"I don't understand what is hard and easy in gamedev" (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Wednesday, December 02, 2020, 20:22 (1455 days ago) @ kidtsunami

I don't. All I know is what has been accomplished and is being accomplished by others.

Bungie didn't set Destiny up for this. Fine. But they can be thinking about it for Matter. Even beyond the issue of gender it's just a good idea anyway. And I don't think say, CD Projekt Red, has more resources and ability to do this than Bungie.

At the very least you could offer a finite variety of body types and appearances instead of just 2. At the VERY very least you could offer 3: masculine, feminine, and neither.

This post is SO different from your earlier one and demonstrates some level of awareness that there are varying options with varying levels of difficulty.

Comparing the resources of CD Projekt Red and Bungie and not discussing the possible issues of how those resources are used is a thorny issue for me.

To take this point further, it comes down (at least partially) to a question of resource allocation and “bang for Bungie’s buck”. Given the kind of game Destiny is, and the current state of the game, I would argue that offering a wider range of selectable body types for our guardians is so far down the list of priorities that it isn’t even worth considering. There are huge, gaping problems with D2 right now that effect every single player most of the time they are playing. Beyond that, it’s not like adding a range of different body types would be a purely good thing for the game either. The character models were very carefully designed to have clearly distinct frames and outlines so that players could differentiate between hunters, warlocks, and titans at a glance. Even having the male and female variations of each class is adding enough into the mix to make those split-second distinctions tricky at times.
So a developer like Bungie probably looks at a situation like this and says “would more body types be nice? Sure. Will it cause other problems? It might. Does it significantly increase our workload? Well, every single piece of armour needs at least 1 extra model generated, plus whatever other resources need to go to animation, memory allocation, test, etc etc etc”. So this becomes one out of a million trade-off issues that crop up over the course of making a game.

Now if it turned out that enough players cared enough about it that it actually made sense for Bungie to prioritize it, then maybe they would. But we’re 7 years into Destiny, and I haven’t seen the issue come up once on Reddit (which is not to say that it has never come up, but certainly not with any regularity). Heck, if Bungie announced tomorrow that they’re adding multiple body types into D2, I’d add that fact onto my mental pile of evidence that Bungie no longer knows what they’re doing as a studio... not because there is anything wrong with that feature, but because IMO Bungie has come pretty damn close to killing this franchise with Beyond Light, and they need to be putting all their resources into areas that make the biggest difference for the most players possible.