Bungie: B/c Datamining, don't expect fun missions/secrets. (Destiny)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, November 11, 2022, 11:41 (746 days ago) @ Cody Miller

After this week's hugely successful "microevent" (Dmg's words, not mine) Bungie’s David Aldridge (Head of Engineering) and Ylan Salsbury (Senior Engineering Manager), did an AMA on Reddit regarding engineering processes. While it is not strictly about community events or anything, the question regarding them/secret missions was asked, and the reply was disheartening to say the least:

"Suppose you want to encrypt a secret mission. Ok... let's tag the world art spaces (bubbles) and the activity itself as "encrypt behind this key that we'll release later". Victory! Except... hm, there are rewards from the mission that we also want to hide, their flavor text contains spoilers...
...it's all solvable, it's just expensive, and so far we've concluded that it makes more sense to spend on more cool experiences instead. This all would have been much cheaper if we'd considered it at the system design stage and forced more modularity around things we might want to make secret in the future... but we had a lot of other priorities on our minds back then and didn't foresee the future value of secrets and surprises.

Tragic, as we are still waiting on the fruits of "more cool experiences" that have been promised, while the yearly cost of content continues to rise...

This AMA prompted Dmg04 to do damage control on Twitter, clarifying that while we should be "resetting expectations" for any event moving forward, this doesn't necessarily mean that Bungie will never do a secret mission event. Which, given their track record, effectively means that Bungie will never do a secret mission event again.

To speak further on the feedback of 'we want more secret quests' - the feedback is heard.

That said, I don't want this statement to become "Bungie just promised more secrets!"

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) November 11, 2022

What a weird week; Telesto really did shake things up beyond the boundaries of the game.