Destiny, an online shooter in which you travel the universe not getting Gjallarhorn, is getting another big patch soon, and some of the new tweaks are not going to be welcomed by longtime players.
Despite the fact that hardcore players are hitting a wall, at least partly due to Bungie’s insistence upon forcing everyone to play how Bungie wants them to play, Bungie is again enacting changes that will force everyone to play how Bungie wants them to play.
Today’s revelation: the weekly heroic strike will soon turn into a “matchmade” activity — in other words, players will be forced into matchmaking whenever they start it. No more soloing or running the weekly heroic with a single other friend — you’ll now be stuck in a team of three based on Destiny‘s matchmaking algorithms, like you are whenever you try to run a regular-level strike.
Says Bungie on their blog (which you can read in full here):
As part of 1.1.1, we’re changing the Weekly Heroic Strike to be a matchmade activity. Why? Let’s ask Design Lead M.E. Chung.
M.E. We wanted the Weekly Heroics to be a challenge that pushed you and your buddies, but what we observed was that these strikes don’t demand the same cooperation of a cohesive pre-made group. The overwhelming community response was such that many players didn’t have the numbers on their friends list to experience the activity on a weekly basis.
Can I still solo the Weekly Heroic?
M.E. No, this change applies to all levels of the Weekly Heroic.
The Nightfall, thankfully, won’t be affected by this change when it’s implemented in the newest patch (planned for later this month). And we’re still not getting a matchmaking option or tool for raids, either. Because Bungie really just doesn’t get it. For whatever reason, they won’t make matchmaking an option, allowing people to solo or run the weekly heroic strike in a group of two if they so choose. Like raid cheesing and the loot cave before it, this is yet another sign that the folks behind Destiny don’t like it when players have choices.
At least they’re fixing heavy weapon ammo.
Comments
46 responses to “Bungie Still Doesn’t Get That Destiny Players Want Options”
This is Bungie. The guys who spend over 10 years making a franchise where they encouraged people to always view the other options.
People are still playing it?
Yeah I am, it is good filler
Filler? You are going to be playing awhile because I dont see a rpg that looks good on the horizon. (Maybe the division but I dont think it will be any good)
I just started playing Destiny again, after a couple month hiatus…. I am still disappointed. So much potential squandered by poor decision-making and limiting design. That said, I still fully expect Destiny 2 to thoroughly kick ass. Don’t let me down Bungie, unlike the implications of your company name, the ropes of loyalty to this franchise are in no way elastic.
Hahaha. Wordplay.
Yeah, Destiny 2 is going to be amazing, I can’t wait.
In the meantime I have a raid matchmaking fix for you bozos, Bungie. Make it a requirement to have at least a fireteam of 3 in the raids, rather than six (but with the OPTION for a 6 person fireteam also). This way, you can have two groups of three commited friends, nobody is likely to bail at the first sign of adversity like randoms do, and you can actually make new friends (in that other group of three) to add to your friends list and make the game easier / more enjoyable for yourself at the same time.
That’ll strengthen the community, add new exciting experiences in playing with new friends, and give more options to those who play alone, by necessity or choice. It’s not rocket science.
Why even bother with Destiny 2?
I honestly can’t remember a game with so much heartless filler, especially from a title that talked up its “lord of the rings like narrative” or whatever shit Bungie put out.
The story, enemies, vehicles and guns have zero personality. I’d rather see them drop the whole thing and start again with the same tech.
Unless you’re dying to see the resolution of the epic battle between those stone things at the end and the citadel thing…. Something about roach men and some zombie wizards… a robot guy….. what was Destiny about again?
Because the gameplay’s bones were so tightly crafted. After playing Destiny and then playing pretty much any first person shooter, be it Far Cry 4, or even the developer’s previous game, Halo: Reach, it becomes clear that the actual gameplay of Destiny is best in class.
Shooting, meleeing, environment traversal, nothing’s really felt as good since I played Destiny. There’s a good game there. Couple that with the fact that the Vault Of Glass raid was one of the coolest ideas in a game in a long time, well balanced between combat, jumping puzzles / traversal, and unique teamwork ideas such as the stealth portion.
Logging on and playing with your friends was also a blast. The excitement you feel when you received an exotic weapon from the nightfall, or the first time we beat the first section of Crota’s End, was one of the best gaming feelings this generation. When you’re playing with friends, real life friends, the game comes alive.
There IS a good game in Destiny, and Destiny itself can be considered a good game in lots of ways. I sunk at least 100 hours into it myself. There are just a lot of questionable ideas and a severe lack of content that is holding it back.
That’s because you’re 100% right about the game mechanics.
The engine is rock solid and the shooting of stuff in the face is great fun.
It doesn’t change the idea that the story and settings (while pretty) were incomprehensible garbage that nobody has any real interest in.
The whole thing feels like they made an empty, still gameworld and then pasted some placeholder enemies in there for you to shoot.
Can I ask what element of the story you’d be interested in seeing progressed in a sequel?
None IMO.
Go back to what they did with Halo and make some interesting enemies, environments, VEHICLES and get someone who passed year 6 English to write the lore.
Yeah I mean I have read a whole bunch of really interesting ideas explored in those grimoire cards (not first hand, but with the people who have the patience for it who then summarised it online), and there’s a lot of really interesting ideas that could be explored in this universe. (can link if you’re interested)
But I mean it’s tough to make an argument for Mass Effect not squandering its setting either. They created a rich, enthralling universe with deep history and dozens of different species, then they focused the entire story around one human man being the saviour of that universe.
I would actually prefer less story in the context of a game like this, rather than more, especially when you’re going to be replaying the missions over and over. Don’t set up a literal universe of ideas, and then spend the entire game telling me how i’m the most important person in it and everything I do is special and amazing. And then tell my friend the exact same thing 5 minutes later.
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As for things I would like in the sequel:
Like I said, I thought the idea of the Vault Of Glass (less so Crota’s End) was inspired and frankly really surprising and risky considering it’s a triple A title. More of that in Destiny 2 would be awesome.
Crota’s End was a misstep because it focused so much on combat that its pacing was way off. It became a slog rather than an adventure. Vault Of Glass gave you exploration elements where you and your friends could laugh (at each other dying over and over on the disappearing platforms) and relax after tough battles, as well as tense moments with no gunplay, and pure team co-ordination in the stealth part. It succeeded because it gave you something that was truly different from the rest of the game.
I also liked the basic premise of strikes (basically MMO dungeons) with tougher challenges. But I would like to see a greater variety of boss enemies, not just super sized versions of regular enemies. I liked the idea of the spider tank having weak points exposed by shooting at it thoughtfully, rather than just blasting away for 15 minutes. More of that.
Events in free-roam were a cool idea, but once you reach higher levels they became pointless and not challenging, i’d like to see bigger events with more interesting ideas. I’d like free roam to have more purpose in general, let me start quests while in the world itself, let me find quests that you can’t receive from the space menu or a vendor, etc.
Heaps more, but you get the point.
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However, I don’t think a focus on vehicles is a good idea personally, considering the instant gratification of this game comes from the weapons, your melee attacks and supers, they way they feel, and your jumping abilities. As soon as vehicles become part of the equation you restrict the game space to one plane of movement, you feel less in control of your victories / defeats, and the environmental design has to change completely to accommodate that.
+1 What @geometrics said.
I didn’t say they shouldn’t make another shooter, just that it’d be better if they started a new IP.
Make a “spiritual sequel “ and get someone to develop a comprehensible setting and story.
The thing about Destiny’s fantastic shooting is that without any particular motivation to play, you might as well be playing in the firing range of any other mil-sim. There’s absolutely no point to logging in apart from choosing whether you’re going to stand in some arbitrary location and shoot one of the four types of alien. Viscerally satisfying… but not emotionally. It got old, real fast. And once you’ve seen behind the smoke and mirrors of the skinner-box grind, you can’t un-see.
I’m hopping the answer to @foggy’s question about bothering with Destiny 2 will be that they’ll have learned their lesson from the multi-million-dollar bonuses they lost thanks to tanking review scores that very astutely observed that Destiny did not make good on its promise, ‘Become legend’. No-one’ becomes legend’ in Destiny, they just fall into the same grind as everyone else and the game makes no attempt to dress that up. Even in the fucking cutscenes, your crowning glory of killing some unspeakable evil gets a pep rally for everyone else except you, and about as much reaction as turning in your first ‘kill ten rats’ quest in an MMO.
Destiny’s still one of the top games of 2014 for me. For all it’s faults, for all Bungie’s faults, it still provided me with hours of enjoyment. Its ambition to break through a new genre to the console space should not be under-appreciated.
I would rather 100 Destinies a year that dream big and fall short than another Call Of Duty that does nothing to push us forward excellently. Or more topically, a The Order 1886, that is far more sinister in its intent to mislead the audience with its bells and whistles over any sort of meaningful gameplay approach.
The excellence of its mechanics was the motivation. In this age of meta-games and achievements and character progression and prestige-ing, here’s a game that’s strength was not in “what you did” but “how good it felt to do it”. Add playing with friends to that mix and it becomes obvious why so many people have stuck with it for so long. Sure, it had the dangling carrot approach to many of its systems, but they would all have fallen apart without that base.
(All games are a Skinner-Box anyway, none of it means anything, it’s all just images on a screen and sounds from your speakers. Why is the prospect of imaginary items in one game different from the prospect of imaginary items in this one?)
The reason why people should be excited about Destiny is that Bungie already nailed the hardest part about the game, everything else, given enough time and a clean slate to accommodate it, should fall into place for the sequel.
Bungie may have fallen short on their promises, but goddamn, show me another company that can fall so short on a game and still have it be this good.
There are a literal fvck-tonne of things Bungie don’t get about the people who wanted to still be playing Destiny.
Bring on Destiny 2. Destiny has already been transferred to my external HDD and will stay there until I need more room than the 2 tb ive allocated for the x1.
I never played this game, but read about it from day one.
Sounds like it started off fantastic but became more and more rigged/stacked & linear over time, looks like a great waste of video game development. Every texture, sound, 3d model, all thrown away.
What the royal fu*k Bungie??
Oh ffs. I’ve got a hard enough time finding people on my friends list now still playing the game, now you want to make it harder for me to play the game on my own?
Because PeeVeePee
Alright, so I just got the expansion, played it for a bit, got bored and now hear this rubbish? Damn it, I’m out.
I really dont see this as a big deal. Personally, I welcome the matchmaking on the weekly. I wish it was on the Nightfall as well. As someone who doesnt know many people who have a PS4 and knowsn no one who plays Destiny….this suits me fine.
Problem is, you’re in the minority. Most people have friends they want to play with.
It needs to be an option, as does introducing optional raid matchmaking. That is MUCH harder to get a group together.
The point is some people like to solo the weekly and the nightfall to give themselves a challenge. It’d be fine if you had the choice to go it alone or two of you rather than being forced into a random selection of players
Not only that, people use those runs as an opportunity to test out new techniques and ideas for tackling the Weekly (and by extension, Nightfall) strikes that week. It’s much tougher to do so when you have two randoms blundering through the level in a straight line shooting everything that moves.
I do see it as a two steps forward, one step back action. Overall i do believe the game is better because of this change, but it could have been done better.
If the ROC strikes are any indication, people wont have trouble solo’ing the weekly as so many people join the strikes and don’t move from the start, you end up doing it solo anyway.
This! Soloing is my thing. It’s what I DO.
yeah thats fair enough. should be able to opt in or out of the matchmaking.
I think it’d be better if it was optional matchmaking, I know a few people who enjoy running it solo for the added challenge/fun of the burns
I’m all for matchmaking but you need to have the choice of matchmaking yes/no.
I’d rather do the Heroic (and Nightfall for that matter) with friends I can communicate with and know how to play with rather than being forced to play with randoms with no mics.
What a ridiculous decision.
I’m not really sure I understand people asking what is actually wrong… I mean, a feature has been removed and a style of play forced upon people who have been playing it different legitimately. Like, I really don’t understand how people can’t extend beyond their own experience and be like “oh yeah, that sucks for everyone who liked that.”
Yeah, fuck this. I hate it when devs demand you play the game their way. If I buy your, I’ll play it whichever goddamn way I feel like. Got it?!
I love how, everyone is saying that destiny 2 is gonna be amaze balls.
It’s an MMO, they don’t get sequels they get endless arrays of Expansions/Dlc.
It’s not an MMO, it’s 16 player lobbies. Bungie announced well before the release of Destiny that it would have 2 major expansions, then the sequel would come out in 2016, followed by 2 major expansions for Destiny 2, then the sequel to that in 2018 and so on in their 10 year plan.
It looks exactly like an MMO to me, no matter how you want to dress it up. I don’t care for multiplayer games (co-op isn’t really that far behind it either), and I much prefer good single player experiences. This game doesn’t look like it has anything compelling as far as story goes, nor cutscenses, nor character development … just a bunch of people getting together to get from point A to point B, gaining experience and levels through grinding, and then defeating end level bosses to get ‘rare loot’. So, once again, it looks far more MMO than anything resembling a single player experience, so you have to understand why people are quick to call it that.
Oh I get it, but can you really call 16 player lobbies (at most) a “massively multi-player online” game?
Bungie has lost the plot.
Also lol at finally implementing a reputation tab as if its some brand new feature. They are clueless.
Trading this crap in when I collect my Dying Light pre-order.
Urgh.
Sick of seeing the Iron Banner and the massive focus on PvP.
That’s stale, but PvE is well and truly boring now. At least bring back the Queen’s bounty again, which was only around twice from memory.
I’m glad about the matchmaking, but what will I do with all my strange coins? I guess I will just horde them until House of Wolves.
Am I the only one who does the Nightfall first as I find it easier than the Weekly solo(except for this week. It was a bitch)?
I always do Nightfall first. And yes, with no burns added this weeks was a bastard! Damn shields!!!
I admit to being in two minds about this. I’ve made some great friends playing destiny and regularly play with a range of people from a group of 8 – different people are online at different times. But, not everyone in that group is available when I want to play (work, kids etc). Quite often, I find they’ve already done the weeklies and just want to do VOG or Crota on hard. Having matchmaking in the weekly heroic would be useful to me, as I still need to get strange coins to upgrade my Alts. I don’t have the time to work out all the cheeses and strategies to the do weeklies solo (especially since the solo debuff recently), so playing with randoms would be cool. On the other hand, if I’m online and only one of my friends is also online, it would be annoying to have some random forced on us just to make up the team. I think an option to matchmake would be better. Also, make strikes, raids have a minimum number of participants, not a maximum. It’s annoying when 6 of my friends are doing a raid and I can’t join them. Maybe make the hard mode raids have a higher participant limit.
wait, are they trying to fix something thats already fixed?
Ridiculous complaint. Most people solo weeklies because they cbf organising a group. This makes that a non issue. Of all the things to complain about this game, this isn’t it!
The big issue with the matchmaking is if you are already doing it with 2 friends. What if one of them gets disconnected and the game then goes to matchmaking and puts someone else in the game. This is my biggest issue with the forced matchmaking unless they only do it at the start of the activity and don’t try and drop people in mid game (but then that could be bad for people using the matchmaking having to finish things 2 man or solo when they wanted a 3 man matchmade activity).