I want DLC that's actually worth purchasing. I bought the first season pass and gave up after that. I personally felt ripped off and I will not be buying Destiny 2 because of that. Not until I see the first few DLC's and see what people actually have to say about it. Keep your fingers crossed but with Activision still backing it I feel it's going to be another money grab.
What are you basing your value assessment on? I mean I felt like The Witcher 3 Season Pass was a fucking STEAL! I mean like 40 or 50 hours of additional gameplay for 30 bucks? That's hardly the baseline of what I would expect from DLC, though. I mean take a look at COD, Battlefield, Evolve, Hitman, etc. etc. There are VERY few cases where DLC provides substantial value. So I don't think that centering out Destiny as a "money grab" isn't fair. I'd venture to say, they actually provided more content per season pass release than the majority of games.
All I want really is cross play. I want to play it on PC, half of my friend got xbox one's and the other half has PS4's... This segregation is killing my gaming.
All I want really is cross play. I want to play it on PC, half of my friend got xbox one's and the other half has PS4's... This segregation is killing my gaming.
Same! I think I've in double-digits now of games I've bought across platforms.....
I want DLC that's actually worth purchasing. I bought the first season pass and gave up after that. I personally felt ripped off and I will not be buying Destiny 2 because of that. Not until I see the first few DLC's and see what people actually have to say about it. Keep your fingers crossed but with Activision still backing it I feel it's going to be another money grab.
What are you basing your value assessment on? I mean I felt like The Witcher 3 Season Pass was a fucking STEAL! I mean like 40 or 50 hours of additional gameplay for 30 bucks? That's hardly the baseline of what I would expect from DLC, though. I mean take a look at COD, Battlefield, Evolve, Hitman, etc. etc. There are VERY few cases where DLC provides substantial value. So I don't think that centering out Destiny as a "money grab" isn't fair. I'd venture to say, they actually provided more content per season pass release than the majority of games.
I'd say it benefits us consumers more to hold companies to the expectations set by the best of them, as opposed to the average or worse.
However, indie studios are on a whole different wavelength, so we really can't compare their DLC value with AAA backing DLC. On the whole, I see the fact that AAA studios have been releasing slimmer DLCs as a sign we should take issue with the state of the industry. Do you agree? I know it's easier said than done in such a large industry, but we should at least make the attempt to hold them accubtable, right?
I want DLC that's actually worth purchasing. I bought the first season pass and gave up after that. I personally felt ripped off and I will not be buying Destiny 2 because of that. Not until I see the first few DLC's and see what people actually have to say about it. Keep your fingers crossed but with Activision still backing it I feel it's going to be another money grab.
What are you basing your value assessment on? I mean I felt like The Witcher 3 Season Pass was a fucking STEAL! I mean like 40 or 50 hours of additional gameplay for 30 bucks? That's hardly the baseline of what I would expect from DLC, though. I mean take a look at COD, Battlefield, Evolve, Hitman, etc. etc. There are VERY few cases where DLC provides substantial value. So I don't think that centering out Destiny as a "money grab" isn't fair. I'd venture to say, they actually provided more content per season pass release than the majority of games.
I'd say it benefits us consumers more to hold companies to the expectations set by the best of them, as opposed to the average or worse.
However, indie studios are on a whole different wavelength, so we really can't compare their DLC value with AAA backing DLC. On the whole, I see the fact that AAA studios have been releasing slimmer DLCs as a sign we should take issue with the state of the industry. Do you agree? I know it's easier said than done in such a large industry, but we should at least make the attempt to hold them accubtable, right?
Sure, I do agree with you to a certain point. However, there are a couple points.
1) The expectations of gamers are becoming more unrealistic as time progresses. Simply put, if you recycle an asset or use a purchased asset, you'll get lynched for it. However, if you spend more money to do custom artwork at the sacrifice of content, you'll get lynched for content.
2) People tend to ignore context under certain circumstances. For instance, some reviewers may have posted an "angry" review with regards to the length of the content of Destiny, so the community piles onto that. However, put into the context of games on the whole, if we were to use HowLongToBeat.com, we see that the following is true. Destiny has a Main Story of 11.5 hours and a Combined main+sides of 41 hours. That would place Destiny in the top 25% of longest games, by length of main story, based on games taking 1-100 hours to complete the main story.
If nothing else, that's actually a surprising statistic. There are nearly 12000 games taking 1-100 hours to complete the main story and 3000 which are between 11 and 100 hours.
I think that probably supports your point, to some degree, but it also raises the question why? Personally, I think it's partially about cost. I'm sure you could do 10 or 20 games for the price of Destiny if you were to outsource to Korea. Is that something we want to see? Is that even the problem? Why so expensive to make games in North America? Are gamers part of the problem?
What will be interesting to see what EA has up their sleeve for BF2. It's apparently a new monetization model.
I get where you're coming from, but be careful: you're comparing Destiny's entire mission content lineup to other games' main story mission content only (just going off the terms you used, apologies if the website defines the content differently). Are we okay with comparing all main story content + side quests to what used to be solely the main story content?
The prices for production value are the result of many things I feel: natural evolution of the popularity of the genre contributes, but so does gamer expectations.
Gamers are having a tough time dealing with an industry that has begun to see support lost for the safe bets backed by ungodly amounts of money, resulting in many more indie developers entering the arena with lower aesthetic production values. We (I would submit rightfully so) expect quality that goes beyond what the indie developers, without the AAA backing, can attain from these AAA developers being buoyed by tens of millions of dollars. In all but aesthetics, we can no longer reliably expect higher overall content quality in the AAA titles anymore, and that's on the developers. Stringing folks along with marketing tactics such as loot boxes and season passes is a bandaid fix for the short-term, at best. Why would I pay for a season pass from CoD when I get lots more value out of The White March for PoE? Short answer is: I don't pay for AAA season passes anymore.
My issue is with the idea that gamers should be settling because hey, it could be worse. That mentality heavily favors the producers. They're doing this for money: let them earn it, or let them fade.
I get where you're coming from, but be careful: you're comparing Destiny's entire mission content lineup to other games' main story mission content only (just going off the terms you used, apologies if the website defines the content differently). Are we okay with comparing all main story content + side quests to what used to be solely the main story content?
The prices for production value are the result of many things I feel: natural evolution of the popularity of the genre contributes, but so does gamer expectations.
Gamers are having a tough time dealing with an industry that has begun to see support lost for the safe bets backed by ungodly amounts of money, resulting in many more indie developers entering the arena with lower aesthetic production values. We (I would submit rightfully so) expect quality that goes beyond what developers without that backing attain from these AAA developers being buoyed by tens of millions of dollars. In all but aesthetics, we can no longer reliably expect higher overall content quality in the AAA titles anymore, and that's on the developers. Stringing folks along with marketing tactics such as loot boxes and season passes is a bandaid fix for the short-term, at best. Why would I pay for a season pass from CoD when I get lots more value out of The White March for PoE? Short answer is: I don't pay for AAA season passes anymore.
My issue is with the idea that gamers should be settling because hey, it could be worse. That mentality heavily favors the producers. They're doing this for money: let them earn it, or let them fade.
Sorry, the main story for Destiny is apparently 11.5 hours versus the 41 hours of main story + extras (no idea what that means, raids?). It's a straight-up main-story comparison using the filters from HLTB. So it doesn't take into consideration the extras, although if we did take into consideration the extras, Destiny actually jumps UP in the list of longest games.
That being said, I'm not trying to condone bad behavior here, either. I can see value in a 10-hour main story experience, regardless of multiplayer. Here's my main concern, though. It's very easy to put extra hours into a game and make it feel empty at the same time. PoE is a perfect example. The pacing in PoE is such that you can actually make it to the last boss, as I did, and have no chance in hell of defeating it. I'm not a fan of that type of mechanic at all! Frankly, it's extremely annoying.
So, I'm not saying that gamers should "settle". What I am saying is that I don't think that value should be strictly based on time, either, because there are plenty of examples of games where the hours to complete are padded without providing any "real" value. On the other hand, I didn't complete Destiny in 11.5 hours, it was more like 16 or 17. Plus, it actually progressed at a rate where I was never left grinding.
As for the value of COD, I don't disagree. However, my son plays a TON of Pay Day 2 and has purchased a lot of content for that. I don't get it, but he plays it for hours and hours on a weekly basis.
So you may not be the right target for something like Destiny. I have all the Destiny DLC myself, but play it relatively infrequently now. However, I don't regret the purchase. I just think it boils down to more than time. It may be in part, and it explains why the sub model doesn't work anymore, but I think it also has additional intangibles that need to be met. Perception of value is another biggie, though, and I think that's where time plays a big part.
I agree, the quality of the content can make short games feel longer and long games feel shorter (DA:I is a prominent example of this with the proliferation of gathering and fetch quests).
That's also why I pointed out that AAA studios have become synonymous with cutting edge aesthetics and nothing else. Many have even decided to go the sporting game route and repackage the brand every year (sometimes more frequently) just to get releases that are compatible with holidays. This isn't good game design, it's good marketing design.
I played the base game through in Destiny: at release, the bosses were the same kind of bullet sponges we saw in titles like DAoC at release back at the turn of the century (!!!). The missions were barebones and amounted, largely, to moving from point to point and killing enemies at each stop. Many times, Bungie never even applied a unique model or skin to bosses; the boss was just a recolored, resized version of the normal enemies you face for that faction. It doesn't get much lazier than that. Bungie made an FPS with tight controls, but is that the bar these days? Bungie should be able to crank out run-of-the-mill FPSs with tight gunplay in their sleep by this point. TF2 still has tight gunplay at a decade old. The bar has been raised, because what Bungie accomplished with Destiny had already been accomplished, many times by multiple other titles. Perfect your craft, stop trying to rest on the laurels of the name behind the new title and the marketing hype, or we'll continue to stall on the innovation while sinking stupid amounts of cash into making clever commercials. I was unpleasantly surprised by Bungie's title.
I feel like, for Bungie's pedigree, it was a half-assed development effort but marketed hardcore to make up for it. Once the bandwagon hits critical mass, a loss on the title is all but impossible due to the sheer hype machine the producer can put behind it.
When the original Halo was released, Destiny would've been considered groundbreaking. At the time of its release, it was simply pretty and had the trademark spit shine you'd expect from a developer with over 100 million dollars at their disposal. Is that good enough? Stagnant development? Or the better question might be: is this the best we can expect from Bungie nowadays? If not, it should piss every gamer off who dropped cash on what Bungie tried to play off as a title that would completely change the way we play FPSs. It did no such thing, and was little more than a AAA Warframe.
Meh, to a certain extent one of the saving graces of Destiny has been how you can play with friends and not have to deal with all the usual chat memes, raging teenagers, and low level harassment that tends to be a universal component of most multiplayer games.
...
Having social features doesn't necessarily mean having open general chat (though lacking anything else, it would be a bare minimum)... even adding a simple Party Finder UI would have gone a long way.
100% agree with the article, if Destiny 2 is lacking social features (and or an awesome single player campaign), I'm not even going to bother. And yeah, FFS, put the lore in the game.
A few other things on my wishlist would be:
- A larger, more realised open world.
- High-end progression (and more interesting weapons) outside of raiding / rated PvP.
- Something to do with your ship beyond loading screens...
I agree, the quality of the content can make short games feel longer and long games feel shorter (DA:I is a prominent example of this with the proliferation of gathering and fetch quests).
That's also why I pointed out that AAA studios have become synonymous with cutting edge aesthetics and nothing else. Many have even decided to go the sporting game route and repackage the brand every year (sometimes more frequently) just to get releases that are compatible with holidays. This isn't good game design, it's good marketing design.
I played the base game through in Destiny: at release, the bosses were the same kind of bullet sponges we saw in titles like DAoC at release back at the turn of the century (!!!). The missions were barebones and amounted, largely, to moving from point to point and killing enemies at each stop. Many times, Bungie never even applied a unique model or skin to bosses; the boss was just a recolored, resized version of the normal enemies you face for that faction. It doesn't get much lazier than that. Bungie made an FPS with tight controls, but is that the bar these days? Bungie should be able to crank out run-of-the-mill FPSs with tight gunplay in their sleep by this point. TF2 still has tight gunplay at a decade old. The bar has been raised, because what Bungie accomplished with Destiny had already been accomplished, many times by multiple other titles. Perfect your craft, stop trying to rest on the laurels of the name behind the new title and the marketing hype, or we'll continue to stall on the innovation while sinking stupid amounts of cash into making clever commercials. I was unpleasantly surprised by Bungie's title.
I feel like, for Bungie's pedigree, it was a half-assed development effort but marketed hardcore to make up for it. Once the bandwagon hits critical mass, a loss on the title is all but impossible due to the sheer hype machine the producer can put behind it.
When the original Halo was released, Destiny would've been considered groundbreaking. At the time of its release, it was simply pretty and had the trademark spit shine you'd expect from a developer with over 100 million dollars at their disposal. Is that good enough? Stagnant development? Or the better question might be: is this the best we can expect from Bungie nowadays? If not, it should piss every gamer off who dropped cash on what Bungie tried to play off as a title that would completely change the way we play FPSs. It did no such thing, and was little more than a AAA Warframe.
I do agree with most of this. I bought all the Destiny expansions and I'll go as far as to say that I love the core gameplay, but a lot of what you said is true, also. It's fun to play.... for a while. It's not mind-blowing though. I'll probably buy the next one, but I doubt I'll pre-order it.
Comments
What are you basing your value assessment on? I mean I felt like The Witcher 3 Season Pass was a fucking STEAL! I mean like 40 or 50 hours of additional gameplay for 30 bucks? That's hardly the baseline of what I would expect from DLC, though. I mean take a look at COD, Battlefield, Evolve, Hitman, etc. etc. There are VERY few cases where DLC provides substantial value. So I don't think that centering out Destiny as a "money grab" isn't fair. I'd venture to say, they actually provided more content per season pass release than the majority of games.
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Same! I think I've in double-digits now of games I've bought across platforms.....
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------
I'd say it benefits us consumers more to hold companies to the expectations set by the best of them, as opposed to the average or worse.
However, indie studios are on a whole different wavelength, so we really can't compare their DLC value with AAA backing DLC. On the whole, I see the fact that AAA studios have been releasing slimmer DLCs as a sign we should take issue with the state of the industry. Do you agree? I know it's easier said than done in such a large industry, but we should at least make the attempt to hold them accubtable, right?
Sure, I do agree with you to a certain point. However, there are a couple points.
1) The expectations of gamers are becoming more unrealistic as time progresses. Simply put, if you recycle an asset or use a purchased asset, you'll get lynched for it. However, if you spend more money to do custom artwork at the sacrifice of content, you'll get lynched for content.
2) People tend to ignore context under certain circumstances. For instance, some reviewers may have posted an "angry" review with regards to the length of the content of Destiny, so the community piles onto that. However, put into the context of games on the whole, if we were to use HowLongToBeat.com, we see that the following is true. Destiny has a Main Story of 11.5 hours and a Combined main+sides of 41 hours. That would place Destiny in the top 25% of longest games, by length of main story, based on games taking 1-100 hours to complete the main story.
If nothing else, that's actually a surprising statistic. There are nearly 12000 games taking 1-100 hours to complete the main story and 3000 which are between 11 and 100 hours.
I think that probably supports your point, to some degree, but it also raises the question why? Personally, I think it's partially about cost. I'm sure you could do 10 or 20 games for the price of Destiny if you were to outsource to Korea. Is that something we want to see? Is that even the problem? Why so expensive to make games in North America? Are gamers part of the problem?
What will be interesting to see what EA has up their sleeve for BF2. It's apparently a new monetization model.
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------
The prices for production value are the result of many things I feel: natural evolution of the popularity of the genre contributes, but so does gamer expectations.
Gamers are having a tough time dealing with an industry that has begun to see support lost for the safe bets backed by ungodly amounts of money, resulting in many more indie developers entering the arena with lower aesthetic production values. We (I would submit rightfully so) expect quality that goes beyond what the indie developers, without the AAA backing, can attain from these AAA developers being buoyed by tens of millions of dollars. In all but aesthetics, we can no longer reliably expect higher overall content quality in the AAA titles anymore, and that's on the developers. Stringing folks along with marketing tactics such as loot boxes and season passes is a bandaid fix for the short-term, at best. Why would I pay for a season pass from CoD when I get lots more value out of The White March for PoE? Short answer is: I don't pay for AAA season passes anymore.
My issue is with the idea that gamers should be settling because hey, it could be worse. That mentality heavily favors the producers. They're doing this for money: let them earn it, or let them fade.
EDIT- for clarity
Sorry, the main story for Destiny is apparently 11.5 hours versus the 41 hours of main story + extras (no idea what that means, raids?). It's a straight-up main-story comparison using the filters from HLTB. So it doesn't take into consideration the extras, although if we did take into consideration the extras, Destiny actually jumps UP in the list of longest games.
That being said, I'm not trying to condone bad behavior here, either. I can see value in a 10-hour main story experience, regardless of multiplayer. Here's my main concern, though. It's very easy to put extra hours into a game and make it feel empty at the same time. PoE is a perfect example. The pacing in PoE is such that you can actually make it to the last boss, as I did, and have no chance in hell of defeating it. I'm not a fan of that type of mechanic at all! Frankly, it's extremely annoying.
So, I'm not saying that gamers should "settle". What I am saying is that I don't think that value should be strictly based on time, either, because there are plenty of examples of games where the hours to complete are padded without providing any "real" value. On the other hand, I didn't complete Destiny in 11.5 hours, it was more like 16 or 17. Plus, it actually progressed at a rate where I was never left grinding.
As for the value of COD, I don't disagree. However, my son plays a TON of Pay Day 2 and has purchased a lot of content for that. I don't get it, but he plays it for hours and hours on a weekly basis.
So you may not be the right target for something like Destiny. I have all the Destiny DLC myself, but play it relatively infrequently now. However, I don't regret the purchase. I just think it boils down to more than time. It may be in part, and it explains why the sub model doesn't work anymore, but I think it also has additional intangibles that need to be met. Perception of value is another biggie, though, and I think that's where time plays a big part.
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------
That's also why I pointed out that AAA studios have become synonymous with cutting edge aesthetics and nothing else. Many have even decided to go the sporting game route and repackage the brand every year (sometimes more frequently) just to get releases that are compatible with holidays. This isn't good game design, it's good marketing design.
I played the base game through in Destiny: at release, the bosses were the same kind of bullet sponges we saw in titles like DAoC at release back at the turn of the century (!!!). The missions were barebones and amounted, largely, to moving from point to point and killing enemies at each stop. Many times, Bungie never even applied a unique model or skin to bosses; the boss was just a recolored, resized version of the normal enemies you face for that faction. It doesn't get much lazier than that. Bungie made an FPS with tight controls, but is that the bar these days? Bungie should be able to crank out run-of-the-mill FPSs with tight gunplay in their sleep by this point. TF2 still has tight gunplay at a decade old. The bar has been raised, because what Bungie accomplished with Destiny had already been accomplished, many times by multiple other titles. Perfect your craft, stop trying to rest on the laurels of the name behind the new title and the marketing hype, or we'll continue to stall on the innovation while sinking stupid amounts of cash into making clever commercials. I was unpleasantly surprised by Bungie's title.
I feel like, for Bungie's pedigree, it was a half-assed development effort but marketed hardcore to make up for it. Once the bandwagon hits critical mass, a loss on the title is all but impossible due to the sheer hype machine the producer can put behind it.
When the original Halo was released, Destiny would've been considered groundbreaking. At the time of its release, it was simply pretty and had the trademark spit shine you'd expect from a developer with over 100 million dollars at their disposal. Is that good enough? Stagnant development? Or the better question might be: is this the best we can expect from Bungie nowadays? If not, it should piss every gamer off who dropped cash on what Bungie tried to play off as a title that would completely change the way we play FPSs. It did no such thing, and was little more than a AAA Warframe.
Having social features doesn't necessarily mean having open general chat (though lacking anything else, it would be a bare minimum)... even adding a simple Party Finder UI would have gone a long way.
100% agree with the article, if Destiny 2 is lacking social features (and or an awesome single player campaign), I'm not even going to bother. And yeah, FFS, put the lore in the game.
A few other things on my wishlist would be:
- A larger, more realised open world.
- High-end progression (and more interesting weapons) outside of raiding / rated PvP.
- Something to do with your ship beyond loading screens...
I do agree with most of this. I bought all the Destiny expansions and I'll go as far as to say that I love the core gameplay, but a lot of what you said is true, also. It's fun to play.... for a while. It's not mind-blowing though. I'll probably buy the next one, but I doubt I'll pre-order it.
Crazkanuk
----------------
Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
----------------