MEGA::Chapters 3 & 4 (Fan Creations)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Monday, September 07, 2015, 12:04 (3368 days ago) @ INSANEdrive

------- Chapter 3 :: Reviving Ghosts -------
(Before the Fall)

What has been the goal that Bungie has been reaching to do with Destiny? What was it that Bungie said that got me SO PUMPED for Destiny? That got me to believe that Bungie wouldn't fuck this up.

Well. Yet again the past shall tell us story. I present to you links to the respective ViDocs, and the … basically they are transcripts of said ViDocs below (some of you may be reading this from work for some reason). Let these videos fill your head with how you felt during the weeks before launch, and let the context of retrospect fill you into the now.

For those of you listening along, I shall skip this part and see you on the other side of Introspective.

Feb 17, 2013

"A fantasy you have when you're creating an experience is that someone else is going to enjoy it. One reason the game was so intriguing is that we're reaching players in ways we haven't before. We're really going to make a conscious effort to build an experience which is going to be meaningful for people. Like how do you keep players going for fifty or a hundred hours over some number of months, and to not only want to play the game, but to play it with their friends?

"We needed something that challenges and inspires all of us. Something that I think has enough ideas in it that will last us the next ten years."

"We are blazing a ton of new trails.”

"We're building something alive, it has a nature that we don't totally control. Things are going to happen, that we don't plan, and that's amazing.

"The best thing with Bungie is that when you have these crazy ideas you know they're going to get funnelled into a game that's fun.

"We're creating something completely new and it's a scary place, but if it's not scary then it's not going to be good.

“We've gone from continuing to make Halo games to doing something which certainly draws on our past experiences and plays to our strengths, but it's new and exciting. It's going to take on a life of its own.”

Aug 22, 2013

“The number one priority was to make a world that people wanted to be in. Something that you want to go back to and you want to explore and to have enough variety where you never get bored. “

“What I believe is going to be most exciting for people who play destiny is the social experience of colliding with other people in this big world. It’s not something that happens in most action games.”

“You choice of the character class, the character race, will condition how that character is going to evolve over time.”

“We want them to meet different people or invite their friends into that experience. We want them to have a great public event in this cross roads space where some players are moving towards a strike or on a story journey.”

“You want to play with other players, you can absolutely do it, and if you don’t, you just go off to your own adventure.”

“Getting loot is really dam exciting. It’s a satisfying feeling. What is this going to enable me to do? What did I win? What ability? How this going to look?”

”If we can simultaneously capture amazing action game, but still allow players to customize it for themselves and they can pick the path that they want to take. We can hit all those elements; we can bottle up that lighting a second time”

Published on Jun 11, 2014

Hey everybody. I’m Jason Jones. And I wanna show you what we've been working on here. At Bungie since we first introduced Destiny back in 2013.

Destiny is our next gen first-person shooter, where you’ll explore the abandoned ruins of ancient human civilization, long after it has been overtaken by our enemies.

But there's still hope. A candle in the darkness. The last safe city on earth.

At the center the city is our home, The Tower. The place we return after every adventure.

To claim our rewards. To buy and sell weapons and gear. And meet up with our friends.

In Destiny you choose who you want to be. And who you want to become.

You go out into the world earn powerful weapons. Cool armor. And combat abilities that change the way you fight.

The choices you make say a lot about the type of player you are in Destiny

There are so many ways to upgrade your class. And perfect your style of play.

As you defeat your enemies, you’ll discover new places to go, and uncover more reasons to head out on new adventures. So we created the director. It answers the question, what’s awesome to do right now and what's my reward for doing it?

And that's important because in Destiny there's a ton of cool stuff to do like a great story campaign where you’ll explore the mysteries our lost worlds.

And from the beginning we built Destiny to be played cooperatively, either match made or with your friends.

On your adventures through the world you'll stumble on public events where you can join up with other players on the fly to take on huge targets of opportunity

Before returning to your journey right where you left off

When you ready for a little downtime, you can go off the beaten path and explore

And when you wanna team up with two other players and fight through waves of enemies to take down an epic boss, you head into a strike

There's so much amazing stuff to find in Destiny. So many ways to combine your class, your abilities, your armor and weapons, to build the guardian you want to become

And you can even take that Guardian into the crucible, our intense competitive multiplayer.

As you build your character, grow more powerful as you take on greater challenges, and maybe one day become powerful enough to finally find a way inside the vault of glass to defeat the most challenging experience with ever created and earns Destiny's ultimate rewards.

So that's what we've been doing here at Bungie. We’re having a great time playing this game and we can't wait for you experience it too.

------- Chapter 4 :: Introspective -------
(I speak from the past)

Among all the possibilities that were swimming in my head as I eagerly and painfully waited for Destinies sweet sweet release, by far the most important element. The most... important ...element. What had the most impact on me was the "Destiny: Official E3 Gameplay Experience Trailer". Jason Jones was front and center and telling me "Story", "Explore", "Things to do", and all these were key words that I as fan of Bungie had. When the founder speaks you take note. It was because of this trailer here that I had planned, perhaps foolishly, perhaps very foolishly, to have Destiny be my core game. If Bungie could deliver what was being sold, if it could deliver the quality of the past 10 plus years of Bungie games, there would have been no need for me to play anything else. I wouldn't have wanted to play anything else. Why bother? Even if you just dumb it down to just being clever tactic of ... or whatever... just "marketing"; I got hyped up because when Bungie says they are going to do something they do it. Bungie doesn't bullshit, or at least it seems to be much less in comparison of general marketing. In retrospect what other context did I have? Even for the Bungie games I did not play, there was a certain degree of expectation.

Bungie games, after a certain point in its history, always had amazing game play that stacked on to an even more amazing story which feed into the amazing game play of an even more amazing world. I was also curious to see how Bungie would handle a new game of this scope and, in a way, a new community since as far as I could tell (at HBO) they had done so well with Halo. The way I saw it, even if they stumbled at first, they could and would right the wrongs. They had a whole year to correct it. They had already allotted time for two whole batches of DLC after the initial release. I also at the time didn't even conceder the constant patches and updates. So. I stayed because I was watching. I wanted to see what Bungie would do. How would they adapt to this social game? What issues would arise and how within a year they could fix it, and If they couldn't in that time how would they speak up about it. I figured that the last thing they would want to do to their fans is leave them floundering. I stayed because Destiny is a social experiment both in and for play. Both literately and figuratively. It seems that neither Bungie nor its fans, and even I in retrospect to a degree, realized the totality of this embedded social nature within the game play its self. Still, even with the little I did realize with my expectation of growing pains, and the declarations for 10 years of play, I found the possibilities of Destiny fascinating. Amongst all my want to say what I mean, for this, you're just going to have to trust that I see something that I can't currently find words nor a metaphor to provide an idea. All I can say is that they have yet to do it, but they are close to doing something no other game I know of can do. I figured so many things, and being so filled with intelligent guesses and expectation may be why the outcome of Year One has hit me so unusually, uniquely hard. I suppose that is the downside to being a inscrutably, inescapably, insatiably curious Warlock. This is the risk I took without releasing it; I went all in without knowing the hand.

To that end it may very well be my fault for expecting Bungie to be able to do so well simply based on what it did in the past. I did not consider the nature of new things, the nature of creating a videogame. I did not know. I’m smarter now though, and I know better. Sometimes 3ds Max, Maya or whatever… just wants to crash to spite ya. Sometimes a teammate has to work on other things, and now instead of going home today you are going home tomorrow. Sometimes that super interesting idea you had on paper just can’t be made right now. Sometimes months of time can be cut, and now you have more work with even less time. In all of this we are human... in some form. We err and can only do so much with the time we have. OF my time, I made a choice. With the exception of a few days attempts here and there of the Master Chief Collection, I have played only Destiny on my Xbox One. Solid. That could impact my outlook too couldn't it?

No. Not for this. Not to say it isn't possible, but this is what I signed up for when I started watching. I'm not burned out and I know the difference. I love videogames and will mention this again later in these MEGA posts. Yet in turn from all my observations, I became surprised in what I saw. It seems all we are doing when we post about Destiny in Year One, is "teaching". One in the same of course, but I can’t understate my surprise on how things turned out. I guess that's just me being ignorant too. I blame Tantalus.

I present to you a Calvin and Hobbs story, where Calvin wants to get a toy hat from the back of a cereal box that he thinks will make him fly. I find the events of this strip to be a fairly solid example of the pitfall of expectation. For those of you listening, I’m going to continue on, and leave the reading of Calvin and Hobbes to you.

At this point I expect you have read the strip, or at the very least understand the point in my above synopsis of it. Yet do not presume I did not have fun in Destiny. I did have fun, but it was very limited in scope to what I was expecting and was a lot of work to get there by myself. Fortunately, my version of Destiny came with a big one hundred and fifty dollar box, so that's cool .

It seems that amongst all thisss...if-only-I-had-a-nickel-for-every-time-someone-mentioned-it'sss... potential, which is simply ridiculous in its amount; Destiny Year One felt mismanaged, inconstant, and at times even incompetent. What kind of Marry Jane were you all smoking in production? It's like you forgot yourself. Must of been good shit, am I right?

I never had to do this directly with Bungie before, though I'm not too sure if that means anything. I mean, yea, we fans are your teachers I get it… but it wasn’t so direct. I don’t recall constant posts of game theory at HBO, I recall constant posts about Story, Recon, and Cannon... so story again for some reason... at HBO. So why is it that this occurred with Bungie in Destinies year one?

Well, fortunately for you all I have enough tinfoil here to guess. ;D

------- Click here for Chapters 5 - 6 -------