Has any dev company burned through the good faith of fans faster? It's astounding to me how hard and far they've managed to drop from their Halo days in the span of 2 Destiny titles. What went so catastrophically wrong inside Bungie following their departure from Microsoft?
Company direction.
I'd say Bethesda has taken the crown
This isn't far off though
Bethesda has literally always been a divisive company to put it kindly. Usenet used to have Bethesda hate threads that are amusingly similar to what Ganker has on current year.
Responses are equally proto-/v/.
Oh Hey Albion Jumpscare.
It tool CDPR one day to prove Shazam right and become the laughing stock of the entire industry.
Kids these days don't realize Bungie's best days were before the Microsoft takeover when they were a Mac and Linux game dev.
probably that they were always shit, and microsoft's boot on their neck kept them in line for halo
More that Halo was mostly developed before the acquisition. All they had to do afterwards was downgrade it to work on a console.
>sony paid $3.6 BILLION for bungie
They burned my trust when they fixed the bug that let you play destiny 1 f2p base game using the free trial.
it's crazy how bad the destiny games are. How much do you think they wasted getting Peter Dinklage to do a voice over that they then paid a different VA to redo? Oh, and let's not forget them removing paid content from D2 because the game has zero optimization and they literally ran out of space lmao.
>getting Peter Dinklage to do a voice over that they then paid a different VA to redo?
shit like this is wild
I'm in the camp that Dinklage wasn't awful, his voice was monotone and a bit lifeless but he's also playing a fricking robot. Not to mention the lines and dialogue he had to work with wasn't great. 95% of his dialogue was basically"is that who I think it is?!?! Get out of here, quick, no time to explain!". It's like he was chosen as the scape goat early on as though his performance was the biggest problem with the game so I hope he got a decent payday for it at least.
>Has any dev company burned through the good faith of fans faster?
Game Freak.
EA
DICE
Ubisoft
Bioware
Blizzard
343 Industries
Paradox Interactive
Did people ever have faith in EA? I think most people just see them as a cold publisher.
the craziest thing to me was watching their "O Brave New World" vidoc before Destiny.
It was like a 50 minute video overviewing all their games from Gnop to Reach.
There was a bit about the communities fostered by each game series, particularly Marathon, Myth, and Halo, and even a whole section devoted to the community and Bungie fans, fan creations, and particularly the creative tools Bungie gave their community to make cool shit: like the "lower weapon" button combo in Halo 2, and the Fog skull, were specifically made to help the Red Versus Blue guys make machinima, Claude Errera's lan party house, all the community creations, stuff like theater mode, file share, and Forge in Halo 3, which got expanded on even further in Reach...
Some stuff they didn't mention in the video: Halo was always really customizable: you could edit a ton of the multiplayer settings in local custom games starting with the very first game. Bungie released "Forge and Anvil" which were their in-house mapmaking tools for Marathon with Marathon 3, which gave rise to tons of custom campaigns. Halo: Custom Edition for PC, which has endless mods...
Then I sat down to play Destiny and it's this incredibly controlled experience. You're really not allowed to play it in any way other than the way the devs seemed to want you to play it. There's only two difficulty options for the campaign, and difficulty doesn't even matter once you're over-leveled.
There was basically nothing given to the community to let people be creative with the game.
It was frankly shocking: going from the extreme customization of Halo: Reach, which was so granular it let you tool around with the AI in firefight through custom skulls, to the extremely limited always-online MMO style experience of Destiny 1, it was like I wasn't even playing a Bungie game.
custom games for Halo were so great, I remember H3 having a Battle Royale custom game where everyone would spawn with random weapons each life. How much fun and crazy mongoose and warthog race tracks could be. Then the ninja courses where you had to know weird glitches and tricks to get through them. H2 though I think will always be the best, hard to explain the excitement of multiplayer back then with Xbox live still being relatively new. Then the game itself having all kinds of weird glitches and shit you could do like being able to get outside the multiplayer levels and explore around looking for cool shit. Damn, my nostalgia is kicking up and I might have to reinstall MCC this weekend to run through a campaign or two.
Why do people just assume dev studios aren't constantly changing staff? The name Bungie is meaningless. The team who made Halo isn't the team who made Destiny and even those that stayed are 20 years older and do not have the same people who had been working alongside/above/below them.
Putting stock in any game studio is meaningless. Too many variables exist for some kind of 'standard'
Bungie changed a ton between Halo CE and Reach and yet none of the games are thought of as being worse than 4, 5, or 6. So even though Bungie was hiring and losing people they continued creating games people enjoyed. Something clearly shifted heavy between Reach and Destiny 1 because it feels like a completely different studio made the game as others have pointed out.
>Bungie changed a ton between Halo CE and Reach and yet none of the games are thought of as being worse than 4, 5, or 6.
343 being astronomically bad is a separate issue as they are an entirely separate studio. You might as well compare Halo to Flappy Bird and say
>well relative to this game they are all pretty similar
What you do not address is that, within the Bungie made Halos, the quality of each individual Halo relative to one or another remains widely contested. You could even just look through the Ganker archive to see people who shit on Reach and ODST constantly, even 3 compared to 1 and 2, and so on.
This isn't exactly true with Bungie.
Halo 2 was a major shakeup for the studio, with a few big names leaving including the co-founders, but for the most part everyone else stayed.
In 2006 the studio started getting really bloated because of Microsoft panicking and bringing on a bunch of corporate hires: so the ratio became something like 1 to 4 original Bungie employees and new hires.
Also in 2006 one of the co-founders came back after Microsoft and Bungie higher ups begged.
Most of the original Halo team were there until around 2010, then there was another shakeup when Microsoft got the rights to Halo: some of the Halo team left to join 343i, but again most old guard Bungie dudes were still at Bungie.
In 2014 there was a major shakeup because of Activision basically butchering the studio and forcing a bunch of people they didn't like to be fired, including several Bungie oldguard.
It's not a straightforward story of "people were constantly leaving and new people were constantly being hired"
it was more "they hired a bunch of new people in 2006, then in 2014 a bunch of the oldguard were fired, which completely changed the company into something else"
There's a specific moment when things seriously went to shit, and it was 2014 due to Activision.
are we also assuming that Bungie had the same pressure being applied and same overlook from Microsoft between each game? As well as the same values, the same people in the same positions exerting the same influence? My point was also
>Too many variables exist for some kind of 'standard'
which goes far beyond simply who was and was not there for each game. Something as simple as
>one guy wanted to implement this mechanic but somebody else on the team pushed back or completely reworked it. On the next game that person was in a position to get the mechanic in regardless or the person that usually tweaks it was no longer there or...
It's just too volatile to even try to assume
>this dev studio made a good game therefore the next game will be good
I am really not sure what your point is. You might be replying to the wrong person.
Also, Bungie as a studio had a great track record before Microsoft. Pathways Into Darkness, the Marathon series, the Myth series, ONI, these were all solid high quality games in their time.
Halo fans debate which of the Bungie games is their favorite, but I think everyone agrees the games are high quality, even if they can't agree on favorites. All the Bungie Halo games have good gameplay and a high degree of polish: they're all high quality just taken on their own merits, not compared to each other.
Even for someone like me who, for example, dislikes Halo: Reach: I dislike that game for style reasons, but I can recognize that its artstyle is extremely well developed, even if I don't personally like it.
No, things really did go to shit in 2014 due, apparently, to Activision.
Most of the oldguard were gone and, surprise surprise, Destiny was released in this weird half-finished state, and just got worse with every update.
Idk what benefit there is to pretending like the correlation between the ejection of a bunch of talented people from the studio and the loss of quality come Destiny 1 means nothing...
>Halo fans debate which of the Bungie games is their favorite, but I think everyone agrees the games are high quality, even if they can't agree on favorites.
this is a point I was trying to make earlier in the thread about the Bungie games compared to 343. It's also why I was so convinced Destiny was going to be a great game prior to its release, and why I convinced myself they'd fix it with Destiny 2. I'd never seen Bungie make a game that I'd call flat out bad.
>You might be replying to the wrong person
How do you reach that conclusion when
was explicitly in response to my post in
and my post directly quotes and responds to what you posted?
I'm also not sure how you reached
>Idk what benefit there is to pretending like the correlation between the ejection of a bunch of talented people from the studio and the loss of quality come Destiny 1 means nothing
when nothing I've posted refutes that in any way.
Perhaps you read my post, started thinking about some other post, and got yourself confused. Either way, I don't see anything in this post that responds to, or even relates to, anything I wrote.
You seem off in your own little world then.
Have a nice day.
Did I really get you mad somehow? I asked a straightforward question in
that in no way contradicts, and if anything supports, the belief that the major employee turn around at Bungie in 2014 was a major contributing factor in Destiny sucking wiener.
Don't start getting weird and autistic just because you miscomprehended a question as simple as
>Why do people put stock in studio names in the first place
I'm quite relaxed.
For soem reason my eyes just glaze over when I start reading yuor posts.
>I think everyone agrees the games are high quality, even if they can't agree on favorites.
I should also separately make a point that you should comb through the archives for people on Ganker talking about ODST and Reach before you assert that
>everyone agrees the games are high quality
I've been in countless threads with people relentlessly shitting on both. Perhaps it's just easy for some people to repress that fact because 4 and 5 are just that much worse.
Reach gets shit on mainly because people either hate the armor abilities or hate the story for being very different from the books. ODST I think gets unfair criticism and I'm not entirely sure what people expected from it. It was $30 at launch instead of the normal $50 and it was known and reported well before release that it wasn't a full halo entry and was more a 3.5 side story. It also introduced the firefight game mode which was clearly popular with some fans since people still play it. I'm on the side that thinks ODST and Reach are great games, and I wish Bungie had made more games where you played from a perspective other than chief.
Nta, but I'm pretty sure ODST released with a 60$ price tag.
you are right it seems, I could have sworn it wasn't a full price release but all my searches say it was full price. I'm too old and completely forgot the price I guess.
I was looking it up too, I think at one point they might have announced that it was 30$ but then Microsoft changed the price.
>Reach gets shit on mainly because people either hate the armor abilities or hate the story for being very different from the books.
Reach gets shit on for just about everything it does.
is it the one autists pissed themselves over because of spread on the DMR or whatever?
When I say everything, I mean everything. Reach got frick all right.
>When I say everything, I mean everything. Reach got frick all right.
objectively wrong but you do you boo-boo
What did Reach do well?
Battlefield is worse, bungie at least tempts people back into considering it.
Jason Jones gutted the company to appease Activision wiener and then got infected with Blizzard employees like an STD
Jason Jones is an enigma to me.
He seems like a real genius savant. Talented programmer, humanities major who was into philosophy and reading Latin, into classical mythology, etc. etc.
In interviews with him and other Bungie employees, it seemed like he worked hard, and also had an intuitive sense for what made games fun. Like apparently the Covenant being so purple and colorful was his idea, where the art guy wanted them to be grey and more serious looking, and he went in and changed the damage values on the Magnum one night to give himself an edge in multiplayer testing, as a joke, and it became the iconic Halo magnum
Bungie exists at all because of his game Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete, which he programmed for fun as a hobby and was playing with his buddies in his college dorm, when Alex Seropian came along and urged Jones to capitalize on it with a game company.
In many ways it seems like Jones is or was the soul of old Bungie
But man, I can't tell if he just caught a bad break with the activision deal or if he was deciding to sabotage his own company.
I half suspect Halo 2, and its harsh dev cycle was partially due to his direction, and an intentional attempt to destroy the company so Microsoft couldn't exploit them, which sort of failed, so maybe the Activision thing was some kind of similar antics, but man...
I can't tell if I want to sympathize with him as a tragic figure caught up in the corporate machine, literally just a dude making videogames for fun who got pushed into this profit motivated corporate game he wasn't having fun with, or if I think he's kind of a dick
>humanities major
You know it's possible that he is a more socially liberal guy, and some of the old bungie guys were becoming socially conservative and it was getting on his nerves.
Which is that catch 22 of like: sometimes really talented people have political views you don't like. Bungie seems overwhelmingly left-leaning now, but besides whoever is doing the skyboxes, the talent just isn't there anymore.
The funniest thing is that somehow people expected them to make a good Marathon remake when 99% of the guys who made the original games left a long time ago, the only guy remaining is Jason Jones and he adopted a homosexual pretentious Kojimbo-like attitude saying that SinglePlayer games are a thing of the past.
>somehow people expected them to make a good Marathon remake
Nobody expected this.
valve
Wrong image?
They've burned through employees faster. Not really the same people who made Marathon and Halo
yea like all of them almost
Konami and Square
Bungie was a few guys then they got all big and corporate