I’d almost forgotten how great Bungie campaigns used to be. (Gaming)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Saturday, December 07, 2019, 18:58 (1904 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I think Forsaken is the best campaign Bungie has ever made in Destiny. It is complete garbage when compared to any Halo campaign (and especially Reach).

Bungie still knows how to to make great encounters and interesting spaces (look no farther than the Shattered Throne and Pit of Heresy for that). It's the set-piece moments they sort of forgot how to do well.

I don't think it's forgot. I think it's a question of iterative investment.

Destiny is, at least broadly speaking, exactly the sort of game I wanted Bungie, or Valve, or someone to deliver-- something like the 10-12 level solo story-driven experience, but with co-op as an always-available option, but in chunks available on a per-year basis instead of a 3-year basis.

I think the problem is that no one either knows how, or is able to currently deliver on that, because while none of the individual parts of that experience necessarily require a full 3 years to deliver on, current pipelines don't necessarily provide for 1/3 of that experience to be delivered within a single year.

I think it's sort of a reverse man-month myth. Each of the component parts of a Halo-like experience benefit from having a full 3 years to incubate even if none of them, individually, take that long to produce. And while it might seem like 1/3 of that amount of content can be delivered in 1/3 of the time, this is not strictly speaking true, and various methods have been used to make it come true-- outsourcing to 3rd parties, funding via microtransactions, etc.

The largest satisfying content chunk delivered in the fewest number of developer-hours to date remains ODST, and it still remains to be determined whether Bungie or anyone else is committed to delivering content like that on a similar schedule, or is able to make the necessary compromises to do so.