Always Online and Game Longevity

So I was watching a game review video, which made me think uncomfortably of Destiny.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmvcJuBOaQE

So yeah, I guess I wanted to discuss the Always Online thing here.

I got a lot of old games I still have plenty of love for. Typically now, I tend to splurge on one thing until I exhaust myself completely for some time. Every now and then, though, I get a nostalgic twinge, and I bring old games out of the box, dust off the console and give it another go. I don't always get the same experience I did on that first playthrough, but I love being able to go back. I got games from the PS1 era that I can still play whenever the mood strikes me.

Destiny, though? Destiny is living on a clock. Its not a short timer, mind, but eventually it'll run out. Bungie will depart from activision, who will put the franchise out behind the shed at some point. I could have a PS4 and the Destiny disc and all the DLC in fourty years, but I'll never again be able to play the game. At least with, say, Halo 2 when the servers went down I still had a campaign mode I could binge on.

I could see why a company might do this for chapters of a franchise. You make the first game, then you ensure people buy the second by taking away the capacity to play the first. What doesn't fit that logic is games that don't get sequels, or spiritual successors even or games that are the last of their franchise. Theirs no new boat to jump on, and not every gamer is able to continuously purchase games. Heck, their are portions of the US where the connection is going to be so shit, these games are practically unplayable right now.

Obviously, Destiny is a bit contentious for me right now. Not sure if I'll be getting the sequels to pass judgement on them. But if it was a great game I loved playing in, I'd like to be able to revisit this whenever I felt like. Some people have a transcendent love for some games that can never live again.

Also I really want to see Krull now, for some reason.

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Destiny, though? Destiny is living on a clock. Its not a short timer, mind, but eventually it'll run out. Bungie will depart from activision, who will put the franchise out behind the shed at some point.

Just a minor note: as long as Bungie meets the terms of the contract they maintain ownership of Destiny. If Destiny is taken down it will be Bungie's decision not Activision's. (This is of course based on the leaked contract, there could be some changes, but I doubt that would change)

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Just a minor note: as long as Bungie meets the terms of the contract they maintain ownership of Destiny. If Destiny is taken down it will be Bungie's decision not Activision's. (This is of course based on the leaked contract, there could be some changes, but I doubt that would change)

While that is true, the point still stands. At some point it just doesn't make sense for them to keep those servers running.

Granted, for me it's not much of an issue with Destiny. The discussion has occurred many times at this point, but Destiny is a game that's much better with friends. That's where the fun of Destiny happens for me. While playing alone is enjoyable, it's not the same as playing through the Halo campaign. By the time they take the servers offline, I highly doubt any of my friends will be playing regularly, so I don't see myself wanting to play Destiny at that point.

Now, what that says about Destiny is an entirely different conversation. We still have people like Rockslider putting together awesome things in the original Halo, nearly fifteen years later. It seems pretty obvious that sort of thing won't be true of Destiny (at least as the game is now).

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Now, what that says about Destiny is an entirely different conversation. We still have people like Rockslider putting together awesome things in the original Halo, nearly fifteen years later. It seems pretty obvious that sort of thing won't be true of Destiny (at least as the game is now).

Speaking of rockslider, I found a mini-mega battle on Mars. On the level where you cross the bridge and charge the gate lords eye, you can circumvent the bridge by jumping up to the right, this will cause all the bridge guys to spawn and chase you to the spire where you will encounter all of those enemies too. A little bit of fun to be had there.

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It still has an EOL date for sure, but I would imagine with Bungie being the one making the decision it will be a lot later than if it was up to Activision.

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Yeah, I wouldn't bet any money against you on that point.

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Activision will just create an in-house developer of former Bungie employees to continue pumping out reiterative content ;)

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Any game that relies on playerbase for content expires faster. My brother still plays Dawn of War, an RTS. There are perhaps 10-15 people still playing that 8 year old game and he waits an hour to get a match, even though the servers are still up.

I liked Transformers, war for cybertron MP, but after about 6 months there were too few players and you waited 15 minutes for enough to start a match.

At least Destiny will have the PVE element until the servers go down, instead of dying once a more compelling PVP game becomes prominent.

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I appreciate having the opportunity to replay old games except the funny thing is the way I've done that recently has been through remakes/re-releases of those games.

Additionally there are tons of experiences we pay for that are ephemeral regardless of whether they are "always on". I'll never be able to recreate friends coming over after school for Smash Bros tournaments on the N64, no matter how many copies of Smash Brothers I have along with aging N64s. It happened, it was awesome, it's a great memory, it's done.

I think when Bungie said that it is a shared world, everyone should understand that this is a show that Bungie is putting on (and pretty damn well I think) and that at some point the show will end. Maybe they'll put on another show, maybe there will be so many other games in the world to play that trying to play a lifeless version of Destiny will be very low on your priority list. I mean if you have XBL Gold or PS+, you get FREE games every month. I don't know why people aren't wringing their hands more over how massive their backlog is.

Though, I would appreciate it if companies sunsetting an online game would at least pass off their server code to a video game museum so at the very least the museum could spin up an instance of Destiny.

**Wow this video guy is super obnoxious**

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It's a completely valid concern. Personally speaking, I never feel the urge to go back. One of the reasons I find videogames so exciting is that they are improving at such an incredible pace. I think games today are way better than they were 5 years ago, those games were way better than the ones 10 years ago, etc.

I've tried on occasion to go back to some of my cherished favorites, and it never goes well for me. They're never as much fun as I remember them being, because the bar has been raised so far since I first played them.

I know that gamers (like fans of any medium) like to compare current released with their past favorites. "Halo CE was the best Halo" or Assassin's Creed 2 was the best AC game". And on a certain level, I think some of those feelings can be completely true and valid... but only in terms of "how good it was at the moment it came out". For all the complaining about Halo Reach, there's a reason 99% of the community stuck with it rather than going back to Halo 3 or 2. There were too many improvements for most of us to go back, even if the overall product didn't connect with some of us the same way.

So when the day comes that Destiny's servers are finally shut down for good, I suspect I'll be too engrossed with Bungie's latest game (or Titanfall 7, or whatever else I'm playing) to care.

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The retrospective about how much has changed over the past year with destiny had me thinking along these lines. Nobody will ever play the game like we did because it no longer exists in that form. Of course, that's mostly for the best.

It truly hurts me that nobody (including me) can have the experiance I had with I Love Bees. Just us old folks sitting around telling stories to each other while nobody else "gets it".

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