So you admit you know nothing about development yet are still willing to pass judgment.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
[Kotaku] The Messy, True Story Behind The Making Of Destiny
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
So you admit you know nothing about development yet are still willing to pass judgment.
Did they say it was bad compared to the nothing they would have at launch?
I need bungie to address this and promise us greatness for next September
I want to play as a flame shield shank with sniper ability
Or a Exploding Thrall
Dangansona
Member
After having read the whole article, I feel confident with what I was saying before: Bungie needs to sometime in the next few months stop adding content to Destiny 1 and take some serious time to start over with Destiny 2.
The tools and foundation seem so weak from Destiny at this point - as well as the strange remixing and dispersion of Staten's original ideas - that it really makes sense for Bungie to forget all about it and try to take advantage of the lessons they learned and their gameplay and net code in a sequel.
In my opinion if we forget about whatever Activision wants, the best move to ensure that Destiny will last as long as Halo has as a serious franchise is to throw out the dev tools, character progression, locations, and maybe even story from the first game (while keeping the lore that everyone seems to love intact). While developing the new game they can actually decide as a team what they want the leveling system and content roll-out to look like for the future.
The tools and foundation seem so weak from Destiny at this point - as well as the strange remixing and dispersion of Staten's original ideas - that it really makes sense for Bungie to forget all about it and try to take advantage of the lessons they learned and their gameplay and net code in a sequel.
In my opinion if we forget about whatever Activision wants, the best move to ensure that Destiny will last as long as Halo has as a serious franchise is to throw out the dev tools, character progression, locations, and maybe even story from the first game (while keeping the lore that everyone seems to love intact). While developing the new game they can actually decide as a team what they want the leveling system and content roll-out to look like for the future.
We already know they're working on Destiny 2, it's just a matter of seeing how that goes now that they've got foundations to work off of.
Dangansona
Member
Yeah, I guess my big thing is I hope they don't feel the pressure by either Activision or fans to be tied to the first game (like with characters carrying over and not taking the time to fix dev tools) at the expense of really changing things in the sequel.
roninwarrior92
Banned
lord knows how much has already been said, but the road they have been on lately, we will get the game we were promised in 2013, from now to destiny 2. all the free story stuff throughout the year plus the big shebangabang next september, we will truly get the *playable* lore we deserve.
roninwarrior92
Banned
they say they wanted to be as big as star wars, and if you read the grimoires and lore they have for this game, it's amazing that they haven't even scratched the surface. all they need to do is get it playable and in cutscenes. even beginning and end movies will work.
People also think giant bomb is great yet I think they suck
Opinions man, we could have loved it
Twilight Gap
Member
If the last year of posts about Destiny's cut content is anything to go by, most of these threads tend to be full of people who know nothing about game development. So perhaps you would enlighten us as to how it works.
When it comes to writing a game, I'm not going to give a pass to a game company with that kind of resources, neither would I for film and TV. Bungie had every opportunity to create a good story, and in many ways they did when you look at the Grimoire. The state of Destiny's story in-game however is simply inexcusable, and that was my point.
Writing is difficult, especially when you have to write 10 year's worth of material and keep it consistent and coherent. Bungie have always been great world builders and mediocre writers, but I have a hard time seeing them spend 3 years writing a story bad enough to scrap right before launch. If that's how "game development" works, then I think it ought to change. A "campy" and trite plot would be thrown out in the first screening. Why did it make it passed that?
Why do you keep saying that a huge team and lots of resources should make it EASIER to tell a good story? There's a reason why literature remains the ultimate writer medium.
Twilight Gap
Member
Feedback and knowledge base.
It doesn't make it easier to tell a story. It should make it easier to tell when a story is shit.
This reads like Joe Staten was surrounded by yesmen, while Jason and the rest of Bungie's higher-ups were hands-off until everything was arted up.
Well clearly there was a lot of disagreement on that front. Staten's story was good enough to the higher-ups for a while but the supercut changed their minds.
Twilight Gap
Member
It's one thing to not like the direction something went after all the pieces come together, but it's weird to me to spend that much time and money on a vision they weren't sure of.
Well, maybe it's not so weird considering that they still aren't sure what the game should be to this day. I sure as hell don't know anymore.
Kor of Memory
Member
This could entirely be the case.
I remember in one of the Game Informer interviews Mark Noseworthy mentioned that he didn't even know Exotic quests existed in the game until he saw one pop up as he was playing it after launch.
I get it but if the story was bad in the way Bungie felt it didn't leave places to go for the franchise or would hurt the franchise long term no story is better than a bad one.
Twilight Gap
Member
I just don't see it happening.
Joe Staten: Hey Jones, I've got a first draft coming up with the things you mentioned. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Jason Jones: *skims through*. Hmm... Traveler, Darkness, Speaker, Crow. Yep, looks good to me. Lemme know when you guys are done, I've got to make sure these guys don't forget to put ADS in the game. Wouldn't want people to think this was Halo.
*3 years later*
Joe Staten: Alright Jones! We're done! Here's our new game, Destiny, viewable for the first time.
Jason Jones: ....Umm. Wow, it's so dense. I hate to break it to you Joe, but this is trash and I need you to redo it.
Joe Staten:
Joe Staten: Hey Jones, I've got a first draft coming up with the things you mentioned. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Jason Jones: *skims through*. Hmm... Traveler, Darkness, Speaker, Crow. Yep, looks good to me. Lemme know when you guys are done, I've got to make sure these guys don't forget to put ADS in the game. Wouldn't want people to think this was Halo.
*3 years later*
Joe Staten: Alright Jones! We're done! Here's our new game, Destiny, viewable for the first time.
Jason Jones: ....Umm. Wow, it's so dense. I hate to break it to you Joe, but this is trash and I need you to redo it.
Joe Staten:
It certainly is weird. It sounds like they decided to push non-linearity AFTER the supercut viewing/story scrapping. Maybe Staten should have been writing with this in mind from the outset.
Maybe Staten's version was shit. Maybe it wasn't. I guess we'll never know. And I don't think some cut of all the cutscenes laid out back to back is the best way to show it off.
Rats Off To Ya
Banned
BlindJesus
Member
It's just so bizarre to see a team that had such great chemistry fall into despair like this. If the allegations are true, Staten and Jones had a falling out and Jones took the studios side. This off hand quote/joke from the 10 year old commentary could still be descriptive of their relationship....or maybe I needed another excuse to laugh at Marty, Jones and Stalin talking objectively about their games....
https://youtu.be/sBi_xx26ClM?t=1896
https://youtu.be/sBi_xx26ClM?t=1896
I can't even imagine the books of sorrow in beginning game movies. It would be MA all the way and glorious.
Twilight Gap
Member
It'd make sense if they didn't like how the game looked and decided to 180 on their direction at that point. What my original comment alluded to was them getting all the way to that point in the story and then not liking the story itself.
Now that I think about it however, The Director was marketed fairly recently. The original menu for the game was indeed much better suited to a more linear story.
NullPointer
Member
Kor of Memory
Member
It'd make sense if they didn't like how the game looked and decided to 180 on their direction at that point. What my original comment alluded to was them getting all the way to that point in the story and then not liking the story itself.
Now that I think about it however, The Director was marketed fairly recently. The original menu for the game was indeed much better suited to a more linear story.
I think eventually they're going to have to fall back to an interface like this.
The Director is nice to look at, but very clumsy to navigate, and it's only going to get worse.
I like to think I'm pretty familiar with the game, but even I sometimes have problems when I want to go play that one Paradox level on Venus, and then I have to hover over 4 or 5 icons and read a bit of a description to make sure I'm thinking of the right one.
It's incredibly clumsy. There is no logic behind were each icon is on each map. Some of the icons are the starting points of the mission, some are the end. Some of them have those weird little path marks, some don't.
Some of them don't even take place anywhere near the icons one the map are (I'm looking at you Twilight Gap mission from the No Time to Explain exotic quest).
Twilight Gap
Member
They should make the star map vertical. Have all of the planets lined up in the left side of the screen in the other they appear from the sun, and then show the map on the right side when you hover over it.
Kor of Memory
Member
I would love something like this.
Though with another layer.
Like, hover over earth and you get a list of misisons top to bottom in a column just to the right of the first planet column.
Then as you hover over the missions, you see the map on the far right, and a line draws out from the mission with the description, info, and maybe a significant picture from the level.
Plus, give us the option to use the D-pad instead of that terrible faux mouse icon thing.
dragonelite
Member
Might give Destiny 2 a chance, because its Bungie for years my favorite devs for
giving me Halo.
Hope they smoothlined the content creation pipeline for Destiny 2 and have more time to do well with the story.
giving me Halo.
Hope they smoothlined the content creation pipeline for Destiny 2 and have more time to do well with the story.
Twilight Gap
Member
Interesting timing on this article by the way
http://kotaku.com/10-big-myths-about-games-debunked-by-the-people-who-ma-1737839268
http://kotaku.com/10-big-myths-about-games-debunked-by-the-people-who-ma-1737839268
I just don't see it happening.
Joe Staten: Hey Jones, I've got a first draft coming up with the things you mentioned. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Jason Jones: *skims through*. Hmm... Traveler, Darkness, Speaker, Crow. Yep, looks good to me. Lemme know when you guys are done, I've got to make sure these guys don't forget to put ADS in the game. Wouldn't want people to think this was Halo.
*3 years later*
Joe Staten: Alright Jones! We're done! Here's our new game, Destiny, viewable for the first time.
Jason Jones: ....Umm. Wow, it's so dense. I hate to break it to you Joe, but this is trash and I need you to redo it.
Joe Staten:
Hey Joe I'm going to say your story was garbage and that it was the reason we had to restructure our game - but really we can't make the amount of levels and raids and ai companions that your story calls for because our engine is poorly coded and complete fucking garbage! Best case scenario without crahses we have to wait 8 hours every time we want to change something in a game map!
But 2 years from now in company sources will throw you under the bus despite the fact that everyone else in the company has no fucking idea what they're doing!
We had to get the Diablo 3 guys in to give us a lecture in common sense to see the error in our ways that it was wrong to completely blow through our development budget, be irresponsible missing all our deadlines, be unprofessional by ostracizing our writing staff like 10 year old girls, and designing a Frankenstein piece of shit game that abused psychology and the mechanics of addiction to enslave players to said anemic content starved game that constantly kicked our most die hard players in the nuts repeatedly until they vomited blood by making a shitty rng system where ultra rare purple engrams decrypted into greens and a mind numbingly garbage end game! We seriously thought that was ok to do!
Haha 7 months to add simple volume controls to our game that's how shit we are now hahaha
I say this as a lifetime Myth Marathon Halo fantard.
Fuck Bungie :|
NullPointer
Member
Sucks that the story got trashed but I'm with Jason Jones on his push for non-linearity. Of course that would have worked out better if it was the plan all along, and not something that was hobbled into form late in the game.
The Taken King handles this pretty well. You have a relatively short linear story progression, and then it opens up into a mix of strikes and patrols and missions that continue the narrative along a few different directions, but eventually coming back to unlock further missions. Seems like the best of both worlds to me, and a perfect fit for Destiny in particular.
The Taken King handles this pretty well. You have a relatively short linear story progression, and then it opens up into a mix of strikes and patrols and missions that continue the narrative along a few different directions, but eventually coming back to unlock further missions. Seems like the best of both worlds to me, and a perfect fit for Destiny in particular.
Twilight Gap
Member
that's what i thought the game was going to do anyway. have a linear "campy" story and then branch out into quests.
the story is mostly a solo journey, and then you shift focus into quests where you can meet up with people out in the wild.
should have been a focus from day one.
If the Diablo guys gave them common sense why was Diablo 3 such an aweful clusterfuck at launch? They were handing down experience they learned from the Internet burning them down. It was so bad I stopped buying Blizzard games. That's how bad I found Diablo 3 at launch.
How long did Diablo 3 take to make? How much money do you think they burned through in the iterations of Diablo 3?
Seth Enosh
Member
As a halo fanboy why are you complaining about not having audio controls? Halo is notorious for not having audio controls, it was a trademark of Bungie when Marty was in charge of the sound.
At least with destiny they listened to feedback and patched them in.
Still amazed at how angry memories of purples decrypting into non purples makes people. Didn't that only happen for like 2 weeks after launch? I remember it being fixed in the first patch so it never affected me much.
dragonelite
Member
The diablo team did a lot right in RoS, and from what i gathered they have only improved the game with seasons and the kanye cube(not sure what the name is)
"Hey we did what you did. Gross incompetence and latent hatred for the player base. It's like we didn't even play our own game! We kinda fixed it too late by not being 100% dumbfucks!"
Playing D3 was the same experience as Destiny.
Play through game kind of enjoying it, bunch of problems but lets see how the endgame is...oh. oh no. This is actually so bad.
BreezyLimbo
Banned
Kanai cube.
Diablo 3 at launch was bad, but it wasn't Destiny bad. The worst things about Diablo 3 at launch was the RMAH, and how drops worked. Legendary drops were just that, you'd probably get 1 in 24 hours of playtime. The difficulty was fucked because in Act 2 there was a huge increase in difficulty compared to Act 1, meaning that Act 1 was the best place to farm.
Still, it had a story. And then they brought out the big patch that fixed everything, and I mean everything. Adventure Mode was such a boon for the game. You can hop on, do some bounties, and come out feeling like you accomplished something with the gear you earned. And they've only been making it better since. Classes now feel like you can mix and match instead of min/maxing(Which there might still be, but it's not bad). For my Wizard I run Elemental Fire, but I can easily swap out my items and make a perma-stun thunder class. It's great.
Destiny needs to go through an enlightenment like that. I don't think that'll be possible though.
That was your takeaway? "Well Halo didn't have audio controls". Except Halo co op and mp didnt have music so fucking loud that no matter how much you turned chat up you couldnt hear anyone.
As for purples, it was a helluva lot longer than 2 weeks. And the 2 updates that "improved" purple decrypts were lies (motes n coins). Before TTK I only had a grand total of 4 purple engrams drop in the wild and I played the game obsessively. Yes I kept count.
I don't doubt that some people were lucky after drops patch #3, but a shitton of people weren't. And saying people harboring a grudge for bad decrypts is missing my point entirely: Bungie thought those horrible decisions that people absolutely hated that made everyone miserable - they thought those were good development decisions that players would be totally fine with. It shows how incompetent and out of touch they are.
It'd make sense if they didn't like how the game looked and decided to 180 on their direction at that point. What my original comment alluded to was them getting all the way to that point in the story and then not liking the story itself.
Now that I think about it however, The Director was marketed fairly recently. The original menu for the game was indeed much better suited to a more linear story.
wow was this from when they were originally making this for 360?
The emblems sure look a hell of a lot better than the ones we got when the game launched
Kun Aguero
Member
Was the soundtrack bad as well? Outside of VOG the score was the best thing about vanilla Destiny. Didn't stop the higher up's trying to fuck Marty over for a percentage. Glad he won the court case so resoundingly, wouldn't surprise me if Joe was getting similar treatment with artistic interference.
Interficium
Banned
formasymphonic
Member
I just don't see it happening.
Joe Staten: Hey Jones, I've got a first draft coming up with the things you mentioned. Take a look and tell me what you think.
Jason Jones: *skims through*. Hmm... Traveler, Darkness, Speaker, Crow. Yep, looks good to me. Lemme know when you guys are done, I've got to make sure these guys don't forget to put ADS in the game. Wouldn't want people to think this was Halo.
*3 years later*
Joe Staten: Alright Jones! We're done! Here's our new game, Destiny, viewable for the first time.
Jason Jones: ....Umm. Wow, it's so dense. I hate to break it to you Joe, but this is trash and I need you to redo it.
Joe Staten:
Going by the article, Joe wasn't the the one throwing stuff in the bin
Twilight Gap
Member
That's joe trashing his office and leaving lol
any examples of games you've worked on?
Bitmap Frogs
Mr. Community
I like the director. It gives the game cohesion and not only serves as a menu, but a reminder of my character's adventures.
To be fair, I also really enjoy seeing the solar system planets as destinations. It tickles my science fiction bone.
Kor of Memory
Member
The top level of the director is the only part I like. For the same reasons.