Destructoid Checkpoint: The Bungie Struggle

Bungie has always been an incredibly interesting company. They have given us two of the greatest series of the modern gaming age with Halo and Destiny. They have managed to sell themselves three different times, once to Microsoft, once to Activision, and recently to PlayStation. 

It has also been a victim of itself, and tech industry culture in general, enjoying a degree of irreverence and almost counter-cultural aesthetic in the early days, but rapidly growing into what was revealed to be a boys' club with all the bad things that go with that. They have been caught up in plagiarism issues multiple times, as well as the unfortunately regular use of unlicensed art, the most egregious of which appears to have been the use of creations by an artist known as Antireal in the development of the new Marathon game’s aesthetic. 

Bungie now comes face to face with two converging issues: a future that looks rocky, and the potential stepping in of Papa Sony in an attempt to pull them back from the ledge they have barrelled toward.

It’s their Destiny

This section will contain some vague thematic spoilers for The Edge of Fate expansion for Destiny 2. 

After calling an end to the Light and Darkness Saga that has kept the series narratively afloat since it first launched eleven years ago, Destiny has entered a new era. The recent release of The Edge of Fate expansion has seen record lows for the Destiny 2 player base at launch, with PC numbers failing to crack the 100K mark on Steam. The more hyped expansions in the game’s history have hit up to 300K, so the failure to ignite is pretty damning.

Worse still, many of the players who are engaging with the new content are simply not enjoying what is on offer, as can be seen in many social media posts, Reddit threads, and YouTube videos. The biggest cause of player unhappiness is the return of the Light Grind. New weapon and armor systems appear to have been designed to have you running the same content over and over again, for the same rewards over and over again. You can get your God Roll Tier 3 weapon, but then you need to go through all the hassle of getting it at Tier 4, then Tier 5. Add in the removal of weapon crafting—something that was actually in a pretty good state in the game—and the frustration grows further. 

In its current state, the growing sentiment is that Destiny 2 is disrespectful of players' time, with the last 10 levels of the Season Pass requiring the same experience as the previous 50 to unlock. Many small aspects of the game seem designed to leach player time, as if the most important metric is how long people are playing the game over anything else. The assumption I can make is that time in game equals a certain degree of spend, but like most things, people may have the cause and effect backward.

The flawed assumption will be that by converting more players into people who meet the longer time spent in-game metric, you can increase their spend. The reality, in my experience, is that players who, for any reason, are inspired to spend more money in the game will just be the ones who play for longer. 

The factors that influence how much money people spend on a game will actually have little to do with the game itself, and have almost everything to do with that person’s life outside the game. 

The narrative for The Edge of Fate expansion appears to be going down pretty well for some, but personally, I consider it to be one of its weakest elements. There are some time travel shenanigans, some vague allusions to concepts explored in New Weird literature, much of classic science fiction, and modern community efforts like The SCP Foundation, but mostly, from what I can tell, there has been a stripping of the agency of just about every character in the game. In an attempt to explore the concepts of determinism and fatalism the result is a confused mess that doesn’t quite pull the previous narrative strings of Destiny 2 together as smartly as it thinks it does.

No matter what, the expansion has failed to ignite the player base, and that could end up being a serious problem for a studio that is expected to start making good on the $3.6 billion that Sony recently pumped into it.

Which brings us to the other issue: Bungie’s next game, the one that Destiny is supposed to keep them alive until the release of, appears to be a title that nobody wants.

It's a Marathon, not a sprint

Marathon was supposed to be the next big thing for Bungie. A return to a genuinely interesting world with fun lore, it appeared to all get thrown out the window in favor of PvPvE trends and the glowing, golden possibility of being the first team to produce a genuinely mainstream (within gaming, at least) extraction shooter. 

Now, I diverge from what appears to be the popular consensus when it comes to how the game looks. I am a big fan of the hyper-stylized look, verging on an aggressively day-glo aesthetic. It is a shame that so much of it seems to have roots in the aforementioned stolen style of Antireal, but I like it a lot, and I know a lot of other people don’t. No matter how I feel, people have definitely struggled to embrace the way the game looks.

An alpha test let people into the game's world and gameplay loop, and it was ultimately discovered that those people didn’t seem to enjoy either. The internet was alight with negative sentiment about the game. It was boring, the classes were bad, it was ugly, the lack of PvE was dumb, the AI was not fun to fight, the feel of reward for runs was low, it was too divergent from the original Marathon world, etc. It was all flooding the web, everyone happy to take their shots at the game, especially players who couldn’t figure out why Bungie seemed to be ignoring the needs of Destiny for what was, in essence, a bad game.

On June 17, Bungie announced that Marathon would not meet its September 23 release date and would be delayed indefinitely. 

Now, say what you want about Concord and why it died, but ultimately, it may end up being one of the most useful sacrifices on the altar of gaming, ever. It was a huge failure, and it lets people know that all the effort in the world, all the investment in the world, won’t stop a game from sinking away into oblivion if it does not make a connection with players.

Would Marathon have been delayed if Concord had never happened? Maybe, maybe not, but I’m sure its spectre haunted the stakeholders when they made the decision to delay. 

With the move to PlayStation, we saw parts of Bungie being absorbed into PSas a whole. This makes perfect sense, as roles and positions can suddenly become superfluous when supported by the broader structure of a new owner, or people might be better placed doing their roles within the larger company. It happens, and it's part of the process of acquisitions. 

Where things get real is that it has been reported that Bungie has some goals it needs to reach in order to meet its end of the deal with Sony. You don’t just get $3.6 billion with no strings attached, after all. Part of those goals are rumored to be certain financial targets.

If those targets are not met, it would seem that Sony can dissolve the board of Bungie and take over the company itself. Sony already has two members on the five-person board, with noted car-enthusiast and long-term Bungie CEO Pete Parsons expected to act as the tie-breaker vote, according to a report that appeared in IGN late in 2023.

Now, that was back before The Final Shape was released, but if the financial requirements persist, it feels likely that Bungie will be under extreme pressure, and they have shown that this is not something their corporate structure handles well, at least not without a degree of human cost.

No matter what, when Bungie does finally get around to showing off whatever changes they make to Marathon, they need to be good, or we could be looking at an inglorious end for the storied developer.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Over on the Destructoid mothership, we have all manner of things for you to read this week.

Adam Newell reviews Donkey Kong Bananza, calling it one of the best Nintendo games of all time. High praise! – “Bananza is a great showcase of what the Switch 2 is capable of due to its various destructible environments and beautiful graphics. But it’s only when you start to peel back the layers and begin to put the game to its limits that you finally realize what an amazing experience you are about to dive into.”

Andrej Barovic did an ollie with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 + 4, finding the fun, but also noticing the flaws. – “What seems not to have been the focus is keeping the original vibes intact. Whereas Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 appears to be quite close to the original game, many features of THPS 4 are missing. Its career mode is nowhere to be found, free roam is absent, and its structure is now the same two-minute challenge run of the other games.”

Scott Duwe breaks down his time with Destiny 2: The Edge of Fate so far.–- “The rest of the DLC? Eh, not so much. Kepler is likely the worst destination added to the game thus far, Matterspark is an annoying and cumbersome gameplay mechanic, and having to yet again relearn new systems for weapons and armor is tiresome. And it’s for these reasons and others that I don’t play the game as often as I used to.”

Kacee Fay returns with the Weekly Watchlist Vol.2 for anyone looking for things to watch. Superman features prominently as a good way to spend some time. – “The cast of this movie makes the film what it is. David Corenswet was born to play Superman, Edi Gathegi steals every scene he’s in as the ridiculously cool Mister Terrific, Nicholas Hoult cements himself as one of the greatest comic book film villains of all time in the role of Lex Luthor, Rachel Brosnahan brings incredible heart to Lois Lane, and so on for the rest of the cast.”

And that’s it for this week, gamers. Stay gold.