Smiled at the sight of Mig. (Gaming)

by Joe Duplessie (SNIPE 316) , Detroit, Tuesday, October 25, 2022, 18:37 (763 days ago) @ Kermit

I agree that corporate greed is a factor... [snip] ...there are gray areas. Destiny has gotten better about loot boxes, but you should get the exotic way before 60-something raid completions (thankfully, most do).

Dude that's just, so lame. You should just have a clear path to whatever goal. I wrote this in an earlier post, but deleted it as it wasn't actually necessary. Let's look at Halo 3 vs. Destiny.

In H3, to unlock specific armor there's a clear path to getting each one*. If you see someone with a Katana in H3 MM, you know they got the original 1000 Gamerscore for the game. You want a Katana too? You know exactly how to get it. They rewarded the player for playing.

In Destiny, (correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a while) to unlock a specific gun/armor/whathaveyou you complete a mission and hope you get the item you want. Which you probably won't. Then even if you do, it's unlikely to be the optimum version of what you want. So you have to do it again. And again. You're incentivized to grind to get the thing you want, so that you can finally play the game the way you want. And then you have to store those weapons in your vault which has limited space, so you have to pick and choose what gets to stay.

Wouldn't it be better if it were a little more like Halo 3? What if for example, you complete the new Raid and that unlocks this sweet new gun. Then to get the perfect stats on it, instead of having to grind the Raid over and over you simply have to play with the gun, however you want! Just get kills to earn XP for it. Maybe get (X) headshots and that unlocks a new skin, or what if you could get a rare skin for landing the final blow on a boss with the weapon. And instead of having a vault where you store all your random stuff, you simply have a weapons locker with all of your unlocked weapons available at any time. Same for Armor. The point being, everything would be unlockable in-game without extra spending, and with a fun, engaging challenge tied to it.

Wouldn't THAT Destiny be better? A Destiny where you play what you want, when you want? No slot machine. But it wouldn't make as much money.

*Now everyone can haz Recon. (Remember the Road to Recon? How cool was that?)

I'm not bothered too much by cosmetic sales. I've bought a few things in Destiny (not so much with real money anymore), but it's worth it or not TO ME. If it's not, I stop caring. I want my black visor for Reach in MCC, and someday I'll get it, but I won't pay for it.

Not the point. These things used to be unlockable through in-game means that were fun and engaging. That used to be the player investment system. Playing for fun, to get cool stuff. The players were robbed of that, in favor of making more money. The games are objectively worse for that, but they accomplished their goal. They make more money.

(Also, just get your MCC Campaign challenges every week. Only takes a few hours altogether and you can unlock all original Reach armor with just 100 points. So about 8 weeks, or less depending on how far you already are. I think the black visor is somewhere around the halfway point.)

IMHO, the bigger problem for 343 is overpromising--selling things that turn out to be less than expected. Which brings us back to customer expectations--we want more and more for basically the same price.

We were conditioned by Bungie to expect every sequel to give us more and more lol. From 1 to Reach, every game expanded the franchise's featureset exponentially. To this day, Reach has the single greatest featureset of any console game ever. It came out 12 years ago.

Corporate greed plays into it, so does the fact that modern AAA games cost a LOT of money. The crisis affecting big budget movies is also affecting game development. Greed is a factor there, but another factor is a fickle fanbase that demands more pixels, higher frame rates, etc., and a business model that seems to demand instant responsiveness to everyone with a platform to bitch, which is, essentially, everyone.

The answer is improving the tools used to create games. Automating as much as possible. They're getting there.

As others have pointed out, critics had fewer outlets, and their criticisms generally weren't monetized.

See here.

Halo wasn't getting bigger in terms of engagement, and that's what the business was evolving towards. Microsoft was disappointed with Reach.

I have no idea what you mean by this. Halo was thriving. There were so many communities, and sub communities within doing incredible things from art to machinima. From obstacle courses to puzzle maps, competitive to casual. We had Grifball, and Forgehub, and so much more. I'd hit the character limit if I tried to list them all.

Maybe MS should have used the same God-tier marketing they had for Halo 3 if they wanted more sales.

I don't know about the true Halo idea. Halo was the true Halo and what made it successful was it delivered something new and better. It's tough to do that AND deliver so much of the old that the fans want at the same time.

But Bungie did it multiple times.

I find it interesting that you say they REFUSE to make a true Halo game, as if they don't want please their customers.

I have no idea what they want. Almost everything people complained about in H4, they doubled down on in H5, and were shocked when people hated it. Then Infinite was a weird hybrid that was a good step in the right direction, but still fell way short of expectations. Who knows?

If it was so different, why has Bungie broken up with Microsoft, then Activision?

MS wanted them to be the Halo studio, and Bungie wanted to work on other IP. So they traded Halo for their freedom.

Activision was because of the corporate greed stuff we were talking about. They seemed to think of Bungie as "Activision Seattle".

Funny that. Halo wouldn't have become what it did without it, but Bungie didn't anticipate it. In this semi-post-Covid age, I will tout the superiority of physical presence all day long, and a good LAN party is a gaming experience like no other. Yet, had Bungie been able to deliver online play earlier, I think they would've, and we would've lost our freaking minds.

Destiny would also benefit greatly from splitscreen. And Theater. Forge. Custom games. Fileshare. Screenshots. And so on.