I am curious, still, and I'll ask since it was brought up again, why does this not apply to a book? Everything supersedes books, but IIRC you don't think they're obsolete.

http://destiny.bungie.org/forum/index.php?id=81284

Why do books have unique things they do but not comics? Surely the things a book lacks that are points in its favor should apply to comics, right? What about static visual art, paintings and drawings and such? Does that have a place on its own? Why is it the addition of the unique things books do and the unique things static visual art does isn't a substantial and worthy whole? Why does it need sound and the illusion of motion to be a medium worth using as something other than a training exercise? You mentioned the needs and character of a story, is there any story that would be suited to a comic book style of composition? Why am I going down this rabbit hole? (answer: because this viewpoint and flow of logic is, well it's pretty familiar because you've been around for years, but it's still very alien to me, I don't really grasp it, and I think it's kind of funny, and those all make me want to know more)

But if you do have the resources and years of expertise, and you just keep putting out comics, I think it's entirely valid to suggest trying to express your ideas in a more capable medium. If your ideas or presentation are hampered by a limited medium, it's not improper to criticize that choice.

Always good to have you around to look down on the entire industries and professions. :/

As other people have mentioned, people run unofficial WoW servers, that may have differences from the current official setup, and I've seen elsewhere that a lot of people play on them.
I also contest the idea that random people are important to how the game feels. I've never once seen anyone call it more than just a little thing, a touch, a nice touch but still just a touch. I'd much rather have bigger, more intricate worlds, the ability to play by myself and off-line, and whatever else they sacrificed so someone can help with a public event I don't need help with and point to a chest I didn't need.

Maybe it's not important to you, but to me it's integral to what Destiny is, which is why this conversation is weird. You want preservation, but you want a different game preserved, or only the parts you care about. You don't want anything taken away--except for what you don't think is important.

That's not true. I'm not suggesting the player base be taken away, or be allowed to be taken away. If you look I said older versions could have more players than you'd expect, if they were available. I contested the idea that that was an important element because, well, I don't think it's that important as it stands, and because I think it could have been a majorly supportive element, but people like you can't handle randoms talking (even though you said recently that people have or should have control over their own emotions, not sure how that works), so we're left with a "social" game that's not social (though they slyly stopped calling it "social" around E3 2014, hopefully because they realized it wasn't), where everything public and open could be done by bots with random names and gear and no one would know the difference, so they might as well have cut out the random people entirely and made the substantive parts of the game better. I brought it up because it's really frustrating that neither of these things happened-- we didn't a truly social game, and we didn't get a bigger, more complex, more stable game that you can play solo and off-line.

I have a confession to make. When they announced the socialness and the random players and the Tower, I thought this was going to be one of my favorite games ever because it would have people-watching, but really, it would be people-listening. That's where people-watching comes into its own and it's basically all you would be able to in Destiny. I love love love being in a crowd and hearing all the conversations and listening to this one or that one. Then I found out there was no automatic voice anywhere in the game, and that took a lot out of it for me. So I guess you can put me in a box with the other people disappointed Destiny wasn't what they expected, even though they based their expectations on something other than direct evidence. I don't think about it any more unless someone brings up how great it is having other players around-- because they're not even background noise to me, they're like the moth in the room that once in a blue moon lands somewhere slightly interesting.

Maybe you can explain it to me-- why is having someone help with a public event and then leave (which is at least 90% of the interaction I get) integral to what Destiny is?

I am curious, still, and I'll ask since it was brought up again, why does this not apply to a book? Everything supersedes books, but IIRC you don't think they're obsolete.

http://destiny.bungie.org/forum/index.php?id=81284

As for comics, I regret telling you not to work on them. While I stand by my belief that they are a medium essentially replaced by better media, the fact of the matter is those other better media are very resource intensive. Not everybody has those resources, so if you wish to hone your skills in comics and don't have a bazillion dollars to make animation, that's perfectly fine, and you can learn a lot about your craft by doing so. You might even make the best comic book ever!

Cody, I love you, you ridiculous man. After several years, you've modified your opinion that a medium should not exist... because now you think it acts as training for a better medium. I haven't read further yet, I hope you stopped after this, because no one's going take you that seriously in this thread or probably this month. Yes, you have some valid points elsewhere, the genre and even the medium of something should open for people to say "really, you picked that?", but you reiterated that an artist's chosen medium-- an artist this community is quite fond of-- serves only as the tricycle to another medium's bicycle. That's... I love you, man, I can't stop grinning.
I am curious, still, and I'll ask since it was brought up again, why does this not apply to a book? Everything supersedes books, but IIRC you don't think they're obsolete.

No, of course not. But from my point of view, this metaphor is sort of different. Destiny IS trying to use color to take a shot of the sunset. You just don't find the sunset - playing with people all the time in a shared changing world - worth the cost of color film - always online, things added and lost . And that's a valid opinion. I might share it if I didn't enjoy the sunset so much.

Interestingly in the case of Destiny, I think we do both like the sunset. Playing with others is absolutely the best part of Destiny. We agree.

To extend your analogy, I'm saying that you can get color film for less money than you think… and that the qualities that make black and white film so great, don't really apply to a sunset anyway.

Or something. Metaphors.

I'll always remember Cody telling me I should get out of comics because he thought the medium was bad. But when I sit down to make a comic, that kind of comment doesn't help me or the potential reader of the comic. It's just Cody's opinion, which is fine for him to have. But if he keeps telling me that every issue I release or something, I'm going to say in a Dude voice, "Hey man, this is just a negative vibe at this point, man. Tell me how to make what I'm making better, not what I should be making. Man." :)

I think that the 'what' is a perfectly valid form of criticism. Bioshock Infinite was an FPS, but as Tevis Thompson put very well:

"This line of thinking seems illegitimate to most reviewers. You can’t question a game’s genre. You are supposed to take the game on its own genre terms, see what it’s trying to do within them, and then evaluate it fairly. But what if what it’s trying to do is dumb? Telling the story of a violent man trying to come to terms with his crimes while using lightning to make heads explode is dumb."

Narcogen has said multiple times that my criticisms should be discounted because I wish Bungie had made another game. Examining such choices critically is perfectly acceptable, and in fact should be encouraged. Destiny is a game about shooting monsters with your friends and getting cool guns. So why can I not argue that an MMO is a dumb way to do that?

I think you can do that. What I don't understand is why you KEEP doing it. For years. In a forum that was generally intended as a gathering for fans of the game.

I mean, I get your criticism and your opinions so much I can truly predict your posts as any news comes out now.

Farmville was absolutely ravaged by critics, but by all accounts it did exactly what it set out to do. For the experience it was trying to provide, it was fantastic. But that experience was dumb. Just like having to play the same shit over and over so you can earn marks or get drops is dumb.

Okay, that's your opinion. So if you're trying to say Destiny is the same, why not stop playing it? Would you find yourself at a Farmville forum telling people what they like is "dumb" for years? Would that help the developer? The people who do like it? Would it help you?

As for comics, I regret telling you not to work on them. While I stand by my belief that they are a medium essentially replaced by better media, the fact of the matter is those other better media are very resource intensive. Not everybody has those resources, so if you wish to hone your skills in comics and don't have a bazillion dollars to make animation, that's perfectly fine, and you can learn a lot about your craft by doing so. You might even make the best comic book ever!

But if you do have the resources and years of expertise, and you just keep putting out comics, I think it's entirely valid to suggest trying to express your ideas in a more capable medium. If your ideas or presentation are hampered by a limited medium, it's not improper to criticize that choice.

And since I don't think it's a 'limited medium', those comments won't help me at all. :/

In that sense, such a criticism really is telling you how to make something better. If that director you were talking about didn't have 10 million dollars, than sure, make a play. But if he did, and the ideas in the play would have been better expressed in film, then it's a perfectly valid thing to say to him.

I said it was perfectly valid. It just doesn't help him since he obviously wanted to make a play and use the unique aspects of the medium to tell his story. You apparently don't care for certain mediums, so why would he listen to someone who isn't even his intended audience?

If I want to show the beauty of a sunset, and I shot it in black and white, would it be wrong to say "You should have shot that in color if that's what you were going for?"

No, of course not. But from my point of view, this metaphor is sort of different. Destiny IS trying to use color to take a shot of the sunset. You just don't find the sunset - playing with people all the time in a shared changing world - worth the cost of color film - always online, things added and lost . And that's a valid opinion. I might share it if I didn't enjoy the sunset so much.

Better media, huh? As simple as that. SMH.

Your self-regard could use a helluva haircut.

I don't think anybody will contend that certain media do things better than other media. It stands to reason then, that a given idea is best expressed in a medium most suited for it. It's just reasoning, not disrespect.

Your self-regard could use a helluva haircut.

The nature of Destiny does not allow for preservation easily.

What can you back that up with?

It doesn't need back up. The game was conceived as a shared living (read evolving) world, and that means things change, and change involves new things being added and old things going away.

That doesn't preclude being able to experience it minus some or all changes. My question was to the ability to do that, how easy it is in practical terms to preserve things, and how he knows how easy it is.

Like live theater, sometimes a new actor has to sub in for the original castee.

This isn't that much like that situation.
They could have had the new voice for the new lines and the old voice for the old ones and put in some in-universe justification. They could have had a toggle for the old lines (IDK how easy that would be but I guarantee it's possible). They could have hired better in the first place, and gotten someone who's a professional voice actor and/or not so famous and busy it would take a large amount of scheduling and money to get more lines.

They could have but they didn't and they have to continue developing the game.

Did you miss the part where I said it bothers me they didn't do things they could've done, in design and more recently, to keep things available?

This eventuality could be foreseen by listening to how they described the game they were building early on. Guess I don't get the outcry or surprise now.

Depending on the resources they were working with, they could've had the recurring events take place less frequently (or even on the same schedule because chaos is fun) and kept them where they were. They could've made them tie to the story differently so it made sense for them to continue, or invented new justification. They could've ignored the story concerns since Weksis the Meek coming back to life 50,000 times already stretches believability.
What's this about menu music? Is it just gone? I'm sure they could've not removed it.
There are so many things they could have done to preserve things more both initially and recently, and they didn't, and that's what upsets and worries me. The kicker is that if it was out on PC pretty much all of this would not concern me because people would have the old versions, the old code and data, and ways of keeping it and still experiencing it, but because it's only on locked-down consoles we only get what Bungie gives us, and if they take something away it's up to them or people who are more technically inclined than even most PC game mod people to keep it and make it playable.

No, because Destiny is a shared world with public spaces. If we're both there at the same time, my world can't be different than yours. Even if you hack something that keeps it like it was, you still need a playerbase with you. The restriction isn't the locked console--the restriction is that it's not only your world.

As other people have mentioned, people run unofficial WoW servers, that may have differences from the current official setup, and I've seen elsewhere that a lot of people play on them.
I also contest the idea that random people are important to how the game feels. I've never once seen anyone call it more than just a little thing, a touch, a nice touch but still just a touch. I'd much rather have bigger, more intricate worlds, the ability to play by myself and off-line, and whatever else they sacrificed so someone can help with a public event I don't need help with and point to a chest I didn't need.

Maybe it's not important to you, but to me it's integral to what Destiny is, which is why this conversation is weird. You want preservation, but you want a different game preserved, or only the parts you care about. You don't want anything taken away--except for what you don't think is important.

Yep, I understand that, and that's why after answering you question, I switched to better approximations for the rest of the post. The play is the thing.

I heard you. I used the example of the play as well, but there is a reason that for narrative works, film has almost entirely replaced the stage. It is also not a coincidence that film is more permanent. It's definitely not a coincidence that the things film does best are idea driven, and the things it doesn't do so well are performance driven.

I'll always remember Cody telling me I should get out of comics because he thought the medium was bad. But when I sit down to make a comic, that kind of comment doesn't help me or the potential reader of the comic. It's just Cody's opinion, which is fine for him to have. But if he keeps telling me that every issue I release or something, I'm going to say in a Dude voice, "Hey man, this is just a negative vibe at this point, man. Tell me how to make what I'm making better, not what I should be making. Man." :)

I think that the 'what' is a perfectly valid form of criticism. Bioshock Infinite was an FPS, but as Tevis Thompson put very well:

"This line of thinking seems illegitimate to most reviewers. You can’t question a game’s genre. You are supposed to take the game on its own genre terms, see what it’s trying to do within them, and then evaluate it fairly. But what if what it’s trying to do is dumb? Telling the story of a violent man trying to come to terms with his crimes while using lightning to make heads explode is dumb."

Narcogen has said multiple times that my criticisms should be discounted because I wish Bungie had made another game. Examining such choices critically is perfectly acceptable, and in fact should be encouraged. Destiny is a game about shooting monsters with your friends and getting cool guns. So why can I not argue that an MMO is a dumb way to do that?

Farmville was absolutely ravaged by critics, but by all accounts it did exactly what it set out to do. For the experience it was trying to provide, it was fantastic. But that experience was dumb. Just like having to play the same shit over and over so you can earn marks or get drops is dumb.

As for comics, I regret telling you not to work on them. While I stand by my belief that they are a medium essentially replaced by better media, the fact of the matter is those other better media are very resource intensive. Not everybody has those resources, so if you wish to hone your skills in comics and don't have a bazillion dollars to make animation, that's perfectly fine, and you can learn a lot about your craft by doing so. You might even make the best comic book ever!

But if you do have the resources and years of expertise, and you just keep putting out comics, I think it's entirely valid to suggest trying to express your ideas in a more capable medium. If your ideas or presentation are hampered by a limited medium, it's not improper to criticize that choice.

In that sense, such a criticism really is telling you how to make something better. If that director you were talking about didn't have 10 million dollars, than sure, make a play. But if he did, and the ideas in the play would have been better expressed in film, then it's a perfectly valid thing to say to him.

If I want to show the beauty of a sunset, and I shot it in black and white, would it be wrong to say "You should have shot that in color if that's what you were going for?"

I've had illustrations rejected, removed from different editions, and other similar situations. There have been times where it bummed me out and other times where it did not. Sometimes I understood why it happened, sometimes I didn't, but I knew going into it that it might happen because I was familiar with the work and my contract. Things flux and change and I am not in control as a contract artist.

Having your illustrations removed from subsequent editions is not the same as having them retroactively removed from existing editions. If your illustrations are removed, the original editions are still out there. When an online game updates, the original is overwritten and gone forever.

Yep, I understand that, and that's why after answering you question, I switched to better approximations for the rest of the post. The play is the thing.

And as Marty said, no amount of videos or audio archives can replace the actual experience.

Right. And as his statement also reveals - the only way that one can try and relieve the experience of good food - a very temporary form of entertainment - is for the chef to never change his recipe. The restaurant can never shut down.

But Destiny changes their recipe. They ARE online. It is a changing, temporary experience. They have said this from the start. They have chosen this nature. If you don't like it, hey - that's fine. But this is the boat we're on now. You can try and help repair it as we go, or you can jump overboard, but when you continually lament that we should have taken a car, I'll remind you, "We're on a boat!" :)

This thread is starting to go in circles, heh. Your comments seem only to target specific sentences of mine instead of all of it that actually explains my point. I think any future comments I make will just keep pointing back to things I've already said, like here. It's sort of a deja vu since I've done this dance with you before. So I'm going to just let my comments stand as they are. :)

The nature of Destiny does not allow for preservation easily.

What can you back that up with?

It doesn't need back up. The game was conceived as a shared living (read evolving) world, and that means things change, and change involves new things being added and old things going away.

That doesn't preclude being able to experience it minus some or all changes. My question was to the ability to do that, how easy it is in practical terms to preserve things, and how he knows how easy it is.

Like live theater, sometimes a new actor has to sub in for the original castee.

This isn't that much like that situation.
They could have had the new voice for the new lines and the old voice for the old ones and put in some in-universe justification. They could have had a toggle for the old lines (IDK how easy that would be but I guarantee it's possible). They could have hired better in the first place, and gotten someone who's a professional voice actor and/or not so famous and busy it would take a large amount of scheduling and money to get more lines.

They could have but they didn't and they have to continue developing the game.

Did you miss the part where I said it bothers me they didn't do things they could've done, in design and more recently, to keep things available?

Depending on the resources they were working with, they could've had the recurring events take place less frequently (or even on the same schedule because chaos is fun) and kept them where they were. They could've made them tie to the story differently so it made sense for them to continue, or invented new justification. They could've ignored the story concerns since Weksis the Meek coming back to life 50,000 times already stretches believability.
What's this about menu music? Is it just gone? I'm sure they could've not removed it.
There are so many things they could have done to preserve things more both initially and recently, and they didn't, and that's what upsets and worries me. The kicker is that if it was out on PC pretty much all of this would not concern me because people would have the old versions, the old code and data, and ways of keeping it and still experiencing it, but because it's only on locked-down consoles we only get what Bungie gives us, and if they take something away it's up to them or people who are more technically inclined than even most PC game mod people to keep it and make it playable.

No, because Destiny is a shared world with public spaces. If we're both there at the same time, my world can't be different than yours. Even if you hack something that keeps it like it was, you still need a playerbase with you. The restriction isn't the locked console--the restriction is that it's not only your world.

As other people have mentioned, people run unofficial WoW servers, that may have differences from the current official setup, and I've seen elsewhere that a lot of people play on them.
I also contest the idea that random people are important to how the game feels. I've never once seen anyone call it more than just a little thing, a touch, a nice touch but still just a touch. I'd much rather have bigger, more intricate worlds, the ability to play by myself and off-line, and whatever else they sacrificed so someone can help with a public event I don't need help with and point to a chest I didn't need.
I typed a bunch more on this but it veers around, so I'll put it elsewhere... edit: or not, since I copied something else to the clipboard ~_~

I've had illustrations rejected, removed from different editions, and other similar situations. There have been times where it bummed me out and other times where it did not. Sometimes I understood why it happened, sometimes I didn't, but I knew going into it that it might happen because I was familiar with the work and my contract. Things flux and change and I am not in control as a contract artist.

Having your illustrations removed from subsequent editions is not the same as having them retroactively removed from existing editions. If your illustrations are removed, the original editions are still out there. When an online game updates, the original is overwritten and gone forever.

And as Marty said, no amount of videos or audio archives can replace the actual experience.

I think yes, it is a matter of the vision of Destiny. Overcoming practical challenges, like a voice actor you couldn't get back or limited space/memory for Blades and Wolves, is how that vision remains reality.

So which is it, you said it's the vision then you said it's practicality.
Anyway, surely the vision should trump practicality as much as possible, and if they wanted a world that feels alive and active they should find ways to have more going on.

If you look at how I worded my comment, I was trying to say practical decisions are how a vision comes to be. They are intertwined. A vision is the dream; the practical efforts are the dream-become-reality.

Bungie decided to create an always-online game that allowed for the type of interconnected gameplay we have now experienced. In making that vision a reality, they came across challenges - and have continued to do so, and will always continue to do so, as any creator does.

This is where decisions have to be made. Examples we've mentioned already are decisions regarding having a unified Ghost going forward or how they want to handle temporary public area 'invasions'. To me, these are the 'practical' steps in making Destiny continue to exist.

Obviously people won't like every change they make and I'm not saying you or anyone else shouldn't criticize those decisions. And I, too, hope the world continues to feel even more alive.

But a lot of what I've been trying to say here is that, to me, a number of comments in this thread, mostly by Cody, goes beyond critiquing those decisions in an effort to improve it, and more about disliking the foundation - that base vision - of Destiny.

And if you dislike what Destiny wants to be, that's fine too. But a year in (or even a year out), it's not going to switch mediums or become a different thing entirely.

To me, continuing this direction of negative deconstruction is, to continue the metaphor, like going up to a director of a play and telling them they should have made a movie. That person is welcome to have and say their opinion, but it doesn't help the director or anyone else trying to make or enjoy the play better.

I'll always remember Cody telling me I should get out of comics because he thought the medium was bad. But when I sit down to make a comic, that kind of comment doesn't help me or the potential reader of the comic. It's just Cody's opinion, which is fine for him to have. But if he keeps telling me that every issue I release or something, I'm going to say in a Dude voice, "Hey man, this is just a negative vibe at this point, man. Tell me how to make what I'm making better, not what I should be making. Man." :)

This is incomparable, because having children is kind of a moral responsibility for the future of our species (at least how I see it). I feel like I have a duty to have a child or children and raise them to uphold, preserve spread cultural and ethical values that are a benefit to humanity, and morally right.

If having kids is a moral responsibility, then don't get married because you might not be able to have kids with your wife. In that case you'll just have to get divorced or decide that you like being an immoral person.

No one's saying they shouldn't have done it, they're saying they should have done it differently.

If they'd done it differently, it would not be what it is or what it was. You want to preserve what it was last September, but unlike a static work of art, it's dynamic and relies/relied in part on live people interacting with it to exist. If you take away that aspect, you're not talking about Destiny any more.

I'm not saying that. Why is this so hard to grasp? I'm fine with change. I don't like things being removed, never to be seen again, especially when those things are fun or took a lot of effort to make. I don't like the inability to choose when there are multiple versions of something.
Again with the false dichotomy too, the choice is not "Destiny as it is" or nothing at all, there are a million different ways they could've done this.

Again, it wouldn't have been Destiny. They've talked about the world changing from the beginning. Get used to things, places, and people going away never to be seen again. That's life. All the more reason to savor each "age" of Destiny.

The nature of Destiny does not allow for preservation easily.

What can you back that up with?

It doesn't need back up. The game was conceived as a shared living (read evolving) world, and that means things change, and change involves new things being added and old things going away.

Like live theater, sometimes a new actor has to sub in for the original castee.

This isn't that much like that situation.
They could have had the new voice for the new lines and the old voice for the old ones and put in some in-universe justification. They could have had a toggle for the old lines (IDK how easy that would be but I guarantee it's possible). They could have hired better in the first place, and gotten someone who's a professional voice actor and/or not so famous and busy it would take a large amount of scheduling and money to get more lines.

They could have but they didn't and they have to continue developing the game.

Depending on the resources they were working with, they could've had the recurring events take place less frequently (or even on the same schedule because chaos is fun) and kept them where they were. They could've made them tie to the story differently so it made sense for them to continue, or invented new justification. They could've ignored the story concerns since Weksis the Meek coming back to life 50,000 times already stretches believability.
What's this about menu music? Is it just gone? I'm sure they could've not removed it.
There are so many things they could have done to preserve things more both initially and recently, and they didn't, and that's what upsets and worries me. The kicker is that if it was out on PC pretty much all of this would not concern me because people would have the old versions, the old code and data, and ways of keeping it and still experiencing it, but because it's only on locked-down consoles we only get what Bungie gives us, and if they take something away it's up to them or people who are more technically inclined than even most PC game mod people to keep it and make it playable.

No, because Destiny is a shared world with public spaces. If we're both there at the same time, my world can't be different than yours. Even if you hack something that keeps it like it was, you still need a playerbase with you. The restriction isn't the locked console--the restriction is that it's not only your world.

No one's saying they shouldn't have done it, they're saying they should have done it differently.

If they'd done it differently, it would not be what it is or what it was. You want to preserve what it was last September, but unlike a static work of art, it's dynamic and relies/relied in part on live people interacting with it to exist. If you take away that aspect, you're not talking about Destiny any more.

I'm not saying that. Why is this so hard to grasp? I'm fine with change. I don't like things being removed, never to be seen again, especially when those things are fun or took a lot of effort to make. I don't like the inability to choose when there are multiple versions of something.
Again with the false dichotomy too, the choice is not "Destiny as it is" or nothing at all, there are a million different ways they could've done this.