Destructoid Chestpoint: Adieu, Destiny

It’s officially over for Destiny. There has been a lot of humming, hawing, hoping, and praying from the playerbase, of which I am a member, and almost certainly a haw-er, but it’s confirmed that the game has finally reached the end of the line.

Yesterday, in a traditional Thursday blog post known as the TWID (This Week In Destiny), Bungie announced that all future planned changes will be rolled into a single update called the Moment of Triumph, which will be available on June 9. This will end active development on the game, although the plan is to keep it alive, much the same way that the original Destiny is still playable. 

 Various changes are being made that players have asked for, and some interesting-sounding new content is on the way, but after this, Destiny 2 enters that strange space where the only thing keeping it alive and in the public consciousness will be the people playing it. For Bungie, it will become a part of their history, no longer part of their present. That same present seems scary and unknown, and my thoughts are with them.

Reports are circling that what is coming for Bungie is not good. We spoke last week about Sony eating $700 million in confirmed losses so far on the Bungie deal, and reporting from Jason Schreier over at Bloomberg implies that the axe is falling. Despite the hopes and dreams of Destiny 2 players, it seems that Destiny 3 is not currently in development.

Marathon, while not a failure, didn’t set the world on fire, with an all-time peak of under ninety thousand, and a 24-hour peak just north of twelve thousand. The Marathon community is, by any metric, not able to support a company that has the running costs of Bungie. Betting on a PvP-focused extraction shooter was a mistake, and the team has announced plans to bring in PvE modes in Season 2. Whether those modes help or stick around remains to be seen, but they have finally ignited a genuine interest in me for Marathon after I bounced off the whole “extraction” thing pretty hard.

The other part of the swirling rumors is that Bungie will be making some pretty big layoffs. They will simply not need the staff they currently have and are likely to enter a period known as “right-sizing.” Right-sizing involves letting people go, but it can also involve hiring people on, depending on the aims of the organization undergoing the process. It’s mostly about becoming a seed again, something that can survive the winter, then regrow into whatever Bungie will be in the future.

Bungie will be in an interesting place, looking for their next project and trying to convince Sony what they should be allowed to do next. It is depressing to think of Bungie in those terms, of needing permission, but that is the likely reality of their situation. 

The simple pitch sounds like Destiny 3, but you need to keep in mind that Destiny 2 had a rough enough launch, much of the creative team that made it all work has actually left for other companies or other projects, and the team that stayed, in Sony’s potentially cruel estimation, is the one that oversaw the ultimate failure of the game.

It’s harsh, but that’s corporate life.

Even then, you need a concrete view of what Destiny 3 even looks like. How does the game play? Where does it fit in the overall story? What kind of development team is required to build it, who will lead that team, how much money will be invested, and what platforms will it be developed for? There are hundreds of questions to be answered if Bungie truly has not started the process already.

Honestly, I find the whole thing entirely depressing. I spent a tremendous amount of time playing Destiny, making lifelong friendships, enjoying the tremendous work by the developers, and immersing myself in the build-crafting, lore-seeking, and mystery-solving communities. World’s First races were a joy that I loved staying up way too late reporting on, and I will miss the game quite a lot, as I am sure many others will.

It feels like an inglorious end for the Destiny universe, development team, and community.

Sometimes you just have to not play the good game

I am going to take a moment to get a little meta and discuss the reviews around Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. The game is the follow-up to Disco Elysium, from developer ZA/UM. ZA/UM has unfortunately been surrounded by drama over the departure of some of the talented people who worked on Disco Elysium. 

This has led to general discontent with ZA/UM, which, from all the data we have available, is pretty understandable. What gets a little odd is that people seemed to convince themselves that the remaining team at ZA/UM could not make a good game. I personally scored Zero Parades a 9 out of 10. I think the game is very enjoyable, and I cannot in good conscience mark it down for reasons other than the product itself. 

From social media, I got the feeling that there was an expectation that the game would be bad, and that not playing it for moral reasons would be easy. Instead, the game is good, and the folks who wish not to play the game are now faced with the idea that sometimes the thing you don’t wish to engage in for moral reasons is actually a very interesting and attractive thing. It has charm, and it piques your interest, and not playing it or watching it or listening to it is difficult. 

It would be an interesting and somewhat easier world if everything you didn’t want to engage with, culturally, socially, emotionally, or intellectually, also happened to be objectively bad, but this is not the case. Sometimes it is just good, and you still need to not purchase it or support it for reasons that you deem important to you.

That’s life.

What's happening, Destructoid?

I played Zero Parades. It was good. - “Being a spy means wearing a facade, living a lie, eschewing comfort until you can no longer maintain the pretense, tending false human connections that flower into simulacra of the real thing, and then being pulled from the field and watching it all fade behind you. Perhaps you mess up, and people die, or you nearly die yourself. Maybe you get something wrong, you’re too slow to move, or figure something out. The step you would normally take is, jarringly, abnormally missed. You can no longer be relied on. This is your first death, the death of the spy construct that was built on top of your humanity.”

Andrej Barovic played LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. It was good. - “The game is structured as chapters in a series of relatively related events, where you fight a new big supervillain and go through the origin stories of new characters each time as they slowly but surely start to meld into a new Bat-family.

The story is witty and cleverly written, a little serious when it has to be but comedic most of the time, with some actually incredible jokes in there and a lot—and I mean a lot—of references to things outside of Batman and, of course, other Batman movies, games, and TV shows.”

Prior to Bungie announcing its Destiny 2 news, Scott Duwe wrote about Destiny 2 players feeling lost. It’s an interesting read, given how things developed. “It definitely feels as though Destiny 2 is not the main priority for Bungie right now, after it launched Marathon almost three months ago. The extraction shooter’s second season is launching in a few weeks, and Destiny 2 has been left in the lurch, with many players opining that it’s been sidelined. But for some, they just miss what used to be.”

And that’s it for this week.