Expectations from within the industry (Destiny)

by Jabberwok, Monday, September 29, 2014, 14:09 (3949 days ago) @ Kermit

Frankly, a lot of Bungie's marketing campaign towards release made me feel vaguely hostile, and I'm not just talking about those horrible TV spots. The repetition of tag lines, rather than candid talks about the state of the product, got on my nerves, but maybe it just meant I was watching too many interviews.

More importantly, I think the main thing that made ODST a niche product was the story. Anyone without the context of the rest of the series, especially Halo 2, would have no idea what was going on. Personally, I didn't find the game to be too short at all. Though I can see how, if someone rushed through the night city areas, it would feel much shorter. The story definitely felt more lengthy and meaty than Destiny's to me. As for lacking Firefight matchmaking, maybe it was long enough ago that it could still get away with relying on local play (unlike so many games now which don't even have it).

I kind of saw ODST as a Halo 3 expansion, sold in a separate box because it was a full-length game (even if a bit short) with completely new content and assets. In that context, I thought it was pretty successful. Oddly enough, the voice acting was my least favorite part, even though I liked the casting choices.

I recently played through ODST again for the first time since its release, and I gotta say it feels like an 8 or an 8.5 kind of a game to me. There are aspects of it which really work (Noir setting, Sadies story) but the game is extremely short and the main storyline has not aged well in my opinion. Add in the lack of matchmaking for firefight and it really feels like a niche product; the more dedicated Halo fans will get a kick out of it but the more casual ones or people new to the series probably would wonder what all the fuss was about.

I'm going to ramble in a bit of a roundabout way here, but it's going somewhere I swear.

The real remarkable thing about Destiny only being rated 5 points lower than ODST is that Metacritic has Destiny rated that high, not that ODST is rated particularly low, especially after the bigwigs came in and absolutely crushed it with 6's. Considering a site such as Gamespot traditionally has a very cozy relationship with big AAA releases, it was stunning to see them score it so low. And yet, despite all that, the game is still at 78 with critics (lower with users, interestingly enough).

There was a Kotaku article right around the time of Destiny's release (I'm not going to go searching for it now but you could find it with a modicum of effort if it tickles your fancy) about a guy who's job is to be a video games consultant. It was sort of a "this is what my job is" article, and evidently video game consultant companies do all kinds of shit behind the scenes, such as providing mock reviews of a game, analyzing the work in progress and making suggestions on how to improve it, providing marketing strategies, basically they come in and tell studios what they think they should do with their game. (what qualifies the people who work as video game consultants to provide expertise in anything related to making a good video game I have no idea, more on that soon).

Anyhow interestingly enough the guy provided some thoughts about Destiny's release I guess as an example of the kind of work he does, and he said that the early low review scores were just "clickbait" from fringe review sites looking to drive traffic, and he fully expected the average score to shoot up once more reputable sites started posting their scores.

Well, we have the benefit of hindsight but of course he couldn't have been more wrong. Instead of increasing into a more respectable triple A release score, the score continued to slide and the biggest review sites giving especially low scores, even lower than the supposed "clickbait" reviews.

An additional tangent on an already ADD post, consider that this guy is actually paid money to make these kinds of predictions. What a cushy job that must be, eh? I'm wondering what qualifications you have to have to become a video game consultant. 20 years in the industry? Was he part of the mod team that developed counterstrike? You know something that would actually give him some credibility when talking about what would make a game successful? 100 to 1 he went to business school and I have more development experience than he does.

But that got me thinking, I wonder if even with the review embargo not being lifted until after the game shipped, were Acti-Bungie surprised by how poorly the game reviewed? I mean if there's guys like Nostradamus up there who are actually on a regular basis brought in to provide expertise to development studios, I have to wonder if they (Acti-Bungie) were blindsided a little? I wonder what their expectations were for how the game would be received? I wonder if they had a few "video game consultants" sitting down with them and assuring them that the game would probably rate a 9, 8.5 at the worst and all was well in triple A land.

Just some speculation and food for thought. If you stuck with me through all that you're a trooper.

Good post. I don't know about Activision, but I suspect that Bungie people see Destiny as a work in progress, and I bet many were worried about reviews, and knew the game would get some flack. Putting aside the vidocs, in actual interviews and panels Bungie reps seem a lot more humble than you might expect if you were sure that you had just made the greatest game ever. Someday when the Destiny launch is ancient history I hope we get more insight into the struggles that were surely involved during the making of this game.