This is some pretty trash reporting, which is odd considering that Eurogamer usually isn't this bad. But their source for this is a Twitter thread from Luckyy10P? The dude is widely known as the biggest clown in the Destiny community, and every piece of "news" he covers is greatly exaggerated drama that only like three players ever complained about, but he presents as some massive community-wide issue.
Nobody's buying and then cancelling their $100 preorders just to keep one of the most mid guns that Bungie has ever released. Tessellation is not that good of a gun. Maybe it will be good when the catalyst is released in The Final Shape (though you won't be able to even get the catalyst without owning the expansion), but right now pretty much every trusted Destiny community member is confirming that the gun serves little to no real purpose in the current sandbox.
If Eurogamer wants to cover nonsense from Luckyy, they should be inquiring about his child support payments.
Bungie 100% can remove the gun from people's inventories, but they won't. They're usually pretty hands-off on stuff like this, because your inventory is accessible cross-platform, but your purchased expansions are not. So they'll leave the gun in your inventory because they know that the possibility exists that some people may change their minds on their original purchase and re-buy the expansion for a different platform.
As part of its recently publicised cutbacks, BioWare has “let go of” Lukas Kristjanson, the lead writer behind Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, and the writer of the first three Dragon Age games, Mary Kirby.
I wouldn’t mind it, typically that level of service comes with redundancy pay. Depends where he was based, if he was working in the US then he’d probably be left high and dry, because US employment is shit.
Could’ve been a mutual decision. They may have taken the hot because they were already thinking of leaving at some point anyway. That sort of thing happens sometimes.
Lol I don’t even have to imagine that. It’s funny you point out 23 years because that’s exactly how long I worked at my previous job before moving on in 2022.
A lot of things, but most of them stem from the expansion being very clearly rushed to release. The narrative was also incomplete, and Bungie had to add a bunch of supplemental lore to the seasonal missions instead of putting them in the main campaign where it belongs.
Traditionally, Bungie keeps the seasonal storyline separated from the campaign story, because they're technically separate purchases the player has to make, so it makes sense to keep those stories apart from each other, so that a player who only buys the expansions but not the season passes won't be missing out on any narrative threads that they haven't already invested time and money into.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the case with Lightfall. The campaign didn't finish telling the story, and spent about half of the campaign time sending the player on a search for a MacGuffin that the game never properly explains, and the other half was spent awkwardly learning how to use the new Strand subclass. Except all the campaign missions where you get to experiment with Strand gave you a super-boosted version of the subclass which isn't available in normal play, so players were disappointed with how Strand performed in the endgame when it felt so overpowered during the campaign. A lot of the unanswered questions from the Lightfall campaign got explained in seasonal cutscenes, instead.
Now, granted, the seasonal and campaign stories are part of the same over-arching plot, so it's expected for there to be some overlap. But it's not supposed to go to the point where you literally can't understand the point of what you did during the campaign until 3 months after the campaign was released, and only if you also bought the season pass. They introduced "The Veil" in the Lightfall campaign, and it was never made clear to the player what it actually was or what it meant as far as the story goes, until some Season of the Deep cutscenes came out.
There's also the issue of Strand being completely reworked from whatever "poison" subclass it was originally going to be, and there's a lot of evidence from the Witch Queen campaign that suggests that the subclass was originally going to be poison (some unredacted text in the game originally referred to poisonous status effects for Strand that are not in the final version). Strand was originally going to be included in Witch Queen, but was cut and pushed back to Lightfall, and in its place in Witch Queen was a really half-baked mechanic called "Deepsight", which reveals hidden platforms for the player to use to progress through the stages (in places where it's clear that the player was originally expected to use the Strand grapple mechanic to progress).
To Bungie's credit, they've made some improvements to Lightfall since release, and it is in a much better state than it was when it launched. But the narrative issues are still there.
It's that sort of feeling that the game is this weird, organic beast that feeds on the "subscriber base" that caused me to leave in the first place.
Sad it worked out that way with Lightfall's release, but if Destiny wants to be such a good game that the ideal player buys everything, then it has to be that damn good to do so. And it can be, but not always.
Yeah, I'm remaining cautiously optimistic about The Final Shape. I'm still going to end up buying it, because despite a lot of the game's flaws and the poor release of Lightfall, the storytelling is still fantastic 99/100 times, and I really want to see how the story ends.
But post-Final Shape is going to be a really hard sell, even for players who are sucked into the game like myself. They've made some decent progress at fixing some of Lightfall's downfalls so far, so it's evident that Bungie does genuinely care about the game still. But they've definitely damaged our trust, and are still gonna need to work really hard to earn that back.
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was? What was it?
And yeah I 100% percent wish we had gotten poison instead of janky parkour. (I will admit that baiting the Sorrow Bearer into lunging off the map with Strand jumps was fun though.)
Wait, they finally got around to explaining what the veil was?
Well... sort of. There's still a lot of unanswered questions about it, but basically it's another cosmic entity that's somehow linked to the Traveler. We end up finding it on Neptune at the end of the Lightfall campaign, and it basically looks like a giant fungal growth. Aesthetically, there's some similarities to the Egregore that took over the Glykon and Leviathan, but I'm not too sure that they're really the same thing.
They released this cutscene which goes into a bit of the Witness's origins, and it briefly talks about the Veil.
That’s the worst part to be to be frank. Incomplete story and lore with the answer of….another $12 every 3 months. ….or pay 50 more dollars to get the story that you already paid…$50 for.
Fuck. That. Also Joe Blackburn had a hard on for player engagement so almost everything got nerfed when lightfall launched… so you have to play longer and shoot things longer.
Shortly before lightfall came out, I dropped the game and haven’t been back.
The writing was bad. I played through the campaign four times (three normal, one ... whatever the hell hard mode was called) and I still have no idea what "the Veil" even is, why we cared about it, why we did literally anything that we did, etc.
The new Darkness element was fun but the way it was introduced made it REALLY OBVIOUS it was supposed to be in Witch Queen and just got delayed.
Game balance went out the window, to the point where people were getting one-shot mapped by Cabal rocket launchers in patrol zones.
They introduced a new raid that, while thematically fun and visually gorgeous, was un-fun to play.
Eh... the more I Think about it the more everything Chozo said covers it more eloquently.
Edit: I don't remember if it was with Lightfall or Witch Queen but they managed to make Gambit worse. Gambit was already neglected and damn near unplayable. They made it worse.
I quit playing when they started sunsetting planets,
I vowed never to spend another dime on Bungie products until they give me back the $60 campaign I paid for.
I don’t know how this game is still going after they consistently make unpopular decisions that turn people away. Maybe being dumbstruck by that is why Sony bought them.
Edit: Like I straight-up paid them full game price only to be treated like an F2P player because they’re apparently incapable of doing what 343 did with all of their older games in the MCC and allowing players to install specific parts of content. I’m still annoyed that I’m being punished for their incompetence.
Same here, I literally paid for Red War. That was a full campaign, and I want to be able to play it along with every location that was included. DCV was a big fat giant middle finger stuck right in my face, and I don’t care how cheap future expansions or season passes get. I want everything I paid money for back, in addition to access to all the new shit.
Until they do that, not another cent. I won’t even play the game until that stuff is back, even if new content is free.
Probably just less experienced writers that can be paid less and pushed around more. Thus leading to the continual quality reduction of all modern media.
Seems sadly on point. Their M.O. since at least as far back as Westwood (RIP Command & Conquer) has been to acquire a name brand, sap it for short term nostalgic profit, then dismantle usable assets. I love Dragon Age: Origins… and to some extent Inquisition, but damn if she ain’t what she used to be.
Even playing through Mass Effect 1 > 2 > 3 back to back has been a challenge for me. The games just get simpler as you go along and it is so frustrating.
And I'm not talking about just the talent systems and looting etc, the fucking dialog gets to a point where sometimes 2-3 of the options will give the same result, and ugh. Ruins so much of it for me.
You make a good point. Is there a life-tree of devs that shows their companies and games? It’d love to see those art directors names we know across the different devs and publishers they worked for but also the lesser known names that really make great games what they are.
That's the story of almost all EA studios. Respawn afaik has kept their senior staff but also have expanded too much for me to believe there's a "Respawn identity" anymore.
What's funny that happened with Bioware and Criterion, too.
Respawn has only made like, five games? Two of which are licensed IP and not any good. They have one great game in TF2. There was never a “respawn identity”. Hell the company was started by old Infinity Ward people.
At least with the ship of theseus it’s an inanimate object. You could replace any board or sail and still consider it the ship in question. Is it still in fact the ship of theseus? That’s debatable but you could say that it still represents the ship.
In this case BioWare is made up of thinking human beings all that are motivated by different factors. You can’t replace one person with another and expect the same of them even if you got someone who followed the initial person’s logic as closely as possible, they’d still end up with different results to the first.
That is if EA even cares enough to replace the previous developers with like minded individuals which I highly doubt. BioWare of old, make great games while telling the best stories possible. After modern day EA’s influence? Make as much money as you can while puppeteering as the BioWare of old.
You can’t replace one person with another and expect the same of them even if you got someone who followed the initial person’s logic as closely as possible, they’d still end up with different results to the first.
but this is… how businesses work. No business is the same people ALL the time. i don 't know why people expect any different here. and the quality of writing has suffered as of late, so why not get new blood in? i really don’t understand what the issue is here.
What if you replace each piece of the original ship with an identical piece? What if you use all of the removed pieces to build an identical ship? Which one is then the “real” ship?
What if you had a time machine and sent a ship made out of original parts back in time then swapped half of the parts between the two ships?
Will the older pieces immediately rot to dust because the older ship already had those parts swapped out in its past, so the older pieces are actually trapped in a time loop, but since they keep getting older they just disappear, but it’s ok because you have the new pieces from the past so you’re left with a ship with new pieces and slightly older pieces?
… If you have 33% of the original ship left. What makes you think there are 3 original ships. It’s like you’re trying to confuse yourself. If you took 33% of the original ship to make a new one, you did just that. Being vague isn’t profound
What’s vague? You can divide the ship into 3 and replace the missing pieces for each third. You now have 3 ships with 33% of the original, all of which fit your criteria
The original ship is where the pieces are coming from, the new ship are made from those pieces. This is sooooo dumb to be arguing. Just be more specific and no issues.
The ending to 3 was a bit of a cop out and generally out of line with the narrative of the game up to that point. Everything proceeding that was fantastic though. Still an 8/10 in my book
They canned the writers from 1 and 2 and promoted this goober who said that “Twilight was good writing” to finish the 3rd game.
Which is why we go from having Shepard being such a badass the Reapers tried to make a reaper version of humans, to all of a sudden being all PTSD about shit.
Lead writer left after 2 and his replacement was kind of known for not getting along well with his predecessor. So its still not clear if he intentionally made changes to the plan that had been put in place or if he just never actually read the design doc that had been left for consistency.
Honestly only room for improvement here. The OG writer for ME wrote ME1 & 2 with ME3 being a guy who supposedly squabbled with him over details and abruptly changed course and retcons, and some even trying to put some of the worst ideas of Andromeda as stuff he passed on for them to use (note: this last one is mostly speculation without real proof to best of my knowledge)
Recent, last 10 years or so, Bioware games have not had the quality of writing they were known for in the 90s and 00s, with some charitable takes on TORs overall writing as being very shotgun approach and seeing what sticks and the fans react well to rather than a very clear end point in mind from the start.
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