Bungie and Destiny New Potential

I was tossing around thoughts in the GWJ Discord and this popped up in my head...basically, how Bungie leaving Activision with Destiny has the potential to do something substantial. In my made up universe, Bungie would sign on with (not necessarily be bought completely) by someone who does not already have a similar title (excludes EA with Anthem, Ubi with Division, etc.) but has decent pockets and the ability to give these guys time. Destiny could be turned into a real MMO and possibly shift how games a service is handled.

Now is the perfect time to bring back MMOs with everything turning into subscriptions anyway - showing people are willing to pay at the right price. Also, what better way to convince people to buy than with a sci-fi shooter? Much easier to sell than fantasy RPGs...for now. If they did it and hit it off correctly, they could single-handedly bring MMOs to the top for a while.

Obviously, they would have to fight against all the bad press they've had for the first two games in order to gain trust for monthly payments. They would also have to find a sweet spot for the cost. Some sort of monthly and annual cost package that can carry them, but not come close to the standard $15/month. Throw in paid cosmetics to add some sort of extra income. Could be something nice.

Well...feel free to tear it apart or add some of your own craziness.

I can't imagine Bungie is particularly keen to jump in bed with another big publisher/owner after buying themselves out of Microsoft and ditching Activision.

I do think people are becoming more used to the idea of subscriptions. People have been okay with Xbox Live and PS Plus for years now, and several publishers are pushing their subscription services as well. PS Now, EA's Origin Access, Xbox's GamePass, etc. People are definitely coming around to the idea.

When you say "bring back MMOs" I'm curious what specific aspect of them do you mean? Just the ongoing development of a core title with never-ending content updates via expansions/patches? The subscription aspect? Something else?

I seriously doubt many people will buy a sub for just Destiny or Bungie. People are (currently) happy to pay for subs to Microsoft and EA because they're getting access to so many titles. Bungie doesn't have that ability right now.

If anything, Destiny would probably be better off as a F2P game. That will help bring people back in.

Could also be that Destiny's mojo has been usurped by battle royale games and there's just no right path here for Bungie.

There's no company besides TTWO that fits the bill for this as acquirer. Bethesda, maaaybe, but theyre lacking the massive MP infrastructure it clear after '76. SNE, MSFT? No, that would limit audience too much. So

And frankly, most publishers would rather have a full control of an IP. Only ATVI is desperate enough for diversification, and obviously they're not going back there.

So, I think they're staying solo.

And frankly, I'm of the opinion that Bungie is mostly a victim of self inflicted wounds, and ATVI had little to do with the caveats of Destiny. They're an extremely proud and vain company, that has trouble admitting mistakes, or noticing when the audience has moved on from an idea.

garion333 wrote:

Could also be that Destiny's mojo has been usurped by battle royale games and there's just no right path here for Bungie.

I don't think that's true. Battle royale games are pure PvP affairs, while the majority of Destiny fans are most interested in the PvE and cooperative elements. They do not fill the same voids.

Atomicvideohead wrote:

And frankly, I'm of the opinion that Bungie is mostly a victim of self inflicted wounds, and ATVI had little to do with the caveats of Destiny. They're an extremely proud and vain company, that has trouble admitting mistakes, or noticing when the audience has moved on from an idea.

I think that is true, though they appear to be improving on this lately.

Dyni wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Could also be that Destiny's mojo has been usurped by battle royale games and there's just no right path here for Bungie.

I don't think that's true. Battle royale games are pure PvP affairs, while the majority of Destiny fans are most interested in the PvE and cooperative elements. They do not fill the same voids.

Someone should tell Bungie that. I'm not sure they know.

garion333 wrote:

If anything, Destiny would probably be better off as a F2P game. That will help bring people back in.

They could chase Warframe, but Bungie has way more mouths to feed than Digital Extremes.

That would require content creation at a faster rate, something their engine is supposedly pretty bad at.

And they'd have to overhaul how real money interacts with their virtual doodads to both fair to the players and financially viable for them. I don't think they can copy Warframe completely there, due to the differences in how players acquire weapons.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Dyni wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Could also be that Destiny's mojo has been usurped by battle royale games and there's just no right path here for Bungie.

I don't think that's true. Battle royale games are pure PvP affairs, while the majority of Destiny fans are most interested in the PvE and cooperative elements. They do not fill the same voids.

Someone should tell Bungie that. I'm not sure they know.

How do you mean?

Most of the stories I see about Destiny are about the developers screwing up people's favorite PvE strategies while trying to balance PvP. If most of their fans are interested in PvE, perhaps Bungie should stop mucking up that part of the game for the sake of a PvP-focused minority. (Or, better yet, just divorce PvE and PvP gear like every other sensible MMO on the market.)

Or why not both? Couldn't they do a primarily PvE game and have some walled-off PvP areas such as an arena with Death-Match, CTF, even BR? Throw a bone to the old Halo players.

As for subbing monthly to an MMO, why was $15/month always the ONLY price point anyone ever tried? That price always seemed just too high to me. Why has no one tried lower monthly subs? It's either $15 or free.

There is a wide range of places Bungie could go. I think their only mistake and perhaps one of their ongoing flaws is trying to do all of them at once.
Story, Raid, Loot, PvP, Coop, RPG, MMO, Vehicles...
You can't argue that at one time they have tried to do all of them. Most of the time they have tried to do most of them. And they should probably just stick to half of them.

PaladinTom wrote:

Or why not both? Couldn't they do a primarily PvE game and have some walled-off PvP areas such as an arena with Death-Match, CTF, even BR? Throw a bone to the old Halo players.

Having both gameplay modes is fine. The trouble comes from having gear that's usable in both places. PvP and PvE have really different design and balance goals, and trying to get it right for both is a horrible game of whack-a-mole.

If there were distinct gear and upgrades for PvP and PvE each, I doubt many would object. If I recall correctly, that's how The Division 2 is handling their balance issues, and most other MMOs I've played have had distinct sets of PvP and PvE gear.

If Bungie was going to pair with another publisher, Paradox would be the one I'd choose.

Dyni wrote:
garion333 wrote:

Could also be that Destiny's mojo has been usurped by battle royale games and there's just no right path here for Bungie.

I don't think that's true. Battle royale games are pure PvP affairs, while the majority of Destiny fans are most interested in the PvE and cooperative elements. They do not fill the same voids.

Sure, though I'm talking about the gaming zeitgeist more than actual people. Destiny was at the top of its game before other mp games pulled them away. People went to PUBG to Fortnite. Obviously, it didn't help that D2 has had a ton of negative press, some of which is the fault of Bungie.

Anyway, he longterm pull isn't there for Destiny without that zeitgeist. It's something Bungie needs to figure out before they start charging for a monthly sub or whatever.

ClockworkHouse wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:

Or why not both? Couldn't they do a primarily PvE game and have some walled-off PvP areas such as an arena with Death-Match, CTF, even BR? Throw a bone to the old Halo players.

Having both gameplay modes is fine. The trouble comes from having gear that's usable in both places. PvP and PvE have really different design and balance goals, and trying to get it right for both is a horrible game of whack-a-mole.

If there were distinct gear and upgrades for PvP and PvE each, I doubt many would object. If I recall correctly, that's how The Division 2 is handling their balance issues, and most other MMOs I've played have had distinct sets of PvP and PvE gear.

Got it. That's the same complaint I see about Fallout 76. They "fix" things to balance PvP (that no one is playing according to Reddit) and break things for PvE.

ClockworkHouse wrote:

Most of the stories I see about Destiny are about the developers screwing up people's favorite PvE strategies while trying to balance PvP. If most of their fans are interested in PvE, perhaps Bungie should stop mucking up that part of the game for the sake of a PvP-focused minority. (Or, better yet, just divorce PvE and PvP gear like every other sensible MMO on the market.)

I think the Destiny community at large has been trying to tell Bungie this since D1. Unfortunately,

Atomicvideohead wrote:

They're an extremely proud and vain company, that has trouble admitting mistakes, or noticing when the audience has moved on from an idea.

It extends far beyond just PvE strategies. One of the massive changes they made in vanilla D2 was to redesign the weapon load out system in the name of PvP balance. They went from primary weapon (hand cannon, scout rifle, pulse rifle, auto rifle), special weapon (shotgun, fusion rifle, sniper rifle), heavy weapon (machine guns, rocket launcher, energy sword) in Destiny 1 to two primaries and a heavy in Destiny 2, where all special weapons moved to the heavy slot. This was hugely detrimental to encounter diversity in PvE. Dual primaries were largely redundant in most encounters. All burst damage was relegated to the heavy slot. Nobody even bothered to use any of the special weapons anymore because surprise, there's no good reason to use a shotgun in place of a rocket launcher.

Oh and also, PvP was universally panned compared to the first game for being boring and slow, so their mutual balancing failed on both fronts. Thankfully, they have since reverted those changes and made improvements on top of it, but it's too little too late for many players.

Dyni wrote:

Thankfully, they have since reverted those changes and made improvements on top of it, but it's too little too late for many players.

By far the most common complaint I've heard from people in the real world about Destiny is, "They keep changing it". Followed very closely by, "I ran out of stuff to do". I don't know how representative those attitudes are of the fanbase as a whole, but I know that with my friends and coworkers that Bungie has shot themselves in the foot by never really settling on what Destiny is and should be. It's like they're endlessly iterating to try to please an ideal audience; meanwhile, people run out of stuff to do and move on.

IMAGE(http://www.entertainmentbuddha.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Screen-Shot-2018-02-10-at-10.50.24-AM.jpg)

ClockworkHouse wrote:

I don't know how representative those attitudes are of the fanbase as a whole, but I know that with my friends and coworkers that Bungie has shot themselves in the foot by never really settling on what Destiny is and should be. It's like they're endlessly iterating to try to please an ideal audience; meanwhile, people run out of stuff to do and move on.

That's exactly what they've done. They keep trying to make a game for everyone and have ended up with a game for no one in particular. They kept vacillating between trying to hook a dedicated fanbase, simplifying things for a broader audience, and then back again. With each shift, they alienated the other side of the coin until eventually all bridges were burned.

I compared it to Monster Hunter World in a different thread. Both tried to expand from a dedicated niche audience to a broader one, but unlike Bungie, the developers of Monster Hunter understood why people love that series. They removed unnecessary tedium and built ramps to make complicated systems more approachable. Bungie removed unnecessary tedium and removed or replaced the complicated systems that kept their fans playing for 3 years. They polished a crude sculpture into a smooth sphere.

To bring it back to the original post, I'm not really sure where Bungie goes from here. I don't think this kind of game can get away with a subscription price on its own, and I don't see them latching onto yet another publisher. My hope is that they can settle on what exactly they want Destiny to be and figure out a way to monetize it in a palatable way, but I'm still not sure what that looks like.

More than anything, I hope that Destiny can become a world instead of a series of games. If Destiny today was a combination of everything from D1 and D2, that would make it so much easier to recommend. The prospect of starting over from scratch again with a D3 does not sound appealing, or at least it greatly limits my desire to invest much time.

The linking of PvE and PvP does at its face seems like an interesting idea. However, it has a huge opportunity cost when it comes to design. So much design that could be novel or interesting for one mode, may break the other. As such, iteration is best restrained and slow to mitigated the amount of balancing disasters. It also encourages shallow mechanics with fewer variables to balance. I think that bares out when you look how they've redesigned and updated.

That huge cost is a huge opportunity to competitors who can see the potential around designing for one mode instead of two. I think Bungie may be too late to the party when it comes to switching modes, as the competition may have already taken firm root, making that road difficult to hoe. Difficult but not impossible. They could also try to be the middle ground, but I imagine that being a route of diminishing returns as people become more niche in their tastes as video game genres become more robust. Kind of like the mass market sitcom has declined from American television, and shows become more focused in either subject matter or structure to appeal to a certain audience.

I think I'm a similar wave length as Dyni. A lot of my IRL friends are into destiny, and refuse other games. I've moved on. Trying to convince them to try something new, is like trying to get a child to stop eating mac and cheese and try shrimp or a pineapple something else "exotic."

Atomicvideohead wrote:

Trying to convince them to try somehting new, is like trying to get a child to stop eating mac and cheese and try shrimp or a pineapple something else "exotic."

This is not at all insulting to people who actually enjoy Destiny, nope.

Mav, I like destiny. And Mac and Cheese. But I also eat other things. That's not meant as any sort of insult.

Mac and cheese wasn't the insulting part though.

Come on, Mav. You don't know what specific situation with my friends is. Don't read into it like that. And this is creating a huge tangent that's really not core to the OP.

Fair enough, I don't know anything about your friends.

What I'm curious about is the cash pile Bungie is sitting on. They must have paid Activision off to get out of the deal 2 years early. They've had cash inflows from ...was it Net ease?...but how much have they made and retained? How much did Activision have penciled in as a # of Destiny 3's release? Bungie must have had to pay a "good will" surplus of that number. Anything below would likely be a non-starter of deal. Theyve got a likely huge outflow, and a very large bureaucratic development process to fuel. How long can they maintain independently, considering the dearth of suitors?

I think Destiny 2 offers a lot of enjoyment that goes beyond whether PvP and PvE is balanced. And focusing on that kind of analysis misses a bigger picture, one that is probably much more subjective and difficult to come to a conclusion on.

They've put a lot of work on both the PvP and PvE sides, both in terms of places and activities as well as "loot". I'm not convinced they have somehow let down their audience, I think their critics are louder.

What do you think their long term plan is ? And what do you think they can do? And what would you like to see them do?

Atomicvideohead wrote:

They must have paid Activision off to get out of the deal 2 years early.

I think the opposite happened. Destiny 2 really underperformed and Activision wanted out from under the contract and the attendant cost of publishing duties.