General Gaming Official Destiny 2 Thread - Blad's Best Friend Club, update: significant layoffs hit Bungie, including composer Michael Salvatori

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

On 4/12/2024 at 11:53 PM, Brick said:

Seems Bungie was indeed holding some things close to their chest to save for later.

or they have had to pivot so hard and burn the midnight oil to get more things added to bolster this expansion. I mean Bungie is not afraid to promise a feature that the team hadn’t even started work on and takes nearly a year to release. lol They are going so hard on finally delivering everything people have said they’ve been disappointed Destiny has been lacking each expansion Bungie is finally doing it all in this final expansion. It almost makes tou think “they could have been doing this the whole time.” 
 

I worry about this expansion day one for people jumping in. I just cannot see where the game isn’t a broken, buggy mess with the amount of stuff they are quickly cramming in at the last minute to boost interest and preorders. 

[eventide11]

That's because nobody's cared about Destiny 2 (except die hard fans) in probably 5 years

[Brick]

On 4/16/2024 at 10:47 AM, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

or they have had to pivot so hard and burn the midnight oil to get more things added to bolster this expansion. I mean Bungie is not afraid to promise a feature that the team hadn’t even started work on and takes nearly a year to release. lol They are going so hard on finally delivering everything people have said they’ve been disappointed Destiny has been lacking each expansion Bungie is finally doing it all in this final expansion. It almost makes tou think “they could have been doing this the whole time.” 
 

I worry about this expansion day one for people jumping in. I just cannot see where the game isn’t a broken, buggy mess with the amount of stuff they are quickly cramming in at the last minute to boost interest and preorders. 

 

Well sure if you want to be cynical 

[TwinIon]

I think the new prism class mixing thing looks pretty awesome. If I was still playing, I'd be really excited about it, but it's not the kind of thing to bring me back to the game. If I'm honest, I'm not sure what would bring me back, so maybe that's not a fair test.

[Keyser_Soze]

 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

I have no trust to get hyped. They have been throwing so much into this at the last minute as a desperate bid to entice people to come back that I don’t trust it. I don’t trust it will be ready or even coherent after Lightfall. 

[Brick]

On 5/28/2024 at 1:37 PM, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I have no trust to get hyped. They have been throwing so much into this at the last minute as a desperate bid to entice people to come back that I don’t trust it. I don’t trust it will be ready or even coherent after Lightfall. 

 

With all due respect I think you're being a bit too pessimistic. You don't know that they're throwing this all in at the last minute, that's just speculation, and I find it doubtful given how long things take in game development, and an extra three months really wouldn't be enough to add in a new subclass, enemy race, etc. That's just too much in a short amount of time, and not even because it won't be balanced and play tested enough way, but in a I don't even think it could be done at all way. By all means wait for impressions and reviews rather than jumping in at launch next week, and you don't need to get hyped, but try and keep an open mind. 

 

Or next week I'll be playing on my fifth crash of the day going, "goddammit, Spawn was right!" 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

If they had all this planned they would have been hyping it up at the showcase for Final Shape last August. Hell before light fall released they announced/promised Fire Team finder before any team even knew they were working on it, which was why it took over a year to come out. 
 

they’re just going through and looking at everything the community has been demanding and asking for for … in some cases 10 years. The layoffs happen, community sentiment and trust takes a dive, Final Shape gets delayed for “polish”, player sentiment, engagement, and trust falls even more, and then suddenly it’s “oh we’re finally doing this. Finally doing that. This too. Oh yeah, also this highly requested feature.” Most of it AFTER Final Shape was originally supposed to come out? No. This has been Bungie in panic mode trying to do everything they can find to show that they have been “listening” for all these years. 

[TwinIon]

FYI, there are some spoilers for the wary.

 

 

[Brick]

7 hours ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

If they had all this planned they would have been hyping it up at the showcase for Final Shape last August. Hell before light fall released they announced/promised Fire Team finder before any team even knew they were working on it, which was why it took over a year to come out. 
 

they’re just going through and looking at everything the community has been demanding and asking for for … in some cases 10 years. The layoffs happen, community sentiment and trust takes a dive, Final Shape gets delayed for “polish”, player sentiment, engagement, and trust falls even more, and then suddenly it’s “oh we’re finally doing this. Finally doing that. This too. Oh yeah, also this highly requested feature.” Most of it AFTER Final Shape was originally supposed to come out? No. This has been Bungie in panic mode trying to do everything they can find to show that they have been “listening” for all these years. 

 

I can understand them not wanting to spill the beans on some things either because they wanted to save some surprises until closer to release, or because they weren't quite ready to be shown off back in August, or both. Things "the community has been asking for" like being able to re-customize our face, bringing back Whisper and Zero Hour, a horde mode, yeah those are definitely from the last three months because of the delay, but I'm a little hesitant to just accuse everything of being rushed. Could the new race have been created recently after people were disappointed that there was only going to be one new enemy type like how we got Tormentors last year, so Bungie just rushed out some new random enemies? I suppose it's possible, but again given how nothing goes quickly in game development I don't want to say for certain that's what happened. The extra three months could have been used to maybe add in things that originally were going to be left on the cutting room floor, perhaps, but I don't know about creating entirely new things from scratch, especially in regards to the story of the campaign where they would also need to get actors way in advance to record their lines. Three months is really no time in game development. I remember even Datto commenting on how three months really isn't enough time to add things in back when the delay was rumoured/announced.

 

Again I haven't watched any of the trailers because I've been wanting to go in blind, so even though some things got spoiled for me, I'm sure there are things I haven't seen so I can't exactly respond to everything you're worried about.

 

Let's just hope for all players' sake that you're wrong lol

 

Then again maybe I'm the one being too optimistic haha

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

The only part of me being wrong to be pessimistic is that this means Bungie could have been doing these kind of game updates and expansions for years and chose not to. This is already sort of true as reports came out after the layoffs from current and ex-bungie employees that the developers saw the community feedback and often agreed. But upper leadership stone walled them on being able to do anything. 
 

Bungie went from saying they had nothing planned yet for added time because of the delay to suddenly having a bunch of updates and Onslaught. All while trying to finish an expansion that seemed to keep getting bigger and bigger in terms of an update. I don’t know if the devs are having to crunch to get all this done, or if this is what Bungie and Destiny could have always been every year if leadership would just get out of their way and let the devs and engineers chef. 
 

as far as whether everything is going to work or the servers will shit themselves… Destiny 2 has always felt like it was made if tissue paper in terms of stability. Some updates kill the game harder than others. 

[Brick]

You're right that a lot of this is stuff we've been asking for for years, and that apparently upper management shut it down, but I don't think all of it was added in at the last minute. Onslaught probably was quicker to make since it uses pre-existing assets with some modifications.

 

I don't know, I guess we'll see how it all turns out in 5 days. I'd love to take a peak behind the curtain to learn how far in advance Bungie plans things out.

[SoberChef]

So I'll take it that nobody picked up The Final Shape DLC? I hadn't yet, waiting a few days to see how the community is feeling about it then pull the trigger ahead of the weekend.

[Brick]

31 minutes ago, SoberChef said:

So I'll take it that nobody picked up The Final Shape DLC? I hadn't yet, waiting a few days to see how the community is feeling about it then pull the trigger ahead of the weekend.

 

I got it. The servers are getting hammered as they always do on launch days though so they might be better tomorrow. Bungie really needs to address this issue as it happens every damned year. This year is particularly bad though with a lot of server disconnects. Got disconnected 3 times, but then it seemed pretty stable later once fewer people were playing. 

 

I've only played the first mission but I've liked what I played so far. Some trippy stuff. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

5 hours ago, Brick said:

 

I got it. The servers are getting hammered as they always do on launch days though so they might be better tomorrow. Bungie really needs to address this issue as it happens every damned year. This year is particularly bad though with a lot of server disconnects. Got disconnected 3 times, but then it seemed pretty stable later once fewer people were playing. 

 

I've only played the first mission but I've liked what I played so far. Some trippy stuff. 

some are making it sound like this is the worst state the servers have ever been in for a major DLC launch. …but they say that every year. …which seems like Bungie could make learn from that after 10 years. I mean, they even take the game offline for ~24 hours prior to a major release to update everything. 
 

though maybe it’s not server traffic. Maybe it is like when a dungeon released and a something in the opening stage of the dungeon caused a crash event so hard it behaved like a DDOS attack. Bungie had to roll the update back with the Dungeon because it was affecting people not even in the dungeon activity. 

[Brick]

9 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

some are making it sound like this is the worst state the servers have ever been in for a major DLC launch. …but they say that every year. …which seems like Bungie could make learn from that after 10 years. I mean, they even take the game offline for ~24 hours prior to a major release to update everything. 
 

though maybe it’s not server traffic. Maybe it is like when a dungeon released and a something in the opening stage of the dungeon caused a crash event so hard it behaved like a DDOS attack. Bungie had to roll the update back with the Dungeon because it was affecting people not even in the dungeon activity. 

 

Yeah not sure what it was. A lot of weasel, currant, and cabbage error codes. They released a statement saying they were working on it. Hope things get fixed before the Raid on Friday. 

 

Hoping you weren't right about things being a mess 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

17 minutes ago, Brick said:

 

Yeah not sure what it was. A lot of weasel, currant, and cabbage error codes. They released a statement saying they were working on it. Hope things get fixed before the Raid on Friday. 

 

Hoping you weren't right about things being a mess 

This is such a thing every year it is why when I was getting the expansions day 1 I would not take off work the day of release, but instead Wednesday. Because in the past all the server issues sometimes wouldn’t get sorted until about the time I would have got home from work anyways. iIf the majority of people are still having issues this may be worse than prior years. 
 

all this to say though, and you could probably guess, but I am not surprised by the state of release. 

[Brick]

1 hour ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

This is such a thing every year it is why when I was getting the expansions day 1 I would not take off work the day of release, but instead Wednesday. Because in the past all the server issues sometimes wouldn’t get sorted until about the time I would have got home from work anyways. iIf the majority of people are still having issues this may be worse than prior years. 
 

all this to say though, and you could probably guess, but I am not surprised by the state of release. 

 

Yeah Wednesday is always the "cheat code" when it comes to booking off a day for a Destiny release. I have this week off, but if I had only booked of yesterday I would have been pissed. I'll play some more later today and report back on if the servers seem better. 

 

I don't get how a billion dollar company, with a billion dollar publisher behind them can't upgrade their servers to be more stable. If Arrowhead can do it in the course of a few days when Helldivers II got popular, surely Bungie can do it after nearly a decade. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

21 minutes ago, Brick said:

I don't get how a billion dollar company, with a billion dollar publisher behind them can't upgrade their servers to be more stable. If Arrowhead can do it in the course of a few days when Helldivers II got popular, surely Bungie can do it after nearly a decade.

at least Hell Divers 2 has the excuse they initially did’’t realize it was going to explode in popularity like it did. 
 

with D2 it feels a little less excusable because of how many expansions and season launches they have done and continue to fumble the launch/rollout. But at this point if you’ve lived through so many of these launches by Bungie you kind of have yourself to blame if you believed this launch would be any different/better. Im not excusing Bungie, but there is and has been such a thing as managing expectations. 

[TwinIon]

I've increasingly come to terms with launches being a struggle for games like this. They build their systems to handle the player base the game has 95% of the time, and these new expansion releases have so much more demand on them than they'll experience the rest of the year. If you're averaging 300k players and then have a launch day where 1M people try to login, I can see why issues would arise. Of course, in the days of modern cloud compute it's easy to say they should just provision some temporary resources because it's not as if this is a surprise surge, though I'm sure it's slightly more difficult than that.

 

However, for a game like Destiny that desperately wants to keep players coming back, maybe it makes more sense to go through that effort and ensure a smooth launch so you don't drive anyone away.

[Brick]

Destiny 2 - Day 2 Stability Improvements - Steam News

STORE.STEAMPOWERED.COM

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Last night, we solved several critical issues causing poor stability and heavily reduced the amount of "Kick to Orbit" errors as you can see in this graph. We are closely monitoring the player population and will...

 

[Brick]

I beat the campaign, and it's good. Real good. Looking forward to the Raid tomorrow. The post campaign stuff is also pretty good from what little I've played so far. I have some nitpicks like I wish there were more Dread types, and it seems weird to get Prismatic before we get the inevitable third Darkness subclass, almost like we should have had one more DLC before Lightfall and The Final Shape, but whatever. Not sure where the story will go from here since this is supposed to be the end of the Light and Darkness saga, so how we will get the last Darkness subclass from a narrative standpoint better make sense.

 

The Witness is super creepy.

[SoberChef]

After tuning into multiple streams over the course of yesterday and today, and seeing the full final mission alongside post credits...I'm emotional as fuck. What a journey it's been throughout all if the ups and downs. Stoked to see what they have to reveal on Monday but this Final Shape was truly exceptional!

[Brick]

I haven't played the Raid yet, and I doubt I will at this point while Contest Mode is active. As of this post only 10 teams have completed it. Gonna have to avoid any and all spoilers since they'll be abundant, and there's always an in-game cutscene that automatically plays on login when a new Raid is first completed, so I'll have to skip that, and watch it later after I beat the Raid for myself. Then I hear a new mission/activity also went live so I'll have to save playing that until after I Raid as well. 

 

All things considered, Bungie pulled it off with this expansion.