 Hey everyone over the last almost two years. I've been making videos. I've written quite a few Destiny 2 scripts I started the channel because Cuphead and Destiny 2 annoyed me so much if you scroll through the Destiny 2 playlist on my channel You'll see the video titles going from outrage to cautiously optimistic to grudgingly positive to praise Destiny 2 is not nearly a perfect game as Destiny 1 wasn't because the games always felt like it was fighting an internal identity crisis and while I've been quite critical I've also always understood the extreme difficulties and ambition involved in creating an MMO RPG and an action FPS From the start Destiny was a much more ambitious Undertaking than something like Borderlands as Destiny 2 has evolved many of the most pressing issues were addressed and with Luke Smith's new and Fascinating series of blog posts for the first time we've gotten real honesty and transparency as well as a look inside Exactly where the game is going and why it's done what it's done today I wanted to quickly address Luke Smith's director's cut blog posts and take a moment to look back at where D2 was and Where it's heading as well as give credit where to do we're gonna look at D2's failure of a launch How to slowly solve its identity crisis and look at the very exciting changes coming up after the logo Losing touch with your audience We've heard Smith and other Bungie leads admit before that Destiny's 2 launch was a mistake But we've never had such total transparency before In my first Destiny 2 video I had a section where I talked about the fact that Destiny's entire appeal was its identity as the first-ever FPS MMORPG it was a light MMORPG But all the people who would howl on reddit that Destiny isn't an MMO dude Were frankly Hilariously and idiotically wrong and it only takes talking to like 10 people in the game to prove this if you pull people in Destiny 2 you will find a huge number of people who came from Wow or Guild Wars 2 Easily half of the people I regularly play with have played Wow There are a lot of shooters, but when Destiny launched it was the RPG side of the game that expanded its audience Destiny basically sold to every one of the players who both a loved shooters and be loved MMOs It turns out that that was millions of people It was a hit because it was something that people had wanted for ages an action MMORPG a shooter MMORPG and on top of filling a genre niche that was empty at the time It also did this while being a badass shooter and a gorgeous game a game that still stands up today Destiny 1 also evolved and leans more into its RPG roots as it aged with more currencies and Crafting materials in a larger loot pool. It felt as it was moving slowly more and more towards truly accepting its MMO inspirations I mean the director of the game is famous for being the world's first to open Wow's first 60-man raid The game was an MMO even if the studio was too terrified to ever utter the letters until last month that is So it was only natural that returning players would expect the RPG aspects of Destiny 2 to be superior to Destiny 1 Unfortunately, that is not what happened and I'm not blaming Activision or considering this some nefarious debacle It was just simply a mistake a terrible and fairly easy to predict mistake. However Destiny 1 was extremely successful, but its grindier aspects chased away the half of the player base that didn't like MMOs And its middling to disastrous reviews, which were well-earned of course held itself back considerably from what the studio was probably expecting It became clear that Bungie had drawn several positive and flawed lessons from Destiny 1's launch Destiny 2's main campaign fixed many of the first game's issues It launched with a tremendous amount of content for a shooter It takes many dozens of hours to play everything that launched with Destiny 2 between open world Adventures, lost sectors, campaign missions, post-campaign missions, quest strikes, the raid A player had a ton of stuff to play and because reviewers aren't MMO players and review games based on their personal taste And not its success at achieving genre benchmarks Destiny 2 reviewed very well and sold very very well So in some ways Destiny 2 did exactly what it set out to do Expand the audience, improve review scores, sell a shitload of units Unfortunately though, the business model that Bungie has chosen for this franchise didn't rely only on shipping units Id can make Doom Eternal, sell as many units as possible and dust their hands off a move on Maybe they sell a small DLC pack But Destiny 2 needed to keep players engaged enough to pay out $60 a year every year for the game Bungie thought that simplifying the game would bring in new players, but that was a mistaken belief Marketing brings in new players, that's why you pay millions in advertising Players don't do huge amounts of research about a game before they buy They may peek at a review score, but they don't think, well, Destiny 1 was a bit too much of a complex RPG for me I'll read some reviews and if the reviewers say the game's internal systems have been simplified by 31%, I'll buy it People put less thought into their purchases than they do their votes and they barely think about that at all Now this isn't to say that simplifications are always bad UI, quality of life, ease of use are all systems that benefit from being simplified An MMORPG does not benefit from simplifying its core systems however The vast majority of people still playing Destiny at the end of its life were looking for more complexity in its RPG systems, not less And that expanded market that Bungie was trying to tap were players who were never going to stick around anyway Bungie's goal should have been winning those purchases with marketing And making sure those people got an enjoyable 16 to 20 hours with the game so that they'd be willing to buy the next one And they needed to do that while making sure that everything after that 20 hours was complex enough To engage the core players that their business model depends on This has all been obvious for some time for reading Smith not only admitted But discuss it in depth without mealy mouth corporate speaker wasn't just refreshing. It was exhilarating I have long thought that the first politician who goes with a 100 hard truth policy will be monumentally successful Much of donald trump's success is based on the perception that he's dropping truth bombs when of course he's often lying As a fellow new yorker, that's what we in the empire state call a bullshitter A person who is expert at making lies sound like the truth But i'm waiting for a politician to say listen everyone's just gonna have to reconcile themselves to the fact that north korea Is a new combination now it's shitty, but that's the deal or who says hey Immigration's a real problem and while we need regular influxes of labor Illegal immigration depresses wages across the labor force. There's no need for grotesque racism. There's no need for a wall There's a simple solution. You hire an illegal immigrant. You go to prison for five years problem solved Anyway, this change in communication style is i'm willing to bet the result of the divorce from activision Huge publishers are generally not overtly involved in day-to-day design decisions It was not activision who said armor perks are confusing to morons take that out Activision almost certainly applied pressure to increase sales and they almost certainly had control over communication and marketing Large corporations are entities that live in perpetual fear They are constantly terrified that one wrong word is going to make someone upset and they will lose sales Corporations are by their very nature extremely conservative beings They are constitutionally unable to tell the truth because sometimes often times actually the truth sucks How often in gaming or hell in any corporate communication? Have you read or heard something as plain and honest as this? quote At d2 launch we shortened the power climb oversimplified the game made it too easy to get items Focused on bringing in new players and hoped that players would pursue looks alone as their end game We were wrong while we continued to build features that would become the forsaken triumphs Think of all the games that have either flopped or disappointed in the last few years Now think of the way those developers have communicated. Hey, yeah, we messed up a good percentage of the developers like bio air for instance Only grudgingly and vaguely alluded to problems Bethesda eventually acknowledged their rough launch of fallout 76 But to have a director not only explicitly state what went wrong, but why is important All the way past the release of warmind I was pessimistic because the communication coming out of bungee not only didn't make me feel like fixes were coming It made me think that bungee didn't even fully understand their problems That they might not have even carefully examined their own decision tree and figured out why they face planted That paragraph up there fills me with immense optimism for destiny to going forward There are a ton of lines and paragraphs like that across smith's three posts And I will link the post in the script if you have time to read them for yourself But having addressed d1 let's look at some of the things that smith talks about regarding the future of destiny And how it demonstrates a fundamental shift in values and priorities that I think actually can be traced to divorce with activision I think the difference in communication between now and destiny to launch is almost certainly the result of the activision split Bungee is still leaning into micro transactions, which disproves the always dubious idea that activision was behind the ever store Micro transactions in live service games are here to stay You can hate it or like me be fairly indifferent, but it's simply not changing Companies exist to make money Game prices have remained fairly static for the last 15 years or so and micro transactions are an important part of revenue for companies But the open unfiltered communication on offer in these posts is something that would have never happened with activision and control Again, think of kasey hudson's blog post after jason schreyer's anthem story Now think how fans would have reacted if hudson had posted an honest assessment of what went wrong People hate being treated like chumps. They don't like being treated like they're stupid But even though activision wasn't behind eververse or directly involved in things like drop rates or random roles being removed They're influence almost certainly played a major role in downplaying the rpg aspects and playing up the action game aspects Imagine you are a high activision executive when you signed bungee. What do you think you're buying? I would argue it is almost certain that activision thought they were about to have call of duty and halo That they were going to have multiple shooters selling 15 million units every year And I assumed that bungee hoped they'd be selling that many as well But of course rpgs do not sell as well as call of duty Within a few months of destiny's release. It became pretty clear that surprise surprise Destiny was not going to be halo. Listen halo was a revolutionary and fantastic game It actually holds up impressively well today for its age But as with any huge fad its success was more than its level design ai and shooting Halo was a titanic success because it was the best game on a popular new platform And because it was one of the very first games to leverage the new console's online capabilities Destiny was never going to be halo So if you're an activision executive most of whom remember are in their position because they went to exeter and worton school of business And not because they're game hobbyists But if you're an executive and you look at halo and then look at destiny It's easy to see that they would be disappointed and that disappointment is almost certain to be conveyed to bungee intense meetings and earnings calls Now if you're bungee and you're in a partnership with a company who is expecting your incredibly insanely successful game to be impossibly successful What do you think you would do? Think maybe you'd start trying to bridge the gap between destiny and halo Maybe you'd try to rein in the rpg and accentuate the fps Maybe you try to tone down pvp so it felt more grounded and halo-like That seems likely to be the reason that destiny 2 took massive leaps back from its original rpg vision But the thing is people who don't like power progression rpgs are not going to stick around and enjoy a milk toast rpg Any more than they would a complex rpg. They are separate audiences and never the twain shall meet It was bad enough that they were unable to bring in the tens of millions of regular shooter fans with destiny 2 But it's catastrophic that they alienated their core audience in the process Now by a week before forsaken was released destiny 2 was back to where destiny 1 had left off It was back to being a fantastic action fps with grindy but simple rpg elements However after the split with activision and this blog post it seems clear that bungee has decided to stop hedging And to carefully and slowly start moving destiny further into what it always could have been a full-fledged action rpg Smith in these posts finally explains exactly how destiny 2's new armor system is going to work It is going to be grindy and allow for the creation of builds It's going to allow for aesthetic character customization that augments rather than neuters their own cash shop And the most hopeful part of smith's post is it's very clear They are interested in continuing to evolve the game so that it's more like warframe and less like halo This is getting long and I need to finish building a fence. So I just want to touch on one more thing destiny's business model going forward many players assumes that destiny would be a growing and evolving game This obviously once again bumped up against the relationship with activision Activision's other huge hit is a game that sells 15 million 60 dollar units every single year Each of those games has a three-year development cycle spread across three studios Now think about what your average call of duty game includes for those three years of development A five-hour campaign maybe 10 multiplayer maps and a few zombie whore maps bungee alone Was never ever going to be able to produce a 60 dollar full game every year But amazingly their original contract called for a full priced 60 dollar release every two years Again, think about the size of destiny compared to infinite warfare Now imagine a contract that called for you to make destiny every two years It's totally bungee's fault for thinking that was anything other than absurdly impossible But that is the deal they signed that deal meant that bungee was going to have to deliver $120 of content every year to its players between two dlcs and a full box release Players are not used to paying 60 dollars for an expansion They think 60 dollars means they are getting a whole new game a sequel and bungee was contractually obligated to that release cadence Looking back now. It's actually quite amazing how much content bungee did produce these last two years Now it appears that going forward bungee is going to push its major sequel style releases Beyond what even their renegotiated activision deal called for Remember shadowkeep is releasing at the start of year three and destiny one year three was the release of destiny two Smith explains in the post that while nothing is completely settled Bungee's plans going forward are to evolve the game world to keep it reasonably sized because of technology constraints But it seems they are no longer shackled to having to release an entirely new game next year Destiny two still looks ridiculously good Its assets and resolution are good enough that can easily survives a top flight looking game for another two maybe three years I think it's likely the destiny three only happens when bungee's engine needs to be updated And its assets can no longer stand up to its competition That's good because much of destiny two's problems were whether directly or indirectly a result of its relationship to activision This blog post is the best indication yet the things have changed dramatically for bungee And i've honestly never been more positive about the game There's a ton of actual gameplay stuff in these posts that shows they're not only keenly aware of long-standing problems But finally getting around to addressing them world drops will now drop at your level So that problem of every single engram being useless is less Crucible will add skill based matchmaking back into most rotations. There will be separate playlists for different modes Heavy ammo will be shared with your whole team a solo pvp queue We're getting to a point where most of my big important problems with the game are not only being acknowledged They're being addressed Once they finally get around to implementing an in-game lfg Almost all of the most infuriating issues with the game will have been fixed It's been pretty interesting to watch bungee come to grips with destiny two or if they continue this level of communication And finally realize that the rpg aspect of their game is as important as the fps part The sky is the limit. All right. I've been playing ion storm and a mid evil two old school shooters I'm doing a video on them right now, but let me just tell you if you're looking for something to play A mid evil is totally rad Thanks for coming. See you next time. Bye