 Alright everyone, let's get a real quick little hot take out of the way today, huh? So I finished All I Care As You with the Solstice of Heroes event and I wanted to talk about both what I think of it and really, more importantly, what I think and can tell us about how Bungie is doing as they release what I think everyone can agree is a make or break expansion for the franchise. You'll often hear people in the gaming media talk about how demanding gamers are. You can't read enough articles playing a tiny fucking violin for just how tough it is to be a grotesquely profitable company that makes games for a living. The gaming press is almost completely a total embarrassment to the trade of journalism. It has allowed itself to become a de facto marketing department for the industry in a way that no other facet of the press has done. Not even movie and television journalists have done such a despicable job at holding companies accountable for their behavior. Gamers are ridiculously docile as consumers. They routinely buy products that are quite literally fucking broken and then patiently wait for the company to slowly fix the product. They allow all manner of shoddy work and pay increasingly higher prices for that shoddy work. They've allowed game companies to rip things out of games that used to come standard and sell them back as loot boxes. And then they'll go on internet forums and defend those very same companies that sold them broken half games. It's like nothing else in business anywhere. If you buy a blender from the store and get home and load it up to make a smoothie only to find it doesn't work, you will march yourself back to that store in a blaze of righteous indignation and demand your money back, or a replacement product immediately. Nobody would allow the blender industry to say, sorry, but tell you what, just leave the blender on your counter and we'll send out a fix in 4-6 weeks. Maybe. Now, making blenders is hard, so the fix might only allow you to slowly swirl water and juice to make an unmixed slurry at first. But we are totally committed to providing the greatest mixing experience to our fans and we look forward to seeing what great smoothies you can make in the future. This is a regular occurrence with almost every game released today. And when the gaming media does occasionally take a break from releasing word for word press releases for the gaming industry, they will usually briefly comment about which current game is a broken mess before going back to highlighting the tiny percentage of assholes that make us all look bad on Twitter. And the constant stream of stories about how terrible and demanding gamers are is nowhere more refuted than in the case of Destiny 2. Destiny and Destiny 2. Players who bought Destiny at launch were sold a game that was not only clearly unfinished, it was a boondoggle that failed to deliver on promises made by the developer. The game launched with so many issues it's not even worth going over them all now. Then, the game was simply not updated and patched in a timely manner, leaving exploits, bugs, and breakages all over the design for months at a time. While Bungie, instead of fixing the broken game they'd already sold us, was busy repackaging parts of the design that had ended up on the cutting room floor so they could be sold as DLC. After more than three years, the game finally resembled the products the players had been promised at launch. And that was only really because almost all of the content that ended up in the game by the end was content that was literally cut and resold as DLC. There's precious little reporting on this outside of Jason Shryer. So little that when I tell people that the Dreadnaught and Destiny 2's Mars and almost certainly Titan were all cut D1 content, they are shocked and often don't believe me. And even after all of that, players lined up to buy Destiny 2. Because to be totally fair here, after Bungie added back all that cut content as DLC and finally got around to fixing all the broken shit in the game, what was left was pretty fucking great. So I think players can be forgiven for having a great deal of confidence heading into Destiny 2. Bungie had eventually delivered on the initial promise. And while it was shitty that they ended up ripping half the game out and selling it back, players were understanding because it was a new franchise still finding its way. Then, Destiny 2 launched with the exact same problems. The game was a simplified mess that was broken in a bunch of places. Shitty, anti-consumer designs were all over the place and even the core gameplay loop had been broken. The game was an unmitigated disaster and people were rightly a bit peeved. Shockingly though, the gaming press showered it in praise. They could not stop talking about how great this game was. Even after having the same thing happen with Destiny 2 that happened with Destiny 1, players have stuck around. They've been salty and angry and vocal about feeling ripped off but they have stuck around and waited for Bungie to fix the game with a tiny team of developers while the vast majority of the studio worked on Destiny 3. So when you add it all up, after the entire run of Destiny, we are in precisely the same place now as we were just before the Taken King released. We're playing a dying game with not enough content that desperately needs to be revitalized. Except this time, the core gameplay and progression loops, which were absolutely perfected in D1, are totally fucking busted. Meaning a significant amount of development time has had to go to simply reverting system after system back to what they were four years ago. So now let's get to Forsaken. Let me say this, a whole bunch of what I've seen about Forsaken looks like a step forward. But at the same time, it is very hard for me to get excited when that step forward simply gets me back to the starting line. Almost everything the players are getting all psyched about are things we had at this time last year and a game we'd already purchased. After I buy Forsaken, it will up cost me 140 bucks to hopefully get the game back to where we were. And my main concern with Forsaken is, I'm not sure we're actually getting back to where we were. Why do I say that? Because the gameplay on offer in the Solstice of Heroes event leaves me deeply concerned that Bungie still doesn't get it. Alright, let me explain why I feel that way. Solstice of Heroes When I logged in to play this event and had to replay the homecoming mission in this new form, I thought it was fine. Nothing fantastic. It was harder, which was appreciated, but all of the things that make D2 inferior were still present. My grenades are still garbage and always on cooldown. My melee attacks are pathetically weak. My super, even with all of the Masterworks, still charges half as fast at best. So I wasn't feeling particularly good as I loaded into the second mission, which is a reimagining of the Spark mission from the base game where you get your light back. And that mission was so fucking good. It was the first time I felt like I was playing Destiny again. There were hundreds of enemies spawning from everywhere, but they weren't huge bullet sponges. Instead of making the game harder by making all enemies have infuriating amounts of health, difficulty was added by having more enemies, having them spawned behind the player, and the final boss server to fight was exciting and chaotic and pure Destiny 1. It was so good that I immediately tweeted I thought it was the best thing Bungie had ever made. Then I loaded into the next three missions, and while they were better than the campaign, they weren't terribly exciting. After all of that, I got the blue armor and loaded into the missions again to upgrade them to legendary, and I was met with the most pathetically shit design in game history. Yellow bar scion suddenly took six headshots to kill. The yellow phalanx shields take an entire clip to take down. Every enemy was a fucking tedious boss-like sponge. The game slowed to an absolute crawl. The only viable strategy for beating these missions solo, and I don't see why anyone would assume that the missions were not meant to be played solo, was to park myself at the edge of the map near cover, and slowly chip away at each enemy before moving on. It's the perfect example of just how bad Bungie is at making their game fun and challenging. Later, after I'd finished it all, I helped a friend do the missions, and as a fire team of three, they were easy. Why on earth don't these missions scale to player count? Dark Souls scales to player count, and that's barely a multiplayer game at all. What possible excuse can Bungie have? Did anyone at the studio play these solo? And if these were scaled so that the only pleasant way to play them was with a fire team, why the fuck do they not have matchmaking? There is zero excuse for that. They aren't raids, they aren't even strikes, they're campaign missions. It's things like this that prove Bungie still is incapable of thinking all the way through their design. It is a fact that playing these blue armor missions solo, and yes, again, I completed them all solo, is a mindless, boring, tedious fucking slog that's not only not fun, they force you to play in a style that has more to do with Call of Duty than with Destiny. So yeah, you can beat them solo, but it fucking sucks to play. Bungie had two very simple solutions to this reality. Either have optional matchmaking for all these missions, or simply scale the enemy health depending on how many players are in the activity. Likewise, there are only three reasons they didn't do that, and all of them are troubling. Either Bungie didn't ever play these solo and ship them without fully testing, or they played them like this and didn't realize that they were totally fucking toxically unfun, or they did realize they were toxically unfun solo, but for whatever reason didn't bother putting in a matchmaking system. Once again, Bungie released content that requires the player to do all of the matchmaking work, because they just don't want to spend the resources required to make certain their product is fun. Now, I don't believe that they didn't realize these were fucking horrendous to play solo, so I can only conclude that they didn't want to spend the time to implement health scaling, and didn't want to spend the time to implement matchmaking. They just shipped a piece of shit, knowing that their players would use outside sites, or their fucking app, to matchmake with strangers, saving them the money that would be required to implement a fully functioning system in their game. Bungie just assumes that their players will use workaround to outsmart their incompetence, and I cannot stress enough how fucking awful these are to play solo. There is simply zero reason for them to play like this. They are harder than soloing Nightfalls, so this shows that right up until the release of Forsaken, Bungie is showing all of the same arrogance and laziness that has marked the game's failures to this point. Lack of matchmaking for Nightfalls has been an inexcusable mess from the launch of D1. Nightfalls are not raids, they do not require communication, they aren't harder than any of the matchmade content in Warframe or the Division. The only reason they fail to implement it is because Bungie is fantastically arrogant. Amazingly arrogant for a company that has repeatedly fallen flat on its face the last four years. Mistake after mistake after mistake, flaw design after flaw design seemingly has taught Bungie very very little, and unfortunately this extends into many things in Forsaken. Apparently PvP will still have power ammo spawning constantly. I have no idea why this would be the case. It's less fun, more chaotic, less tactical, and most players don't like it. You still will not be able to choose your subclass build. Instead of two choices of perk clusters, you'll now have three. For all their talk of new supers, the fact is it's three new perk clusters. Players don't like this. They've all wanted the ability to choose their own perks back. But Bungie's arrogance won't allow them to fully admit how badly they fucked up. We've heard nothing about decreasing the base super cooldown. We've heard nothing about increased grenade cooldowns or getting the sprint speed back to D1 levels. These are core gameplay systems that players have fundamentally rejected and we've not seen anything to make me believe that Bungie is changing them. They still aren't giving us nightfall matchmaking, I assume. They still aren't giving us an in-game LFG, I assume. We're getting a new area, a new raid, new story, and a better reskin of existing enemies than they usually do. This is nothing to praise. This is the bare minimum that must be delivered for a $40 price tag. We're getting random rolls, armor perks, and a new weapon slot system. This is also nothing to be praised. These are all things we already had and things that never should have been changed in the first place. And to be perfectly honest, I haven't seen any new perks. They seem to be sticking with the same garbage strike modifiers, refusing to fully bring back the system that they ripped out. Players have rejected almost all of these changes. They want all of the systems back from D1. I want all of the modifiers back, not three fucking modifiers. I want all of the armor and weapon perks back, plus new armor and weapons perks. I want my super and grenades and melee as often as I had them in D1, and I want them as powerful as they were in D1. I want this game to play like Destiny 1 played, except with new content and enemies. I want better class customization options, not simply one new choice of perks that I can't change at all. I don't want to be exactly the same as every other stormcaller. I want to be able to tailor my class to my playstyle. I want matchmaking for nightfalls. I want an in-game LFG. Listen, what I'm getting at is this. Almost all of these changes I've seen are for the better. They are all positive changes, and the new content looks great, but that should be a fucking given. They aren't gifting us for saken. They are selling us a product, and for all the good changes there are a whole host of things that look like they will remain unaddressed. And most importantly, those blue armor missions and Solstice of Heroes show that the same myopia and arrogance that's made D2 a disaster is still in full force. Bungie is still so rightly pleased with how beautiful their game looks, they think whatever they do is great. Well, Solstice of Heroes is not great. Not choosing subclass perks isn't great. Getting half as many supers and grenades isn't great. Maybe all of these things will be addressed, and they just haven't talked about it yet. But this most recent event has me doubting that, because the fundamental arrogance remains. Bungie simply refuses to admit that they are wrong and give customers what they want. And if they don't give us what we want this time, I have a feeling it might finally come back to bite them. Hopefully, and I truly, truly mean this. Hopefully they prove me wrong, but in four years they haven't done that yet. Alright. Sorry for the rant. See you next week. Thanks for coming.