 So, I've decided to start putting out some quicker, more regular, much easier to produce videos and articles, focusing on news that comes out of the games I'm interested in. I'm almost finished with my dead cells analysis, but in the meantime, we're gonna have to talk about Destiny 2 again. Destiny 2 finally put up their anticipated blog post explaining where they intend to take the game in the coming months and years. I debated how best to structure this before deciding on just riffing on the stuff I thought particularly noteworthy. First off, the blog post was, indeed, more communicative than Bungie has been before. And considering that most of the blog post has made up of vague promises with vague timelines about vague fixes, that really does show just how terrible the developer has been at managing the game. Although one blog post doesn't make up for the three and a half years of failure and crisis that Destiny 1 and 2 have gone through, it's better than nothing. And if playing 1500 hours of Destiny 1 and 2 has taught me anything, it's to lower my expectations. Let's hop to it, and as always, if you like what I have to say or how I sound saying it, do us both a favor and click on the share and subscribe buttons and then comment down below. First off, the team at Bungie provided this helpful graphic that explains visually the difference between DLC, updates, and microtransactions. I don't think anyone actually needed this explained, and in fact, I don't think locking people out of endgame activities was even the main problem. The problem was locking people out of endgame activities three months after launch, and in the case of PC players, something like 40 days, Destiny 2 is a much, much smaller game than year 3 Destiny 1. This is a value proposition. There was a terrible outcry not because people aren't used to DLC locking them out of activities, but three months after launch in a game that's struggling mightily with not having enough content, this was made even worse by the DLC itself not being worth $20. The quote-unquote campaign was short, boring, and repetitive, and a large chunk of it is spent running through procedurally generated platforms, fighting the same enemies you've been fighting for three and a half years. If Bungie wants to address the lack of confidence fans have and the anger they felt at the DLC release, they need to greatly increase the value they are providing. The curse of Osiris felt like a free update in scope and size. Instead, it cost $20 and locked players out of some of the only interesting content left for them to do. Going forward, Iron Banner, Trials of the Nine, and Endgame Playlist will not lock out people who didn't buy the DLC. I'm thinking this means that no DLC strikes can be the nightfall or the heroic playlist, but we'll see, I guess. Extorting your players to purchase DLC or have their already purchased game shrink was always shitty and unnecessary. Bungie would be better off just making DLC content that people want to buy rather than trying to force people to buy it or have their original purchase lose value. Speaking of value, the next section up is on microtransactions. Games are meticulously designed, especially a huge, polished, massively expensive game like Destiny 2. Because games like Destiny 2 are carefully crafted by hundreds of people with oversight from executives with decades of experience in the business, we can rest assured that nothing in these games was done by accident. Are there going to be problems that slip through development? Of course. Every game, no matter how polished, will have its share of bugs and balance issues. That's to be expected. But something as important to the financial health of Bungie as the eververse microtransactions store has been meticulously and thoughtfully designed. Bungie has a habit of responding to criticism of their design by saying things like, hey, we hear you and this was never our intention. So this part right here, this bothers me. We recognize that the scales are tipped too far towards tests at the moment and eververse was never intended to be a substitute for end game content and rewards. So we'll be making three changes for upcoming seasons. Now the eververse was clearly and obviously designed to be just that. It's not an accident that more than half of the loot added to Curse of Osiris was not available in the game, but only through the microtransactions store. That's a design decision. And this design decision hasn't only had a negative effect on loot drops and a reward system. In order to have enough content to sell, Bungie had to radically alter other aspects of the design. Shaders were made consumable for one reason, to have more things to sell in the store. Armor was made almost entirely cosmetic, further diluting what little bill of diversity existed in the first place, only to avoid having to deal with a pay-to-win scandal. This is exactly what Bungie intended. Now, how can I say that with total confidence? Because this is the game that Bungie created. Trust is a funny thing, man. You have it until you lose it and the only way to get it back isn't just transparency, it's honesty. What I really wanted to see in this section was something like this. And Bungie, you can use this free of charge, this is yours. Bungie is a business. While we love our players and are committed to providing a fun, engaging, ongoing experience, we also have a duty to our investors and partners and ourselves to be as successful a company as we can be. With the industry moving towards an ongoing monetization model, we owed it to ourselves and our publisher and investors to investigate how to best balance the needs of our players with the needs of our business. We did a really bad job at that and we apologize. Many of the issues you've had with Destiny 2 are indeed the result of us doing a bad job integrating our micro transaction model. And many of the changes we made in the name of revenue are baked into the game at core levels and will take time to fix. But understand that we realize we've gone too far, too fast and plan on fixing it. We're sorry, going forward we'll do a better job selling you stuff that you want that doesn't break the game in other places. Now that's not what that says up there. What Bungie says is, we realize you don't like the way micro transactions are handled in the game. We don't know how that happened. Somebody must have broken at night and messed with our code. Don't worry, we're going to find that person and get them fired from wherever they work. In the meantime, we're going to start making it less obviously odious. Thanks for the heads up guys. We might never have realized this happened, lol. Anyway, the solutions on offer are fine, I guess. Not nearly enough and with only vague statements, adding ghosts, sparrows, and ships to the regular loot pool is so obvious they don't get credit for that. This isn't a free to play game. This is a $60 game that wants to sell me $40 of DLC a year. Micro transactions are extra money for Destiny. And having a huge percentage of loot in your loot game, not drop is loot, but rather from buying shitty loot boxes is insulting and game breaking and adding things back into the pool is a must. We've got a real problem with loot not dropping in the game anymore. Engrens have always been a thing, but in Destiny 1, actual gear often drops from enemies and activities. In Destiny 2, almost everything comes from vendors or tokens or engrens or loot boxes. It is aggressively unfun and needs to be changed. That's not an offer, apparently. It blows my fucking mind that 4 years into a game, they are still investigating XP games. This is unacceptable. Finally, this doesn't address one of the four problems with Destiny 2. As I've said before, the inclusion of armor in the micro transaction store all but assured that armor would be changed to be almost completely cosmetic, as the original Taken King Everest armor set had to deal with the pay-to-win controversy. And honestly, it really wasn't pay-to-win, but it was still pretty shitty. Sensitive to those issues, Bungie decided to just make armor cosmetic this time, further watering down the game. I can think of dozens of better ways to monetize armor that don't include making the game actively less fun to play. One that players have asked for forever, for instance. Transmogrification. Have the Eververse store sell skins that change the appearance of your armor to any other armor set in the game, as long as you've acquired one piece somewhere in the game itself. This allows everything to drop out in the world. It gives players a reason to actually go hunting for specific armor pieces. Make them armor blueprints, if you want. It doesn't require you to nerf armor into uselessness and provides the Eververse store with something of actual value to players that they would want to buy. You can sell the skins directly for silver and have loot boxes that contain a random blueprint for people who actually enjoy the loot box thing. Now onto the important stuff. Let me just say that the Masterwork weapons and armor aren't even close to enough. Not even close, man. Basically, these pieces are like grinding to get armor and weapons that still aren't as good as average legendaries from Destiny 1. I'll save my thoughts on this for the section where they actually belong, which is in the section on that absolutely terrible, useless, pointless, bungled mod system. But first, let's get into the section where Bungie promises to spend the next year slowly turning Destiny 2 into the most faithful re-skin of Destiny 1 that they can before the sequel hits. Alright, so they're gonna spend time making sure the items that drop from the raid actually drop from the raid. This change was so fucking stupid in the first place, I'm at a total loss for how even one person at Bungie thought this was a better system. Nobody wants to do a mechanically complex raid, finally succeed, and then have to wait until the raid is over, go through two loading screens, and run across the whole fucking tower to turn in tokens. They'll make raid gear actually be decent again and have mods that do things in the fucking raid like Destiny 1. Strike scoring like Destiny 1, except with layless strikes that are mostly much less interesting and well designed than D1 strikes. I promise you they are. Play the D2 strike playlist for an hour, then boot up Destiny 1 and play that strike list. They are so much better, it's depressing. They're gonna go back to the Destiny 1 Nightfall instead of the terrible time to Nightfall. It will apparently take until spring of this year to add back interesting modifiers to the strike playlist. We'll get six versus six groupsable, more than one crucible playlist, private matches, man, it goes on and on. This blog post is a de facto admission that a huge percentage of Destiny 2 development was spent on things that were worse in every way than the game they already had. It's gonna take almost a full year for Bungie to make Destiny 2 into a Destiny game. This entire list is basically a roadmap back to Destiny 1, which is amazing and sad and not nearly fast enough if they intend to keep trying to sell me DLC. They say they'll be looking at ways to make exotic armor not suck so badly. They say it'll take several months to not have duplicate exotics constantly drop. By the way, the solution for that? The loot pool is way, way, way too fucking small for a game that is built around loot. Under the fall of 2018 section, it lists every aspect of the game with the word improvement next to them, including weapon slot and archetype improvements, which I can only take to mean trying to get back to the Destiny 1 weapon system. But you'll have to purchase the $40 Taken King style expansion for that. So in about one year and $100 for now, you'll have a game almost as good but much smaller than the game it replaced. In my opinion, the most important thing in the entire blog post is this section. They say they're reworking mods. This will either make or break the game. Bungie's lucky they have this mod system in the game because it's the easiest way to finally get some interesting gameplay back in there. If they stay true to form, the rework is gonna be a 6% increase in mod effect but if they actually want to give people a reason to play, they'll start making powerful, interesting mods. Things like 25% increased damage against Hive Knights or significantly increased movement speed and jump height. They need to put four mod slots on each piece of gear and give players hundreds of mods to choose from. Everything from burns to increased range to increased reload speed, super and grenade cruel down all those things get creative. Bungie, your game has set thousands of years in the future and it features space ninja wizards. Think of something interesting. Don't approach this as something that needs to be tweaked to alter the way it rewards players and interacts with D2's gameplay. Approach this as finally adding something truly significant to the way the game is played. Use this system to make Destiny 2 an actual sequel to Destiny 1, not a reboot because I don't want to spend $140 on a reboot of Destiny 1, I have Destiny 1. It's still on my Xbox. If they know what they're doing, they can save the game with this system. But only if they actually make it fun and give players the ability to have diverse and interesting builds. Bungie's flirtation with the casual fan has failed. You can't get casual players to stick with the game for a thousand hours. Games should be accessible to all of course but even an MMO light needs to focus on its core audience. I'm not the audience who was only gonna pop in to see what all the fuss was about. If they're so terrified about ruining the balance in their second rate PVP game, they can deactivate all mods in certain PVP modes. Mods are the only thing that have a chance to bring me back to this game and I have very little faith that will happen because frankly, nowhere in this document does Mr. Barrett acknowledge the main problem with Destiny 2. It's less fun than Destiny 1. All the other stuff wouldn't be nearly as big a problem if the game was fun. They need to use the mod system to take the gameplay further than Destiny 1. They need to inject depth, strategy and build diversity into the gameplay. If they do that, I might be making a video about Destiny 2's amazing comeback. If they announce in February that they're making existing mods slightly more powerful, I think honestly I've probably played Destiny 2 for the last time. So am I satisfied with this? Not really. It's just a list of things that players have been complaining about. Some of them like ranked play and multi emotes literally for years. It gives a timeline of solutions but only very vague explanations of those solutions. This is being reworked. That's being rebalanced. The other thing is being explored. None of that gives me any confidence. They've been using language like this forever. And coming from a team who just recently wrapped up developing this total mess of a game, they haven't earned any trust at all. For instance, there was nothing in there about fixing the terrible progression tree for dummies they've built. I still have hope that someone at Bungie will realize what can be done but the main problems of the game are that there isn't enough to do. The gameplay and build diversity are too shallow and planned. The gear and strikes are too few and not fun enough. And none of those things can be fixed by anything in this document unless I'm wrong and Bungie actually does what I would want them to do with the mod system. With all that being said though, this really is an amazing document. It's at least finally a tepid admission that everything that was changed in D2 was a mistake. It's not so much a roadmap for the future as it is a diagram of a U-turn. But it shouldn't take one full year to pull off even the trickiest three point turn and I shouldn't have to pay them 60 more dollars for them to back their van off of my mailbox. All right, thanks for coming. See you next time.