1: Rushed DLC and Expansions
Throughout its history, Destiny’s add-on content has been hit or miss. It’s been regular and consistent, so you have to credit Activision for having a hand in that at least, but it hasn’t always been high quality.
The low point was certainly Curse of Osiris which not only dashed my dreams of a really cool Mercury/Ancient Egypt style raid but also did nothing to fix so many of the problems that were plaguing Destiny 2 at the time.
That’s because Curse of Osiris was essentially on rails to deliver in December whether the game was flailing or thriving. Bungie and Activision had a release plan that they were sticking to come hell or high-water.
Without anyone to please other than themselves and their fans, Bungie has the final call on where resources are split and when add-ons get released.
If they need to shift resources away from Destiny 3 temporarily to help patch something up in Destiny 2, just as a hypothetical example, there’s no one to pressure or even force them to not do that; even if it means delaying something else.
Even with the pressure to stick to a rigid release schedule, Bungie has proven itself capable of turning water into wine which was evidenced most recently in the excellent Forsaken expansion. Now let’s see what they can do now that they are unfettered.
2: Catering to Non-Fans
Right off the bat, I want to make sure that it’s clear that I’m not talking about casual fans. There’s a difference between casual fans and non-fans.
I have lots of friends that play Destiny 2 casually. They just do their weekly engrams, play a few strikes and Crucible matches for fun and that’s it.
They don’t join me in completing all the weekly Black Armory forge weapons, and they have never completed a raid. That’s perfectly fine. There should be plenty of stuff for non-hardcore fans to enjoy. It doesn’t need to all be crazy grinding and puzzle solving.
The distinction I’m trying to make, then, is that I don’t want to see Destiny compromise its soul in any way in an attempt to appeal to people that are never going to enjoy the game.
The launch state of Destiny 2 after the initial shine wore off almost sunk the game entirely. There was barely anything to grind for, exotic and legendary equipment was practically handed out, and exotic equipment felt neutered of its personality.
I can’t lay all the blame on Activision for those mistakes, but I do trust Bungie to learn from the experience especially since we’ve already seen them start to redeem themselves in year two of Destiny 2.
And now with Destiny 3 likely not terribly far away, there’s no one else around to push Bungie into trying to sell the game to a market of people that are never going to like Destiny anyway.
They can focus on crafting the best possible experience to the people who have stuck with the franchise since the first game.
3: Pervasiveness of Eververse
If you expect Bungie to delete Eververse now that Activision is gone, I have some bad news for you. It’s just not going to happen. It’s just too reliable as a consistent income stream. In fact, there’s every chance that Bungie will rely on it even more than ever now that they are technically an “indie” developer.
However, Bungie does now have the creative freedom to at least not make it as pervasive as it was for a brief moment in time at the start of Destiny 2.
Especially if you factor in how Activision wasn’t happy with how Destiny 2 was performing (hence the split), you could figure that even more microtransactions would have been on the way for Destiny 3.
While it’s unlikely that Bungie is going to remove them altogether, it’s fair to expect something similar to what it is now.
It’s a little annoying that some cosmetics are locked behind Eververse, but it never really rises to the point of being offensive, nor is it that hard to get Bright Dust and purchase them for free.
4: Adversity to Risks
Probably the most frustrating thing for me as a Destiny fan up until very recently is that there hasn’t been a lot of risk-taking. The expansions and DLC were starting to get formulaic until Forsaken rolled in.
It was always a short storyline, a few strikes, new exotics and equipment, and if we were lucky, a new raid.
Things have started to change as of Forsaken though. Bungie experimented with a new game mode, Gambit, which was a home run. The evolution of the end game area, The Dreaming City, was also a really neat way to tease out new missions and secret content.
Black Armory and the annual pass, in general, is also a risk in of itself. Black Armory just wrapped up and the entire add-on has been focused on delivering content that is very grindy and geared towards hardcore fans. It was very risky, and while I was a fan of it, not everyone was.
Still, I appreciate the attempt to try something new, and now that Activision is out of the picture, there’s no one around to pressure Bungie to stick to the scrip or worse, revert back to being vanilla.
If Bungie wants to go buck wild with Destiny 3 and do a whole bunch of stuff we’ve never seen before, or subvert all our expectations of the Destiny franchise to replace it with a completely different structure, they certainly could if that’s what they feel is best for the long-term health of the franchise.
5: Destiny’s Inevitable Death
And finally, speaking of the long-term health of the franchise, we lead to our last point. Now that the partnership with Activision is gone, and Bungie is free to do what it wants, there’s nothing stopping Bungie from keeping the franchise alive as long as it wants.
If the partnership was a success, and the two companies decided to stick together for another new franchise, it was inevitable that Bungie would be pressured to leave Destiny behind one day.
Destiny isn’t immortal and will die out eventually. I do believe though that this divorce adds a few years to life of the franchise.
Instead of setting up Destiny 3 to be left behind, Bungie could craft a game that is capable of being left in “maintenance mode” for a long period of time. Imagine something like older MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XI if that helps.
Final Fantasy XI is way past its prime, and Square Enix has moved onto Final Fantasy XIV, just like Bungie will eventually move on to its next franchise.
But, Final Fantasy XI does still get regular updates to keep things just fresh enough for the people who really love it and have stuck with it for over a decade now.
Sure you’d like Destiny to be in the spotlight forever if you’re a mega-fan, but that’s unrealistic. I feel a lot better about the series living on past its golden age with Bungie’s finger over the kill switch than Activision, that’s for sure.
Published: Jan 11, 2019 12:25 pm