Oh please let this be April Fools Day +10 (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 02:18 (3884 days ago) @ Xenos

Sadly you didn't miss anything leading up to this. This is out of the blue for all of us.

Yeah… I don't… no, I'm afraid not.

You see, this forum has a tendency to be self-supporting in its love for all things Bungie. That also means that criticism or concerns get buried under an avalanche of YOU TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW. Sorry guys, but it's true. This is why I don't really visit DBO any more — it's just not a good place to discuss; it's an echo-chamber for the ‘EVERYTHING BUNGIE DOES IS AWESOME’ crowd.

The evidence has been there for all to see for a long time that Bungie isn't quite the company that many of us fell in love with. Think about all the people who've left; Joe Staten, Matt Soell, Jaime Griesemer, Marcus Lehto and plenty of others whose names weren't prominent enough to be noticed: many people whose hearts and souls went into the games that Bungie made for years. Also, from reading the interviews with Bungie's latest recruits, some of them have seemed relatively inexperienced.

Now, these things don't necessarily signify that Bungie is no longer a good games company: far from it. It just shows that the company has gradually, piece by piece, transformed into a different beast from the one we used to know. It's a little bit like how Apple has evolved since Steve Jobs died: for all the tabloids who love to write crap like ‘This would never have happened under Steve Jobs…!’, there is still a grain of truth to the statement: the company has to have changed, perhaps imperceptibly, but significantly nonetheless.

This forum just isn't a good place to voice the opinion that the company has changed, though: it's an unpopular opinion to air (it's essentially a source of cognitive dissonance), and so I for one have stopped trying to voice it here. I have to imagine I'm not the only one. So I imagine a casual forum-visitor here wouldn't necessarily pick up on it. That doesn't change the fact that there have been small clues that not everything was perfect at Bungie for some time now, and perhaps this is just the first time that it's manifest in a spectacular and public fashion.