Destiny, new game from Bungie

[SchizophrenicMC]

Necro for new information about the game's strange lack of story, and events that took place just prior to launch:

Court documents released, pertaining to Martin O'Donnel's lawsuit against Bungie, confirm Destiny's story was gutted and reworked for sequel purposes toward the end of development

I mean, I don't think anyone believed otherwise at this point, but the confirmation still sours me on Actibungie.

[anime52k8]

Meh, still love the game, still don't particularly care. I haven't played in a while because I've completed literally everything there is to do in the game right now, (and I've been painfully addicted to smite lately) but I'm still looking forward to having new crap to wreck in Taken King.

:edit:

BTW, my Guardians are pretty baller, just saying:

https://www.bungie.net/en/Legend/1/4611686018430469154/2305843009215701091

Edited September 6, 2015 by anime52k8

[SchizophrenicMC]

I loved the gameplay for the first few hours, but then the lack of a story and the fact that the gameplay just repeated over and over with no variations killed it for me. I also think what they're charging for expansions is a bit ridiculous considering they're pretty much just chunks of the original game, if the documents released are to be believed.

I'm only upset about this because Destiny had the potential to be game of the decade, but Activision got even a little more heavy-handed with it than I'd initially feared.

[JB0]

I loved the gameplay for the first few hours, but then the lack of a story and the fact that the gameplay just repeated over and over with no variations killed it for me. I also think what they're charging for expansions is a bit ridiculous considering they're pretty much just chunks of the original game, if the documents released are to be believed.

I'm only upset about this because Destiny had the potential to be game of the decade, but Activision got even a little more heavy-handed with it than I'd initially feared.

Pretty much, yeah.

The most annoying thing of the story is there's little STUBS of story. They act like they're important, kick you out of the gameplay to watch cutscenes, but then it all goes nowhere.

[Chewie]

Destiny has the potential to be a truly amazing game. It's not necessarily a bad game as it is, however the problem is that the things it has don't make up for the things it lacks. There's no variety. There's no story; the grimoires are lazy. They are far too involved with the PVP side of things and blanket fixes/nerfs because of it. They've proven with Iron Banner it doesn't have to be blanketed. They have a switch that toggles power and armor. Stop breaking things in PVE. It's missing no brainer features that have to be gotten from a third party websites(LFG) or an app. Boring characters with dialogue that was pieced together from what remained of the gutting. All intricacies handled on a website. Server stability issues that have graduated into resetting modems/routers/Xbox connectivity.

The Taken King is promising a lot of what should have been available at launch and people are pissed and rightly so. Just reading about this expansion makes the game feel more complete. More of what it should have been and what people were expecting at launch.

Lastly, they've had to back pedal far too many times whenever Deej or Smith opened their prick mouths. Those aren't the people you want representing your company. I don't care about Activision having their nasty, greedy little hands in it. It's part of the territory. These guys are simply douchebags.

I'll continue to play because I mostly have fun and I can pick it up and put it down, but I want more from it and I hope TTK delivers.

[JB0]

Speaking of Taken King:

I want the fancy collector's edition box. It looks awesome. But it's only available on PS4 and X1.

I don't own a PS4 or X1. I would never play Destiny on one anyways, because I'm not paying someone a ransom just to turn on my ethernet port.

This is an annoyance, but I get it. Whatever. PS3 4 LYFE

Now then, on to my actual point...

For SOME REASON, the "digital collector's edition" IS available for all platforms. For the same price as the fancy box full of things that cost actual money to manufacture, you get nothing but the game and a few gimmicky items.

How does that make sense? It's demonstrably a lesser product, surely it should cost less.

(I refrain from commenting on the name "digital collector's edition")

[SchizophrenicMC]

Well, I mean, for starters your PS3 support is going to wane, and there's no chance Destiny 2 is going to be available for PS3, so you will eventually have to bow if you want to find out firsthand the next meager morsel of story.

Still I just can't see paying for Taken King and supporting this assery. Especially now that you can buy Taken King, the base game, and the first 2 DLC for the original price of the game, which is the biggest screw-you I can think to give the early adopters. Just everything about this whole debacle pisses me off. This really could have been a great game. It was made by a company legendary for great things in all areas, and for keeping control of its games even under the publishing of hands-on giants like Microsoft. But somebody sold out. And then everything got mis-handled.

Activision being Activision I guess. frakk Deej though. That guy is not only an a-hole; he's also an idiot with no clue how to handle public relations. I swear two thirds of the stuff he's said has caused more community anger.

[JB0]

Well, I mean, for starters your PS3 support is going to wane, and there's no chance Destiny 2 is going to be available for PS3, so you will eventually have to bow if you want to find out firsthand the next meager morsel of story.

Oh, I know. Fortunately, Destiny is enough of a fiasco that this will not be as hard a loss as it might've.

But I refuse to pay someone a monthly fee to LITERALLY do nothing.

I do not lease, rent, or borrow my games, I OWN them and they are not a monthly service, the new cable bill.

[Duke Togo]

Oh, I know. Fortunately, Destiny is enough of a fiasco that this will not be as hard a loss as it might've.

But I refuse to pay someone a monthly fee to LITERALLY do nothing.

I do not lease, rent, or borrow my games, I OWN them and they are not a monthly service, the new cable bill.

If you aren't playing online multilayer games you don't need PS Plus. I don't get the anger.

[Phobos]

I'm glad I decided to pass on this train wreck. It seemed so promising leading up to launch day, too.

[Duke Togo]

I'm glad I decided to pass on this train wreck. It seemed so promising leading up to launch day, too.

Given how well it's doing and the positive press the Taken King is getting, I don't think I'd call Destiny a train wreck. It's clearly quite successful. But it's a departure from what it looked to be before release. Me, I haven't played since the spring and have no plans to play again.

Edited September 7, 2015 by Duke Togo

[SchizophrenicMC]

Oh, I know. Fortunately, Destiny is enough of a fiasco that this will not be as hard a loss as it might've.

But I refuse to pay someone a monthly fee to LITERALLY do nothing.

I do not lease, rent, or borrow my games, I OWN them and they are not a monthly service, the new cable bill.

Like Duke said, PS Plus and Xbox Live Gold are only necessary for playing their respective titles in online multiplayer, and the fee is sensible. Servers are expensive, and bandwidth is just as bad. Online gaming taxes both of them. I'd know: I build and maintain servers and their infrastructure for a living. It's actually a bit surprising they're able to keep it profitable, considering how much server capacity they use on free stuff like firmware updates, and the fact that they'll sell a year of unlimited computing and bandwidth for your games for $60. If you wanted that from the company I work for, you'd pay hundreds on a cloud instance to do the same thing.

[JB0]

If you aren't playing online multilayer games you don't need PS Plus. I don't get the anger.

I don't know, maybe because it's a blatantly obvious screwjob, a shameless cash grab, and symptomatic of an ever-more-prevalent attitude that it isn't FAIR that profits stop after people buy the game/system and there needs to be a mechanism to ensure a continued flow of money forever no matter how rapacious and shameful it is.

I'm vaguely surprised they don't charge you a quarter every time you turn the system on, on top of the monthly service fee for a service they don't provide.

Like Duke said, PS Plus and Xbox Live Gold are only necessary for playing their respective titles in online multiplayer, and the fee is sensible. Servers are expensive, and bandwidth is just as bad. Online gaming taxes both of them. I'd know: I build and maintain servers and their infrastructure for a living. It's actually a bit surprising they're able to keep it profitable, considering how much server capacity they use on free stuff like firmware updates, and the fact that they'll sell a year of unlimited computing and bandwidth for your games for $60. If you wanted that from the company I work for, you'd pay hundreds on a cloud instance to do the same thing.

The fundamental problem with your defense of the circumstance is... Microsoft and Sony aren't PROVIDING those servers.

I would understand if they were, and in fact I defended XBox Live on the XBox because that was exactly what Microsoft was doing.

But now both MS and Sony charge you to enable access to other people's service, not to provide a service themselves.

[Duke Togo]

I don't know, maybe because it's a blatantly obvious screwjob, a shameless cash grab, and symptomatic of an ever-more-prevalent attitude that it isn't FAIR that profits stop after people buy the game/system and there needs to be a mechanism to ensure a continued flow of money forever no matter how rapacious and shameful it is.

I'm vaguely surprised they don't charge you a quarter every time you turn the system on, on top of the monthly service fee for a service they don't provide.

The fundamental problem with your defense of the circumstance is... Microsoft and Sony aren't PROVIDING those servers.

I would understand if they were, and in fact I defended XBox Live on the XBox because that was exactly what Microsoft was doing.

But now both MS and Sony charge you to enable access to other people's service, not to provide a service themselves.

That's not correct, at all. I'm not sure where you're getting you info from, but it's wrong.

[SchizophrenicMC]

I don't know, maybe because it's a blatantly obvious screwjob, a shameless cash grab, and symptomatic of an ever-more-prevalent attitude that it isn't FAIR that profits stop after people buy the game/system and there needs to be a mechanism to ensure a continued flow of money forever no matter how rapacious and shameful it is.

I'm vaguely surprised they don't charge you a quarter every time you turn the system on, on top of the monthly service fee for a service they don't provide.

The fundamental problem with your defense of the circumstance is... Microsoft and Sony aren't PROVIDING those servers.

I would understand if they were, and in fact I defended XBox Live on the XBox because that was exactly what Microsoft was doing.

But now both MS and Sony charge you to enable access to other people's service, not to provide a service themselves.

First thing: consoles aren't profitable on their own. Even at bulk discount prices, the stock hardware alone is worth more than the console, and even then the manufacturers are using custom versions of the hardware that fit their custom form factors, so the prices are way higher. Figure $600-800 a unit COST for those components. Every time Sony or MS sell a console, they're losing a LOT of money. They can't even pay for the hardware on a console sale, let alone the countless hours of engineering and development that went into it, let alone the continued support of the platform.

In actual fact, they make all their money from the licensing fees on the games they sell. Overhead on a copy of a game is next to nothing at scale, and development budgets get paid off quickly at scale. Beyond that, a large portion of every game's sale is taken as a licensing fee, which pays for the console development and production, and is exchanged for a signature that makes the console treat the copy of the game like a legit copy. Every disc has a unique signature that's traded for a unique license, and the fee is paid for it. Do this hundreds of millions of times and it starts to pay off.

And they have to do it that way because, they do provide the servers. All of the thousands upon thousands of servers hosting online games and all the other junk they put up (much of which is free) are either owned or leased the console manufacturer (at, believe me, extraordinarily high prices). If you play 4 hours of a video game every day during a given month, the bandwidth you've used alone will eat up your monthly subscription fee, based on the prices of bandwidth we sell, and the annual subscription fee for both PS+ and XBL Gold. To say nothing of the intensive and expensive processing the servers were doing to your game session that forced other players' sessions onto other expensive servers. Just to put a picture on how much money is involved here, a large customer had a large order recently, and our procurement department inadvertently ordered 768 of the wrong model processor to fill the order. It cost the company $1.7 million, and the person responsible was told not to do it again, but wasn't otherwise punished because out of our bottom line, it's a scratch in the paint. That will buff. And 768 CPUs is a fraction of a server room's capacity, and a tiny, tiny fraction of PSN and XBL's overall capacity. We're talking hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in raw infrastructure just to let you get haxx0r'd by 12 year olds in Call of Dinklage.

The bandwidth costs, for that matter, are immense. So is the cost of power, not only for the servers, but for the massive amount of air conditioning needed to keep them from melting. And the buildings to house them and the fire suppression systems and the maintenance. This is mindbogglingly expensive. And you get it all for $5 a month. Honestly, I can't imagine their data services are profitable.

And even then, PS4 doesn't charge for games that aren't hosted by PS+ servers. If you want to play Elder Scrolls: Online, you pay a subscription to the company running those servers, but PS+ is not required. XBL still is, I believe, but XBL is frankly a better service that has obviously cost Microsoft a much prettier penny.

tl;dr: stop whining, it costs Microsoft and Sony more per hour to run their games services than Macross World has cost cumulatively since day one, and you haven't even paid toward that.

[anime52k8]

In other news, Destiny 2.0 is out in the wild. Waiting on the 17GB download to finish right now.

[Hikuro]

Finished the download of the new 17 gig patch and meh I'm not seeing much for changes but that's just me. Maybe I'm missing something and don't see it cause I hadn't played this game.....gosh since last October?

I did play though tonight and just kinda thinking how fun it can be to level grind in this game if you know what you're doing. Didn't take me long to pick up where I left off that's a good thing.

[Big s]

Any one else here still playing.

[JB0]

Any one else here still playing.

Intermittently. Game is fun as hell when it isn't just boringly grindy.

It'd actually been idle for quite some time when Bungie announced that they finally gave in to public demand and implemented Sparrow racing.

It may go idle again soon now that Sparrow racing is gone again.

[anime52k8]

I still pop once or twice a week to raid just because there's still a couple pieces of max level loot I don't have. I've done literally everything there is to do in the game. I still like the game, but I'm trying to move on to other games that I haven't played for thousands of hours yet.

[Big s]

Well if anyone is on later on ps4 I wanna get the hard mode oryx challenge out of the way, I think that's this week.

On ps4 I go by xacto35.

[Hikuro]

so I was hearing there's some big update going on and lately I've been kind of filling an itch to play after I made my own Ghost companion over the weekend.

[JB0]

That's adorable!

I still fire Destiny up every now and again to shoot some stuff, but much of the charm is definitely gone.

BRING BACK SPARROW RACING!

[anime52k8]

I play a lot still, I've got 3 max level characters right now.

[Big s]

I just got sucked back into it about 2 weeks ago and I'm loving the new reward system. Now it's like every time I get a legendary or exotic it's better than what I had before. Even court of oryx is paying out. I got a 335 artifact from it.

[Hikuro]

I DID play a little bit tonight as I was waiting for super glue to cure on my Ghost project. Course it was taking forever to get my Vanguard quests done cause a group of guys were camping with me and taking a number of my hard earned kills until I left the area.

Well in either case, here's my custom made ghost. Recently I bought a 3D Printer since a lot of my friends are doing it I figured time to jump off the cliff.

Mostly just used White, Black, Red and Clear Blue, tiny magnets and a large LED. When I need to turn it on or off I just tear the wings off and twist the ghost's body into position, then slap t he wings back on which are just magnetically sealed onto the ghost's body. It only takes me about 30 seconds to get the job done.

I've had a few people at work want me to build them one as well since they play.

Kinda fun! it's like having an exotic item get it?

[anime52k8]

That's exceedingly awesome. want.

[Big s]

Now you gotta figure out how to do the new taken ghost from the poe challenge.

[Kanedas Bike]

Jumped back onto Destiny around 2 weeks ago too, this after nearly a year off.

I LOVE the new reward system, it's still a grind, but now at least there's more of a carrot to entice me to take part.

-b.