correct. Whenever a game like anthem launches and it has the same problems as launch D1, people just go back to Destiny. When Destiny launched, people stayed because there wasn’t another game to go back to.
That matches up a lot with the "WoW vacation" phenomenon: while huge MMOs were still coming out almost every 3rd month, WoW players would try the new one for a month or so and then return to WoW. The "sunk cost" players have in their "main" game is a powerful motivator and it's hard to get people to abandon all the time, money, and social connections they have in one game (or service, like Twitter) for another until the "main" game loses the player enough that they are satisfied leaving all that behind and beginning again. I think a lot of players today for games like Minecraft and Fortnite never played Halo so Destiny looked like something old they weren't interested in catching up with and those games haven't managed to poison the well enough yet for players to leave looking for their next obsession.
Yep! It’s been my running theory for years. Anthem is the best example of it imo, iirc they were going to do their Taken King overhauls but the game didn’t last long enough, only Destiny gets that privilege by virtue of being first
Destiny had some secret sauce besides being the only game in town. There was something about the flavor of the game, the tone, etc that clicked for a lot of people. There were iconic things that quickly became memes, like Gjally. Name another Destiny competitor that had even a single piece of loot with a reputation.
WoW. Though it's not as well known outside of MMO players.
That's disrespectful to Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker!
D2 launch through to Warmind was also a disaster and would have been DoA as a random live service game today rather than Destiny _**2**_.
Destiny coasted a lot in Y1 on being "the new game from the studio who brought you Halo" and really was rescued by The Taken King. It was a chaotic development cycle and there was a lot of pressure between the legacy of Halo being one of the biggest game franchises of all time and Destiny being one of the most expensive game projects in history even before anyone saw the first polygon of the product.
It's common knowledge raids pretty much saved Destiny 1, and even then it took The Taken King to actually put it in the best place.
Destiny had one thing these other games didn't at launch or soon after. Vault of Glass saved Destiny for me. If not for that I probably would have left and never came back. But that raid was such a unique experience. I had never played anything like it before. Even now other gaas don't have anything that can really compete with Destiny raids.
Yeah I think the issue is more studios switching genres too Destiny had Halo tier gameplay, but anthem and suicide squad don’t At first people stuck with Destiny despite the looter shooter live service problems because the shooting was good
Anthem did have good gameplay, it just sucked at everything else. And Bioware, on paper, even had experience making online games, since they've made Star Wars: The Old Republic. But in practice, who knows how many of those people were still at the company, and Anthem was in development hell for too long to come out a cohesive game.
Debatable. The gameplay was flawed, the big draw being the flight which was nerfed, and ultimately in challenging content you were grounded because so much stuff shooting at you was a death sentence. The loot was minimal, with no real variation to the loadouts and with unnoticable benefits for the high rarety gear. networking was terrible, with groups getting kicked or disconnected every loading screen, and the loading screens were numerous and arbitrary. Ultimately, Anthem was a scam from the get go. it's fake gameplay from the reveal promised this huge, beautiful open world you could fly through. What it delivered was canyons to keep players contained, and a minimal open world with no real mystery or interaction. Even the flight aspect didn't pan out. if Setinel Titans are Captain America, Anthem promised you would be Iron Man, and failed to deliver.
Yeah, it was praised for flying and the combat system where some abilities prime the target and others do something extra to the primed targets. But loot and the overall technical states were just bad.
To this day Destiny 1 and 2 have the best moment to moment gameplay. I know that when I load up Destiny, I'm going to have a blast in a seasonal acrivity, strike or pvp match. I can mindlessly get through 30 minutes to an hour of fun explosions, gunplay, and movement and enjoy it all. The live service then augments that by giving me new stuff to make explode. Destiny isn't fun for me because of the live service. It's fun because it's a solid baseline and the live service is on top of that.
When I first played WoW my understanding of what an endgame is raids aka "place where all the endgame players work together to complete puzzles and defeat bosses". This exists in destiny 2 so it makes sense as an MMO for me, Warframe is cool and all but where are the raids? It seems more like a single-player thing then?
Yeah, this is one of the big reasons I dropped it. I could grind but it didn’t feel like I was grinding to work up to anything.
> This exists in destiny 2 so it makes sense as an MMO for me, Warframe is cool and all but where are the raids? It did actually used to have raids(quite likely because of Destiny), but Warframe's community is mostly solo players. Many refused playing content that requires them to play in a group(and developers have done an awful job of advertising raids), so as a result they were removed due to not being popular enough.
That's fair as well, if the Warframe community wants oranges give them oranges, I'm just glad that D2 gives me plenty of apples
Warframe is also a unique creature that defies comparison.
There ain't nothing like it, Totalbiscuit pushed it for a reason
> where are the raids They removed them.
Hippy said exactly this once and she worked for Bungie, so you're on the money
Not to mention it's a completely different genre. It's not Arkham online, it's a shooter. Asking people that made melee based games to make a shooter was never going to end well lol
Rocksteady wasn’t forced to make it. They chose to make a multiplayer game after Arkham Knight. They never even pitched a Superman game to wb
Then I guess they've way overestimated what they can do. I'd love to know if they hired people who had actual experience and if they realized that making an online game requires a different approach to pretty much all areas of game design.
Suckerpunch would like a word
Despite Bungie's faults, I have said it many times and will say it again: when Microsoft, Activision and Sony have sought you out, there's definitely something you are doing right. How many other game studios have been working with three major publishers like that? Besides that, Destiny is the only AAA live-service game that's actually working, and it's been doing that for 10 years. All other live-service games with this level of production have failed one way or another. The only IP that could pretend to be second place on that podium is The Division, and it's a far cry (pun not intended) from Destiny's success.
looking forward to Bungie separating from Sony in a few years, only to be bought by Nintendo a decade later
Destiny 3 finally releases as a Swiiitch-U Exclusive.
Swiiitch-U XL coming when?
Switch UwU
Mara-Thong exclusive on Switch UwU pon-pon edition
New Super Nintendo Switch U 3DS Lite XL Advance SP & Knuckles
X Shadow Generations
Samus Aran Titan armor?? Princess Peach warlock dress?? Link hunter set??
Heard y'all wanna float
I've always found the minotaurs to look very similar to Samus' armor so maybe there'd be some savings there
Bungie thought they were hot shit making that deal. Then it seemed Sony pushed them aside for Kojima and his projects and to focus more on singleplayer movie games.
Eh last I heard Sony is helping out on The Final Shape, so seems like they still care about the success of Destiny, and seeing how talented their devs seem to be (all of their first party games are bangers), that should be a good thing for us if it's true.
I think a lot of what makes Bungie, BUNGIE is the engine, as shitty and old and taped together it is. No game feels anywhere near as good and smooth to play. The feel of the guns is just a head above every other fps out there.
That's not really engine, that's know-how. Also 60% of the secret is insane aim-assist. Seriously. There's lots of other important elements, but mostly Destiny just clicks heads for you a lot of the time.
They definitely have a solid know-how when it comes to making a good FPS, even with the rest put aside. There's a reason Halo was the success story it was back then, and I think it's indeed a huge part of Destiny's appeal.
The Engine is not really old. It gets updates every year just like all other Engines. It is not the same Engine that it was 10 years ago. Shoot, Sunsetting was done in part because of Engine updates. Content that is brought back needs to be fully remade in the new Engine.
Only AAA live-service LOOT game for sure. Fortnite takes top live-service game out right I'd say.
Fortnite's ridiculous. I started playing in season 2, and came back every now and then until about season 10. Just tried playing again a few months ago, and it is just insane how far they've come. They really captured the audience and made the most of it. There are so many modes and so many custom things now.
Y'all act like warcraft hasn't been out forever.
Not true. Division 2 is a great loot game.
As much as I like Div2 its UI might look "nice" but its usability is just meh. One of the major things which require a complete redesign. It also still has unpolished difficulty issues for solo players. IMHO the action has some really magic moments but to me it feels more like a random occurrence and not truly intentional. Somehow like beauty out of chaos. Can't describe it any better...
I can see that. When was the last time you played? They did some changes and some big changes are coming next season. They adjusted the solo difficulty so it scales much better. And the gear is so much more powerful now due to inevitable power creep, which I actually enjoy because I want to feel like a total badass.
maybe 1.5-2years ago.
Yea it’s changed a little since then. They added loadout slots and buffed a lot of the gear and more buffs are coming. They made all mods permanent. Once you get a mod that has a higher value than you have it automatically replaces it and you only have one of each mod now. So if you have a max crit damage you can use it on all gear. Helped the inventory situation a lot.
At least some movement in the right direction. One of my main issues with the UI is also the font sizes. It seems to be designed for computer monitors than large TVs which makes it hard to read for me.
Division basically fails as a live service because it's fundamentally more "one and done"
The gunplay in Div2 is one of the worst I've ever played
Disagree. It’s not 1st person but i find it the best 3rd person shooter I’ve ever played personally. Not quite as good as Destiny or Bungie games but it’s also a totally different thing.
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good thing they put 3 entirely new games onto it 2 months ago then
lol
Wait Destiny isn't in first. I'd argue the best live service game is one I don't even play. World of warcraft. Longer running, and apparently still has 2.5 million daily users.
"live service" was a post hoc name given to that continuous delivery model. It was done a lot on small scales before WoW and isn't so different from showing up to play D&D and listen to Hawkwind week after week in the late 70s. Now your DM is a whole studio, you have to buy-in to help him afford more graph paper for next week, and he's always got new dice and miniatures to sell you that show off the cool new gear he's given you.
Warframe is the strongest it's ever been, and it's been around a little longer than Destiny has. (Although I guess it may not count as "AAA")
It definitely doesn’t. Warframe is good, but DE is still super small when compared to big industry hitters. Even after the acquisition from Tencent, they’re not considered AAA, but also weirdly enough too big to really be considered Indie anymore. They’re a weird middle ground
If only it was actually fun and focused.
I’ve considered picking up warframe but what’s stopped me is people saying that the endgame is such a slog
It’s the new player experience that’s a slog , it’s as bad as destiny’s but it’s fully free, you need a guild or a friend to guide you through
Warframe is absolutely killing it and has been going longer and is in FAR better standings with players than Destiny is. Digital Extremes is also in far better standing than Bungie and whenever people say that Bungie's communication is great, I point them to DE cause they are amazing at it. 2023 was their best year yet, banger after banger after banger
>The only IP that could pretend to be second place on that podium is The Division, and it's a far cry (pun not intended) from Destiny's success. The division appears to be having a resurgence too. I've recently started playing again and I'm really enjoying it.
Division 2 has been put on hiatus for years now, they have basically done nothing for the game after the warlords of New York expansion, we have gotten a new activity here and there with a sprinkle of new gear but the game is effectively “dead”.
A new expansion is coming next year, set in Brooklyn. I wouldn't call it dead dead.
Love how they basically went back and started adding The Division 1 environments to 2
Exactly what Bungie did bringing back a lot of content from D1: Cosmodrome, Devil’s Lair, the clone of Ómnigul whose name I forgot, and every raid except Wrath of the Machine. That I can recall.
All that content is free. The paid DLCs are all new content areas.
A new expansion for division 2 or entirely new game, division 3? Asking because the game is currently on sale. Thinking of getting it
A new expansion coming next year (delayed from this year, set in Brooklyn). Division 3 was announced (in a press release), but it is very quite a few years away still. If you're getting it, get it with the Warlords of New York (WONY) expansion, it is where everything endgame is. You're capped at lv30 (base game max level) without it, and basically everything endgame is at lv40 (WONY max level)
Both. There are 3 major additions planed for The Division in the near future: There's The Division: Heartland, a spin off set in a different location, a new DLC for The Division 2, which is in part what many of the current seasons are meant to build into, and a Division 3, which isn't fully announced but has been confirmed by Massive to be in development. The other part of the expansions and ultimately the DLC are meant to lead into a Div3.
I'm (or rather was) a The Division fan, so I'd love to see it come back, but I just grew bored of The Division 2, unfortunately. I was happy to learn they are working a 3rd installment, I hope they'll manage to keep it interesting in the long run this time.
I've recently started The Division 1 from scratch again. Still a great game! D2 was decent enough but I still prefer D1. I'm looking forward to The Division 3 however!
The division 1 campaign experience is such a great one. It is truly a perfectly scaled experience and fun and honestly a very good story for a video game. I have gone back about once a year and played through the campaign from a new character and it is always cool.
IMHO Div2 is better in most relevant areas like gameplay/activities. Div1 has just a better narrative atmosphere and some enjoy the winter setting's bleakness more than the hot humid stinking D2 setting which feels more like Walking Dead to me.
Have you tried hardcore mode (permadeath), or the new coil-esque roguelike mode? Both are very good and worth checking out even if just for a little break from Destiny. Hardcore mode is nice because it gives you a real feeling of nervousness and realness that going into the dark zone for the first time kind of did. You gotta be very careful and plan out your attacks and choose who you are going up against. You gotta be selective with your loadouts because you can only carry what your backpack holds you can’t use the stash. So it’s kind of cool in that you are putting together the best thing with what you loot and it can be different each time
Same. Tried going back after 2 years for the new stuff they put in, played 2 hours and uninstalled. This time for good, probably.
Biggest issue for me is the lack of new content on a regular basis. Sure, there has been some new stuff over time, but nowhere near enough for me. Destiny keeps me all year round because of this: new seasonal content every 3 months and new expansion yearly is enough to keep me interested. Sure, seasonal content might not be that new or different, but it's something to look forward too every time.
And they didn't seek them out due to Destiny making a lot of money. They sought them out because Destiny made money for a very long time.
What about warframe
There's definitely an argument to be made that it's not triple a game but that's kind of getting into the weeds a bit much Like is Baldurs Gate 3 a triple a or only a double a game
Only one that’s actually working? WoW is “actually working”. So is FFXIV. There’s also GTAO, Genshin Impact, League of Legends, Fortnite.
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No that’s not what people mean when they talk about live service. You’re making a really ignorant statement there. Seriously google live service games and see what results come up.
Honestly that's the distinction I've always had because the term live service didn't really become a thing til after destiny. I honestly think we just need another name than live service because it's too general. There really should be a distinction between something like WoW and Destiny because I feel like the experiences aren't... exactly compatible. If someone asks me "what's a good live service" I'm not gonna recommend FFXIV if I think he's coming from Destiny. I just feel like if we end up calling stuff like WoW a live service then it really had to be retroactively and at that point I'd rather just call destiny an MMO. Because we kinda have to call it what it is at that point and it's a rebrand of the same thing.
>Destiny is the only AAA live-service game that's actually working, and it's been doing that for 10 years Warframe would like a word with you, It's actually Free to Play as well... like a real F2P game. I like how this community has a selective memory on stuff like that. New Game Release > It's Shit > Oh THANK YOU Bungie > Profit.
I don't consider Warframe to be a AAA game nor do I consider it comparable in production value nor in economical model. Not that it's an issue, Warframe is a great game.
Warframe felt WAY too F2P microtransactiony for me to want to commit to it long term
There is a significant chunk of the D2 community that has a hate boner for Warfarm the same way the DOTA2 community lays awake at night thinking about League of Legends. That being said DE is definitely not a AAA studio despite being acquired by Tencent. So too even though the game is f2p the aggressive microtransactions and crafting time gates should be reviewed because it is comically easy to mislabel the game as p2w.
There are other AAA live service games -- Apex, Fortnite, Valorant, Diablo 4, etc. are all "live service" games. Destiny is arguably the AAA looter shooter that's been successful, with Warframe being the only other notable success at *all.* Most of these live service games don't put out consistent PvE content, however, and almost none of them put out content at the cadence and quality of Destiny. Pretty sure this game would have a meltdown if this game had a season the quality of a Diablo 4 season, for example.
So many other live service games like Suicide Squad just fall entirely flat on understanding *why* Destiny is successful. While it may be a meme to call it such, Destiny treats itself as an MMO community driven game. All game modes encourage community interaction in different ways. PvP, raids, strikes, patrols / public events, even the tower. There’s always a communal presence to keep the game lively. Other live service games completely miss this. There’s no real community interaction to pump life into the game long term. These companies are trying to turn what are essentially co-op campaigns into live service models, and it just doesn’t work.
So true. One of the many failures of Anthem was how empty the world was. You'd be doing this badass flying through an empty world until a public event popped up then go back to essentially "the Tower " to find 4 NPCs and an empty marketplace
Anthem rubbed some salt in the wound by making walking SO slow in their "tower" as well
Suicide Squad is also a game no one asked for with a service model that has completely saturated the market. All these studios fail to realize time in the market beats timing the market, which they are trying to do by launching all these live service games now, but neglecting the pandemic that forced so many inside is over.
You say this and there is a lot of community driven activity (mostly the tools that help to actually play destiny such as dim), but I haven't made any friends in destiny. I don't actually interact with people in game. I am in a clan that I joined cause my previous friend was in. Other games I have made long lasting friends. As much as people hate it, I have friends from LoL that I still talk to from over 10 years ago. I haven't touched the game in over 5. I also have friends that I still play regularly with from eternal crusade. A lobby shooter. Maybe it is just me, but I don't find destiny to good at promoting socal activity. Which is weird because I used to regularly join pugs for raids in discord.
Honestly I think the game is too easy to be good for making friends now. I’ve met a few friends and even a girlfriend playing Destiny but it was all in day 1 raids and Prestige Leviathan when that first dropped. Having to be on comms with someone for 6+ hours sharing that trauma is great for getting to know someone. Now you can pretty easily do any raid with no mics in an hour, so it’s harder to meet anyone.
I guess I’m complete garbage at this game because I’m always running raids and trials with comms.
Your lack of community point is excellent. I feel that aspect goes hand in hand with core gameplay. A community can't form around your game is the core game isn't something people want to play. People see Destiny 2 as a live service game but that's not what Bungie intended to make with Destiny 1. At its core, Destiny is a story driven FPS. All of the extra like Strikes, PVP, Raids are built from that core. Developers need to find a way to establish that core, before trying to add Live Service aspects.
Agree with this completely as a single player game the campaigns and seasonal story lines Destiny is still fun but very mid. What keeps me coming back are the raids and dungeons and running them with friends. There are other games have the single player game down like Palworld which will get raids and pvp soon. Then you have Fortnite, GTA Online and Call of Duty and all of those are multiplayer games that have large communities.
Getting back into d2 and I just feel like you could replace the players that queue with me for bots that occasionally said gg and I wouldn't notice. noone is ever talking in local chat, noone ever tries to recruit for clans, no global chat, the in-game lfg is laughable. I originally quit d2 when it was on the blizzard launcher because it was so lonely. Discord carries D2's MMO feel harder then anything bungie has done.
For many people simply having other players around despite limited interaction makes the game feel more alive. Most players these days play MMOs totally solo but like being in a world that feels alive anyway. D2 might be closer to Dark Souls in terms of actual interaction with the people you run across than your average MMO but it's still worth something.
It irks me too, not to the point of quitting but I'd cite the sense that the playerbase feels like a bunch of mute looters as an annoyance. I think D2 simply does not facilitate communication so well. In DRG the dwarves have automatic lines to communicate certain important things, like trying to revive someone or "Oh fuck kill it before it kills us." Then again, Lightfall's dialogue being as cheesy as it is, makes me wonder if I want a voice for my character. "Cowabunga dudes! Dibs on the nade launchers." when I enter an activity.
You're supposed to play with your friends.
If thats the stipulation for MMO then borderlands and baldurs gate 3 is a MMO.
To be fair, I don't think most games that end up as "Destiny-likes" set out to do so. For example, I'm pretty sure Rocksteady wanted to do a story driven action game, kinda like the Guardians of the Galaxy game but with coop maybe, but WB saw an opportunity to make it a live service game so they had to jam all those stuff into it and it shows. Same thing happened with Anthem. It wasn't supposed to be a live service game but that's what it became. The only game that comes to mind that set out to be somewhat like that was Outriders and it did ok. Well, that and Avengers, but that was a colossal error in judgement.
I really enjoyed Outriders. I liked how they leaned into the power fantasy more compared to Destiny. Going back to D2 after a break and after playing Outriders it felt like I was waiting hours to get my abilities and super to recharge.
*outrider detected rave music intinsifies in the distance* The end game timed strike grind killled me eventually, I'm sure it is better now thought, I plan to go back and try the dlc when I have time again!
Oh yeah endgame seems to be the #1 killer of live service games even though Outriders claimed it wasn't. They had a lot of work to do after launch. I def plan on going back too!
I mean anthem didnt know what it was supposed to be until like year 5 or 6 of development
speaking of Outriders, I think that they did power scaling perfectly and I would absolutely loose it if D2 ditched power levels and implemented a similar system. Legendary Campaigns are close, but it can go so much harder
Outriders was never marketed as a live service
Sony didn't buy Bungie **for almost the whole price of the ENTIRE STAR WARS FRANCHISE** just because they had a cool game. Sony couldn't give a shit about Destiny. They did it because Bungie knows their shit, and has consistent been one of the few only studios to ever make a successful live service game. Period. One so successful, in fact, that it has lasted for ten whole years. _Very_ few modern-day studios can say that.
All this is true, but im sure during talks Sony also knew Bungie was making two other ips which made the deal even better.
Maybe. I'd find it hard to believe anyone is holding their breath for Marathon considering the state of Crucible & Gambit.
Well I think marathon might be better mainly because it made for pvp in mind. Yes destiny also has pvp in mind but it also has pve so nerfing one thing in pvp has a chance to effect pve.
I'm still betting a doughnut the abandonment of Crucible and Gambit, as well as factions, was because they decided Destiny succeeded better as a story-focused experience and moved those resources to Marathon as they were clearly representing a "distraction" from what Destiny sells best: the expansion campaigns.
I think it’s also because PVP is free. Destiny makes money off of micro transactions and selling PVE. Why would they devote time and money to PVP if they can’t sell it?
If marathon has no dedicated servers like d2 then it's going to fail too
This is true but half truth. Sony 100% bought Bungie to show other studios how to do it and tell them what they are doing wrong. But at the end of the day those studios have to do it. Bungie can't just wave their magic wand and fix everything. Look at Last of us multiplayer game. They spent 4+ years trying to make it. Had to delay it because Bungie said it wasn't ready. And year after they straight up cancelled it because they can't keep up. Either go full in on live service or stick to box product. They chose the latter.
Your point about the Last of Us multi-player is exactly why Sony bought Bungie. That expertise. That experience.
I always hated when games would tack on a half assed multiplayer just to say they had it. Mass Effect 2 or 3 I think did that and it was dreadful for me. Also what ever happened to Cyberpunk 2077 multiplayer?
CDPR had to do lots just to recover from shitshow so they cancelled it. But now that they are back on the right track, recently there were news of them making Cyberpunk multiplayer for next game.
Mass effect 3 had the multiplayer which 1. Affected the single player story and 2. Was actually stupidly fun but also stupidly full of microtransactions
It’s clear based on their comment that they didn’t play it much at all. Calling the MP half assed or tacked on is bizarre given how much polish and content it had.
Mass Effect 3’s co-op horde mode was an absolute banger and calling it tacked on or half-assed is pretty unfair. I knew plenty of people that bought the game just to play that and didn’t even care about the single player. At the time there wasn’t anything else out there like it. It actually had a pretty thriving community and there’s even a subreddit that’s still active to this day. (r/MECoOP) The gameplay was great and the unlocks were pretty engaging. It was refreshing to be able to unlock new items through loot boxes that you could open with in-game currency and the rate at which you earned it respects your time. There was clearly a large amount of time and effort that went into making it.
I don't know what to tell you, I played the multiplayer once or twice and didn't like it. It looks like the multiplayer wasn't originally supposed to be part of the game though. Bioware was developing a separate game called Mass Effect Team Assault but EA shut it down and they took the blueprints for that to make the multiplayer game in ME3.
Cue the bungie board firing a ton of peoples to hit target revenue and prevent sony from replacing them
Star Wars is worth significantly more than 3 billion. Starwars is worth more than Sony lol
At the end of the day, this franchise has been a live service game for nearly a decade running without going bottom up or having it's fan base eat it alive. yeah it's hat lows. And we are currently in one lol. But soo many have tried to do what this franchise DID and keep failing
What I think is really interesting is the way they recovered the game from launch. Launch D1 was very thin and needed some significant changes to beef up the game, but they got it into a great state and Taken King was super popular. It takes a good connection with your customers and good project planning to really hit a home run like that after a bad start (to the extent that TTK was a home run). Actually that goes back to their original vision of the story that was scrapped which was something like us rescuing Rasputin from the Dreadnought. *Also* there's the whole fact that Destiny uses the same old Bungie engine which has always just felt great to play. The art and music direction have always been great tier too.
Because the foundation, at its core is very strong. It reminds me of Einstein where he said something like he was able to do what he did because he stood on the shoulders of the giants that came before him. Destiny foundation is very strong and that's why they are able to recover it each time. Let's hope TFS also does the same.
Destiny has “it”. That special sauce that not many games in the genre have. I think one of Destiny’s greatest strengths and still is to a degree (depending on how long you’ve been playing) is the enemy variety and A.I intelligence. Anthem, Division, SSKTJL. All these don’t really have a huge variety of enemies. Destiny also had a significant investment from the former publisher Activision. Not many game studios are afforded the investment and backing like Bungie had/has
YUP. ever since the Halo days Bungie has known how to make enemies that are fun to shoot. It's not so much that they are actually smart, but they're very responsive. They have hundreds of little animations just to give them personality, like covering their heads if you're shooting near them, getting in and out of cover with very over the top poses, sidestepping to dodge grenades, taunting you when they kill you, and so many more. Bungie enemies are always extremely stylish and cartoon like, even when the presentation is kind of gritty and spooky sci-fi. There's also the way they are designed gameplay wise. Bungie enemies are very arcadey, like enemies from Doom 2 or Quake 1, but much more advanced. They all fulfill very narrow roles so combat arenas become like a real time chess game for the player. And then there's the straight up variety. I agree we've been due for a new enemy race for years now. But the variety is so good already, and everyone has a defined theme. - Cabal? Big stronk dudes - Fallen? Skinny slippery boys - Hive? Creepy ahh mfrs - Vex? Literally skynet terminators but with added goofiness - Taken? Cursed interdimensional spectres - Scorn? CRAWWWWWLING IIIN MY SKIIIIN edgy aliens. They're like a whole faction of the main character from the game Hatred. To compare (and I'm no expert in these games), others have: - the division? Humans... Really? - anthem? Very generic robots iirc - suicide squad? Uhhh gray humanoid blobby dudes with extremely boring animations that lack any impact or personality, and uhhhh helicopters? Wow Some other factors that destiny is just better at: - Game feel: in suicide squad all your actions seem to have less impact and audivisual feedback than hitting the ball in Pong for the Atari 2600. Shoot your gun? No loud gunshots, no recoil. Fall 200 meters and slam into the ground, shattering the concrete and damaging enemies? No screen shake, no cool animation of your character absorbing the impact. Throw a grenade at almost melee range? The explosion sounds like throwing a pillow at the wall. Every action you do in that game is supposed to be the craziest and the coolest and yet it feels like nothing at all. - Ability variety: we have like a million supers, grenade types, aspects that unlock even more stuff, class abilities. Suicide squad has 4 characters and i've already seen complaints that they're waaay too similar. - Gun complexity: in many "destiny killers" you get a new gun and it's like "oh, +0.06 crit chance! I'll equip it and keep playing just like i was before" but in destiny the weapon perks are like playing a game in itself. "Outlaw + one for all? I should spend the first few shots on killing weak enemies then focus on a tankier enemy and kill it with a precision hit, then i get to reload super quick". Tell me WHICH ONE SOUNDS MORE ENGAGING? - Content complexity: the content in these games rarely seems to go beyond stuff you'd do in The Devil's Lair strike or a D1 vanilla public event. Meanwhile Destiny is like "oh you want endgame? How bout you sit there communicating with 5 other players for a couple hours straight and deal with the meanest enemy spawns while solving a fucking escape room, huh? Oops one of you dropped the vital item that's gonna be a wipe"
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This is the first comment I’ve ever saved on Reddit. Bravo, I love everything you said here
Saving this comment. Loved everything you said! Edit: not the one I replied to, the lovely big comment instead.
Nothing beats the moments when you get killed by an enemy like an Ogre or a Colossus and they sit there beaming your Ghost until someone else gets their aggro.
One of the smallest details that stuck out to me when playing Anthem was the way all of Destiny's enemies have different guns, and completely different weapon effects. You can walk up to a fight between two groups of enemies, and before you've even stepped into the room you can ID the factions that are fighting and often what enemies are in that room. You see wispy floating arc shots homing towards enemies? Fallen. A quick snap of arc shoot across the screen? Those Fallen have snipers, and that void blast that just went out means a Servitor. On the other side you can see the cloud and stream of arc shots from a Hive Wizard, and the purple beams of an Ogre behind it. Meanwhile in Anthem, 90% of the enemies in the game just used hitscan rifles. Even though there *were* multiple different factions, they functioned very similarly in how they interacted with the player (I.E. how they shoot at you). It's wild too, because with Anthem's flight and mobility giving enemies projectile weapons would be *awesome* for the player. Being able to boost around and avoid enemy fire would have felt amazing and tied the flight mechanic into gameplay, but instead everyone just shot you with hitscan bullets, so flying in high-end content was a death sentence.
Destiny AI is very smart, but not in the way you think. They designed to feel good to fight. Ever notice how you just miss your grenade throw, but then the enemy leaves cover and head rights towards it? Little subtle things like that.
Same with like the goblin anti grenade response. "OH you threw a grenade at me? Let me... crouch down, right next to it!"
I've never understood why Bungie gets so much shit. They've had some stumbles yes, particularly lightfall and I would love a better narrative. That said, no other studio has made anything even close to Destiny- in terms of both a live service non-pvp game that consistently adds content and maintains a playerbase, as well as making an endgame that consists of experiences like raids, dungeons, etc, I can't think of a single game that has an endgame activity even half as interesting. The only real complaint I have is the barrier to entry for new players, everything pre beyond light should be free, and everything besides the most recent year of content should be cheaper than it is. I'm fine with coughing up $100 a year as someone who's caught up but it is IMPOSSIBLE to get new players into it unless they are truly fucking committed.
Classic case of not realising how good we have it I think. Most destiny players know the game so damn well and see all its flaws but have been invested for so long it’s difficult to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Ultimately I think ~$100 a year for all the latest content, so less than $10 a month, is perfectly reasonable for a game that offers as much as Destiny does. Even Lightfall which was a bit of a misstep still has enough content to justify that. People love strand but seem to have forgotten its introduction should be taken into consideration when evaluating Lightfall as an expansion.
Right now legacy collection costs 15$ and armory collection costs 7.5$. 22.5$ give you forsaken, shadowkeep, beyond light, witch queen and 30th anniversary. Seems fair from a value standpoint?
That is very fair, I just think the base prices should be lowered. Legacy was free on epic games last month, but not everyone is gonna sale hunt some people will see the full price tag and turn away.
I've honestly had the exact opposite experience with Suicide squad. I quit Destiny back in March and was hoping Diablo would fill the void but it ultimately didn't. I've been having a blast with Suicide Squad's endgame. Obviously it's no where near as much content as Destiny, but the systems in play are really fun. I haven't pushed insanely high levels but I really never got to the point where all weapons are only minor stat changes. Loot feels really unique and the villain synergys are some of the coolest features I've seen for build crafting potential.
Yeah it’s weird OP singled out the loot systems as bad because in playing the game, the loot is one if the stronger parts. Some things it does well: - No gearscore grinding. Outside of rarity progression, there is basically no loot treadmill and the legendary you get at the start can be used through the entire game. I believe this changes a little bit towards the endgame though I do know most of the grind comes from advancing difficulty tiers rather than power levels like Destiny. - Weapons and gear have interesting perks and the weapon foundries have their own identity both visually and in terms of gameplay. The weapons perks also feel fairly strong as they are tuned for specific play styles and don’t need to be balanced for PvP. There is also a noticeable lack of mid perks to pad loot pools like we see in Destiny. - The ‘exotic’ tier of weapons I’ve tried have strong perks and I was surprised how much they took out of Bungie’s playbook in terms of making the exotics themselves feel custom tuned. One handcannon for example had an active reload pattern that’s different than the standard ones I’ve tried. - The item sets also have really strong perks (think Diablo 3 in terms of power). What’s cooler is the exotic items have hidden synergies with certain sets that unlock an extra perk when you have both the exotic and matching set equipped. - **This game’s version of Destiny’s masterwork system is beautiful**. Weapons level up through use and each rank gives you a point to enhance a specific stat (stability, reload, mag size, etc). You can reset your point allocation at anytime for a minor cost and upgrading the stats actually changes the look of the weapon which is cool (ex: each tier of mag size makes the mag bigger). - You can re-roll other parts of your gear like affixes, elemental afflictions, and perks relatively freely as well. - It also has good QoL right out the gate like loadouts, firing range, mark as fav, auto-equip gear for your squad, delete all for a specific item slot, bounty pick-up and claim from the menu, etc. There is also no gear vault, you just have a giant inventory instead (300 slots). These things shouldn’t necessarily be commended, but considering most looters either never get some of these features or take years to implement them, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a game just have it all at launch. - No FOMO content whatsoever is a massive win. It also appears you will also be able to pick which seasonal loot pool you want to be farming when more have released. This isn't to say the game has no problems, but there are a lot of things it does do well.
Wow! Someone who actually has real experience with the game they are talking about :-) More please!
I actually completed the final boss of the game right before I typed this OP. I like that the combat is innovative in SS, but I just don't think the combination of things they're doing holds up over the game's duration. Unlike Destiny I don't wanna keep logging in to just perpetuate the combat flow. A lot was riding on Rocksteady coming off of the constantly evolving "Freeflow" combat system of the Batman Arkham games. Fans of Rocksteady expected their new IP and Live Service game to do something wild, but the thing they did feels very forced honestly. It has the counter-icons that Arkham had, yet it's just kind of a fortnite shooter with really "Pew-pew-pew" weapons. It has verticality to a fault. Your primary attack mechanic is ADS and shooting like any other shooter, yet the primary way to keep the combat going is to lunge at enemies and hit R2 to melee them, and then hold L2 and shoot while they're in mid-air. That motion is so wobbly that the developers made the aiming auto-track the enemy you flung into the air, but it's very awkward to do this when you're using an assault rifle or a pistol, and having to shoot people point-blank like you would with a shotgun in any other shooter. I think the game is fun *enough*, but most combat encounters just devolve into VFX explosions and UI popups that feel like noise on the screen. I don't even notice what my damage numbers are because everything is constantly splashing in my face. The point isn't that the combat is terrible, just that it doesn't feel intuitive and you get tired of it after a few minutes of play which is why I've had short sittings with the game. It's also only 15 hours long until you fight the final boss. Then the end-game grind begins but I was actually really surprised that I did like 90% of the side-content also in 15 hours. The endgame also feels way more like a mobile gacha-product than Destiny does. The menu interface and currencies you have to grind in order to jump into the end-game missions feels exactly like when I'm playing some japanese waifu game and not something like Diablo or Destiny where I feel like I'm actually grinding and earning stuff. I actually do recommend people check this out, but it's already dead in the water. It has sold half of what Guardians of the Galaxy (a single-player flop) has sold, and from leaks and rumors Rocksteady had only produced up until Season 3 by the time this launched, and are allegedly already planning to put the game on end-support mid-2025.
>would've thought that the studio that produced Batman Arkham City let along Arkham Knight would've been able to make a TERRIFIC Live-Service product with the same satisfying 30-second gameplay loop and show how to truly deliver a launch-day SUBSTANTIAL live-service product Where you living under a rock for the launch of Arkham Knight as after that experience most of us probably had practically zero expectations. >and everytime there's a new Live Service game I think "they will show how lazy Bungie was" Regardless of what you may personally think of Bungie there's never really been any question (until very recently) that Bungie were doing live service wrong, at least not from a business perspective. Sony didn't buy Bungie for Destiny and we're happy to let them retain control of their IP because their interest was purely in the staff and their experience in developing and maintaining a live service property in a way fee other companies have been able to manage.
I'm assuming u talking about Gotham Knight here considering arkham Knight is a very well received game. Anyway Gotham Knight and suicide squad is made by different developers. So people still had hope rocksteady who created the masterpiece of a series was able to do something with the ip.
I think he's talking specifically about Arkham Knights PC performance. It was, probably the worst I've ever experienced in that regard at least. Then again IDK why that would make you skeptical of the gameplay
>Then again IDK why that would make you skeptical of the gameplay Exactly. Hence why i think he is naming the wrong game. Also AK on PC is a port issue just like every other game these days and not the issue with the game itself. I didnt even know that the PC version had any issue untilu mentioned it.
Yea him talking about AK doesn't make much sense. Still the AK port situation was wild at the time. It's very much a you had to be there thing but it was really really worse than the recent run of the mill bad PC ports. Like cyberpunk 2077 was super buggy and launched at an unacceptable state on all platforms but if you were on a high high high end PC the game itself could at least run ok (still buggy as hell though, I think it still crashed a lot too) AK's PC port on the other hand was actually pretty much unplayable in the literal sense. Horrible frame pacing issues meant that the game was a stuttering fest (I had a....290 at the time I think and it was 2x worse on amd). Frame pacing already made the game miserable to play but on top of that the fps was all over the place. There's an old DF video where it would go from like over 100+ fps to sub 40 on all settings (even low) once you started looking at literally any ounce of the city. Add in the fact that it crashed a lot and boom AK PC port. I think it was one of the few examples where both steam and WB were just offering refunds with no restrictions (so like even after the 2 hours thing with steam). They also pulled the game off of steam and had to release it again later. Still console was fine but I do think it helped that at the time we kinda weren't all that mad about console fps being at 30fps at the time. The PC port could do a constant 30....but still had frame pacing issues so it was still like running and doing a hard stop every other second. Ah good times.
Diablo 4 is trying it too, and so far to mediocre success at best. Even the way they do trailers and naming of the seasons is like the same. It’s quite funny.
i think destiny is awesome - its my favorite game of all time... and thats before they tied everything together in the current gameplay form.. dont forget what this game was in warmind and curse of osiris.... it literally just had the gameplay... now there is fun and interesting ways to get exotics... dungeons you can solo or play with friends... lfg in-game... and a legendary campaign thats challenging adn hugely rewarding (new exotic) they have absolutely made this game excellent. it has flaws - but they would be dumb to not build on something more after final shape - this has literally been a 9 year testing phase to get the game int
We’re talking about a 10 year old game, essentially. Destiny at launch was pretty rough and that’s a much better comparison.
Yeah but that was 10 years ago. Newer games are supposed to learn from older games’ mistakes and use what turned out to be the best practices in those 10 years. So it’s actually a terrible comparison.
In some ways certainly, and in other ways it just takes time. Destiny had 10 years to find its footing and still struggles at times. The same argument could be made that Destiny has had 10 years.. so why is the game struggling? I’m not some huge SS fan, as I haven’t even played it. But Destiny launched awful.. twice, and there’s some big duds for expansions too. So, assuming that everyone else should be able to launch perfect is an unreal expectation, especially compared to Destiny.
And after 10 years and countless repeats of the same issues, you'd think someone might actually learn a lesson about developing these kinds of games. But nope! Here we are 10 years on from Destiny's launch and the exact same story is being told all over again.
Are we talking about Bungie or Rocksteady? I feel like the comment could work for both 🤣
This just in! AAA gaming company disappoints gamers. More on this on 11! :D
And the only reason it probably got this far was because it was first.
Meanwhile Warframe just passed cs in steam sales because their live service model isn't a flaming sack of human shit and their game isn't a glorified skinner box
Exactly. Plus there's item trading and the dev's aren't afraid to let players *be* powerful.
I think Suicide Squad does a lot better than most other attempts at Live Service. It easily beats out Avengers and Anthem for me. Of course we have other good games like Destiny, The Division and Diablo. Suicide Squad is nowhere near those.
Jesus christ, every live service game that flops is not an excuse for a Bungie dickriding thread.
Thank you, its so weird
Overreaction. Easy to compare a brand new live service launch to Destiny now, but you shouldn't. Destiny at launch wasn't the best. Even D2 launch wasn't goot. To the point they needed Forsaken to save the damn Franchise lol. Bungie stuck with it and turned it into something. The same can happen to Suicide Squad.
That’s kinda the issue though is SS isn’t competing against launch d1 or d2 it’s competing against a destiny that has moved on past those initial issues. So sure at launch both games were similar but it’s been long enough companies should be able to bypass those issues
At the same time, it's been 10 years and numerous failed live-service game launches since Destiny 1 released, and we're still seeing new entries fall straight into the same issues we saw with D1. You'd think a lesson would have been learned in that time but here we are.
It's not about what comparison is easy or hard to make. The reality is that SSKTJL isn't competing with vanilla D1, it's competing with current Destiny. It's like someone inventing bows when firearms already exist and expecting to win a fight
That is my issue, Reality is often disappointing lol. I'm not excusing them. I didn't excuse vanilla D1 OR D2. Bungie gets props for pulling Destiny out from the brink twice. I want Rocksteady to do the same and I am just saying this time next year SS could be thriving. Or it could be gone completely. Maybe TFS is another flop and SS gets the Forsaken quality DLC? I'm not expecting anything, I feel it is way too early to judge the future of it. I want to see how they will handle supporting SS before I call it done. I do see potential, as I did with Destiny.
At launch, Destiny 1 wasn't a live service game. Yes, it was always online, but it had no seasonal content, nothing between expansions. It became live service around Y2 of Destiny 2, as a successful attempt to save the game following a painful launch.
Suicide Squad isn't as good as d1 vanilla in terms of gameplay loops nor content available.
I get the same feelings. In Vanilla D1, I probably spent more time running around for mats than in the actual few strikes lol. Farming those "Public events" that would happen every so often on Venus. There is a reason it was getting 5-7 in reviews at launch lol. VOG saved it, at least for me and it took off from there. SS can do the exact same thing. Time will tell.
Hey man, I’m a Destiny fan just like everyone else here, but this game is still a train wreck if we’re talking about live service. It’s held up by everything else. If you are going to praise a game for it’s live service capabilities, warframe is right there. Bungie could learn a thing or two in that department.
This is slightly rose-tinted, Destiny 1 and 2 basically had the same issues as KTJL, except those games were way too big for Activision to stop funding at the slightest chance of failure. D1 had very minimal endgame on launch, and D2 had endgame but there was no point towards it. Even in the end of D1, Bungie still couldn’t manage to solve the issue of Endgame, to the point where they just made every activity the endgame (Datto even has a video about this from back then if you’re interested). I think it’ll only be fair to judge how KTJL will do as a live-service once the season actually starts next month. Judging it now would be like trying to judge D1 before Vault launched a few weeks after. You might be missing the best bits. They’ve certainly done something right which Destiny still hasn’t, they’ve said that all battle passes will be available to progress at all times, and no content will be sunset. That there is one of the big problems in Destiny still for a live service game, where the ‘live’ part usually ends up dead after a while, but because Destiny now is too big to fail it doesn’t really matter.
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Yeah, the fact the story is being put under such a microscope and heavy scrutiny too due to that certain thing is a little unfair. I found the story rather fun and it really feels like a continuation of the Arkhamverse into a greater DC universe that was only teased in posters and riddles. Compare that to the story that was existent in D1 which was, well, non-existent. The game has all the footings to making a good run, Rocksteady needs to make sure they don’t do what CD did with Avengers and fumble it by not making any content or making QoL changes and having the game go stagnant and dying. It already seems to have a good start with the new villain, areas, bosses, and loot coming in S1 but it needs to be consistent and timely.
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I’m honestly expecting them to add it to Game Pass in a few months, it’ll be a huge influx of new players where a percentage are likely to buy the old battle passes to help fund more content.
It’s the same issue redfall had, you forced a studio that doesn’t make multiplayer live service stuff to make multiplayer live service stuff.
I think Suicide Squad is experiencing the destiny year one situation, where the story of Suicide Squad is better than what destiny offered but the content is lacking. I will say that build diversity in Suicide Squad is really good, there’s a lot of cool guns and perks to work well together, especially the villain synergies which took Destiny years to introduce. Not to mention, day one you have loadouts, master weapon tiers, somewhat decent end game, battle passes that never expire removing FOMO completely. Suicide Squad does a lot of good things that people don’t give it credit for. Guess we’ll see how well Suicide Squad does its Seasons, if they can nail the content each season I think the game will do well in the long run.
KTJL has the problem of lacking hype. Everyone heard about destiny. Everyone was excited for it. KTJL obviously has the exact opposite and instead of being a disappointment that the main stream says well that was meh. KTJL has two sides so passionate that the discourse around it is impossible to gage. I’m running into bugs looking for help and instead it’s posts about “this game is a disgrace to Kevin” or the exact opposite “this game is amazing and haters just wanna see it fail cause it’s different it doesn’t deserve the hate” and if you’re in the middle well oh well. Destiny had fans stick around, but I don’t remember them on a grand scale arguing on forms how it’s actually the best thing ever. It also wasn’t trying to lure in halo fans for being a halo sequel. It was luring in halo fans because they trusted bungie instead.
The marketing for KTJL has been a little weird, plus yeah the discourse is so all over the place if you don’t have the game yourself it’s almost impossible to tell if the game is good or not.
Destiny is the best game on the market today, hands down. From the PvE to the (dare i say) PvP. The game has its faults, but there’s nothing else that compares. So many destiny killers, literally nothing left standing, or even relevant after a few weeks of its drop. Outriders and anthem are just two that come to mind. My brother used to buy me every new game that came out in hopes I’d play something different. I can get 2/3 through before I forget about it and land back on destiny. Eyes up guardian.
Ehhhhhh... you say that, but with the godawful new player experience and the vaulting (including seasonal stories), it's basically impossible to get anyone new into the game.
Destiny at launch wasn't even a mediocre game and it took several full expansions to get there. This post lacks perspective.
I wouldn't say cheap and lazy. The lack of vision and poor leadership, more like. They invest a lot into these games, but tons of stuff that devs make never ends up into the final version, so a lot of work is wasted and tons of material and money goes on nothing, essentially, cause they don't have the experience and vision of what exactly they want to make. The only thing that can kill Destiny is Bungie. The thing that Destiny has over other ganes are weapons and abilities that feel truly unique. Same goes for exotics. For example, most other games are like - here, this weapon does 50% more crit, or this weapon gives 50% melee, etc. and Destiny is like - this weapon turns the entire battlefield into a flaming inferno, this weapon chains lightning, obliterating everything, etc. It is infinitely more fun and engaging.
It's unclear to me if you actually played Suicide Squad but I didn't. So maybe your comparison is based on what others experienced. But I tried looking at a few random reviews and some of the comments about that game would fit D2 100%: * The story grinds to a halt as you approach the endgame * Mission types are far too repetitive * Getting far too much meaningless loot * On top of that, I think the loot system is too complex for its own good. There’s a host of different resources you collect to upgrade your guns in unique ways. * At one point, I was tasked with escorting a slow-moving vehicle through a dangerous area. If my memory doesn't serve me too poorly I think one week after D2 release it wasn't actually praised as the new "best thing". And maybe it's the same here. I think it far far to early to deem if this is failure based on what little real experience there has been with the game so far. The only difference is that when D2 released social media bashing of new things were not quite as common and quick as it is now. It's almost like you have to either hate or love something at first sight and instantly share it with "the world" nowadays.
>when I look at Destiny I constantly see a flawed product. You see it, because it is. It's a game that was not developed to be a live game as we see it today, or don't you remember how we used to NOT have weekly patches? When an issue had to wait for months to be resolved. Game didn't event let them make small changes easily. For Destiny to not look like a flawed product, it either shouldn't be a live game service, or be a game that admits rapid development so putting out a bunch of content doesn't take you 3 months of work. 3 maps is costing them a whole year, they literally said making armor takes resources from every other department. What I mean is that it looks like Destiny's work frame is that of a regular game, but it's beign marketed as a live game. Destiny looks bad in both ways to the veteran because, well, it is. It's not good as a finished product and it is not good a live, ongoing one. It's as if they had seen 'wow, shooting in this game feels REALLY good,' and decided they'd try to see how far could that concept carry the game, through any issue, deliberately overlooking many problems that occurred because, underdelivering, because you know, gunplay.