Cross-saves! (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Thursday, June 06, 2019, 17:50 (2007 days ago) @ Cody Miller

If the content is à la carte, that means it is not substantial and not tightly integrated into the game. A free game with optional paid content either has shit paid content, or the paid content is not really that optional.

Can you imagine a free to watch movie or free to listen to song? You can’t take anything out because ever single bit is important to the overall experience!

That is an insane comparison ;) For some players, Destiny IS the crucible. Other players literally never touch the crucible. Same goes for strikes, or raids, or any activity in the game.

A song is 3-5 minutes. A movie is 2-3 hours. Destiny is (for some) a nightly or semi-nightly activity/hangout with friends that people sink hundreds or thousands of hours into. You’re thinking about Destiny as if it were an authored, linear experience with a beginning, middle and end. But Destiny is so NOT that. It’s more like a bar where you hang out with your friends after work every day. One night you play some pool and throw some darts, the next night you watch the football game together, and the night after that you just chill and listen to music. Destiny’s various activities are nothing like scenes in a movie. They’re far closer to individual rides in an amusement park. Except some people live in the park, so they keep building new rides to keep things fresh. And many people outside the park look in and say “Hey that new ride looks cool, I’d like to try it” but Bungie tells them “you can’t try that ride until you try every single one of the older rides.” “But my friends are trying the new ride now!” “... give us $100 and take all the old rides, or GTFO.”

In Bungie’s new model, Forsaken is a paid add-on. It is arguably the best combination of story missions/destinations/patrol activities/side quests in the franchise to date. But looking forward, it’s silly to require a new player to buy that expansion and play through all that content (plus all the content before it) just to catch up to their friends who have been playing the entire time. It’s a huge barrier, and a barrier that gets bigger the longer D2 is around and the more stuff gets added.

With this new system, a new player can jump in and start playing with their friends right away, for free. Or if they’re playing alone, they can experience the huge chunk of content that makes up the “hub” of D2. From there, they have the freedom to buy the latest expansion and join the majority of the community. And if they want to, they can still go back and buy older expansions to experience them, but they don’t have to, and that’s huge.