Silly season is officially back people. And how do we know? Because the latest expansion for Destiny is out.
It’s not just Rise of Iron that kicks off this week, however: there’s a new Batman episode, Jazzpunk gets a console release, and Firewatch hits Xbox One.
Dear Esther: Landmark Edition (PS4)
What is it? Console re-release of one of the older walking simulators.
Should you care? Depends on how much you liked Gone Home and Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture.
The Bunker (PS4)
What is it? A live-action psychological horror game.
Should you care? Horror fans should check this out. Live action games don’t come along very often.
NBA 2K17 (PS3, 360, PC, PS4, XBO)
What is it? Basketball. Again.
Should you care? If you didn’t pre-order last week, it’s officially out on the 21st Australian time. You can probably still just buy and play right away, though.
Wheels of Aurelia (PC)
What is it? A narrative-driven story about going on a roadtrip through the Western coast of Italy.
Should you care? One for anybody who liked 80 Days.
Destiny: Rise of Iron/Destiny: The Collection (PS4/XBO)
What is it? The latest coat of paint for Destiny.
Should you care? If you’ve skipped Destiny up until now and you like these kinds of shooters, now’s probably a good time to jump in.
Cossacks 3 (PC)
What is it? The remake of a classic RTS featuring tens of thousands of medieval units duking it out.
Should you care? I’ll be checking this out for sure. I’m stunned it even got made, honestly.
Jazzpunk (PS4)
What is it? An adventure game about being a spy and basically losing your marbles.
Should you care? It’s bonkers as fuck. Get it now; it’s available on PC as well.
Slain: Back From Hell (PS4)
What is it? A pixel-art heavy metal inspired 2D platformer.
Should you care? I feel like I’ve written about this already. Anyway, it’s out digitally this week.
Tokyo Twil,ight Ghost Hunters Daybreak Special Gigs (PS3, PS4, Vita)
What is it? A visual novel about battling spirits throughout Tokyo with a funky combat system.
Should you care? This looks … real unusual. Check out the trailer first.
Killer Instinct: Definitive Edition (XBO)
What is it? The best version of the classic fighter.
Should you care? More people should. The modern retake on KI has been nothing short of fantastic.
Batman: The Telltale Series Episode 2 (PS3, 360, PC, PS4, XBO)
What is it? Round 2 of Bruce Wayne’s troubles.
Should you care? I’ll wait until the whole series is out.
Inversus (PS4)
What is it? Console launch of a really neat looking twin-stick shooter.
Should you care? Fans of Geometry Wars will enjoy this.
Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity (PS4)
What is it? A bullet-hell crossed with a dungeon crawler aRPG.
Should you care? Check out some footage. It looks a lot cooler than it sounds.
Skylight Freerange 2: Gachduine (Vita)
What is it? It says it’s a 3D open-world RPG.
Should you care? This was the only footage I found. It does not look good.
Firewatch (Xbox One)
What is it? An adventure in a national park that’s about people.
Should you care? Plenty of people loved it. Read this from Mark, and then go play it.
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade (PC)
What is it? The full release of a Warhammer 40K FPS MMO.
Should you care? There’s only NA servers right now, which is a bit of a dealbreaker for an FPS.
Virginia (PC, PS4)
What is it? A single-player story about searching for a missing person.
Should you care? Our UK compatriots are excited for this one. Keep an eye on it.
Forza Horizon 3 (PC, XBO)
What is it? Driving utes and dirt buggies around Forza Horizon’s version of “Australia”.
Should you care? Ever enjoyed a Need for Speed game? Any arcade racer ever? Then yes. It looks a treat. You’ll only get it this week if you pre-order, however (it comes out next week otherwise).
Zenith (PC, PS4)
What is it? An isometric 3D aRPG featuring a sassy wizard.
Should you care? Got doubts about the humour. Could be fun though.
Agenda (PC)
What is it? A strategy game about trying to dominate the whole world.
Should you care? Looks like it’ll appeal to those who enjoyed DEFCON.
That’s it for this week. Did I miss anything? Are you picking up Destiny or anything else? Let us know!
Comments
43 responses to “This Week In Games: An Iron Grind”
So what was the game leaving early access? Just out of curiosity.
So I wrote that initially and then didn’t have enough time to edit it out when 10.15 came up. Let me explain.
H1Z1’s King of the Hill was supposed to be leaving early access on Sep 20, but the devs posted on Steam that they’re keeping it in the oven for a while longer while they sort stuff out.
No dramas 🙂
Is Tokyo Twilight Ghosthunters a sequel to the one that came out a year or two ago?
Apparently it’s an enhanced version of the original.
Bugger! I bought the original one not that long ago 🙁
Forza Horizon 3 for those that pre-order on the 23rd.
Cheers, I’ll pop it in.
Bit of a quiet week, then.
Bungie kinda disgust me, now, over how they’ve squandered their legacy with arrogant-as-hell attitudes towards community engagement (or their complete, deafening ‘do nothing hope it will go away’ silence on bugs), and the delusion that they’ve created something that ‘no-one’s ever done before’. As if it were somehow original and ground-breaking to stuff an incredibly limited, shallow loot-grinder MMO into a FPS packaging…
I am genuinely surprised that there are so many people apparently still excited about playing the latest extension to that tedious, poorly-written treadmill.
I really enjoyed the Taken King’s story and the writing in the characters that actually gave the voice actors something to do (let’s face it, people will always be a sucker for Nathan Fillion in a rogue-ish space pirate kind of role) but I am really struggling to find the enthusiasm to jump back into Destiny. It had a really fascinating lore and I loved digging into the game and discovering it’s secrets… but I just don’t have the time or energy anymore and I don’t think I’m going to get the value out of the expansion that warrants playing it, because even if the story is on par with or better than TTK, I’m probably just going to play each mission once on each character (if that) and run a few strikes before realising that I don’t feel like doing the same thing over and over anymore.
I took solid 6 months break from Destiny and I got back in this weekend, just to have feel. Yes, Destiny has flaws but it is still one of the best shooter out in the market and that’y why I enjoy it. I play Destiny for fun and when I start to feel that it is getting tedious grind fest, I take break and play something else. That’s why I have only 1 Titan and I am a day 1 player, although I am going to start Hunter soon just to enjoy TTK campaign again.
For games likes Destiny, grinding is the only way to increase longevity, which I understand. You can make your experience by not get caught in loots instead focus on shooting and killing bosses for fun in raids. And if its get stale, put it down and try something else.
I played solidly for a year, almost every day, grinding out those strikes, dailies, weeklies, etc. Raids too. When The Dark Below and House of Wolves came out I started to feel like I was seeing diminishing returns. There was more “stuff” to do but it was less and less fulfilling. Then when The Taken King came out I felt reinvigorated by the story and voice acting and cinematics and the story felt really interesting, and the combat really got changed up. I agree, it’s an excellent shooter, and this held my interest for a long time.
But I stopped playing it in November last year, without even completing the King’s Fall raid. I’ve watched my friends keep running on the same treadmill, chasing higher and higher light. That’s fine. But I personally am not convinced that Rise of Iron is worth jumping back in for. It probably will be, but again, now that I’ve grown tired of the treadmill and the grind, will it have enough content to warrant the price of re-entry? Maybe, maybe not. All I know for sure is right now I have more important things to spend my time and money on.
–
But I mean, come on, an entire year of constant play is astronomically more value than any other triple A console release I can think of. You’ve gotta give Bungie that.
I don’t disagree, and that was the logic I used to defend Destiny against criticism.
But I started playing less once The Dark Below came out. House of Wolves was barely a blip on the radar. TTK was the best expansion yet but the playtime but after over a year of playing the same game I lost interest after completing the story. As it stands I personally will probably only go back in for the story, not the grind.
Same here Kermitron. I jumping in for the story and the raid. I never did finish the Kings Fall raid on hard but i do love jumping into a raid blind and trying to work out the mechanics.
I never raided in Destiny until TTK came out. Now, I love doing raids for fun and when I get lucky with loots its a bonus. But I never do raids because I have to. Never bothered chasing any particular armor or weapons.
People play this game non stop for months and then whine non stop about it how poor the RNG system is. Yes, of course it is going to become stale and a grind fest, these MMOs thrive on this. Otherwise people will finish everything in days and move on.
TDW and HOW were pretty average content and I never ordered them. I jumped back in with TTK and played my first raid. It was a blast. Then, with my 1 only Titan, the came slowly became stale. So, I took break.
Now, I feel like I am ready for it again. Started a hunter and a warlock but will probably finish hunter and quit.
Well said eh! I’m a year one player as well and excited for the new content. It’s a game I tend to put away for a while and then come back to to get a bit of a fix of those excellent shooter mechanics. The grind? Well I’ll do a bit but I’m never going to be the best guardian with the greatest loot so who cares. I can still get some cool-ass stuff and run around the galaxy fighting crazy future-baddies and feel like a sci-fi badass lol
This is exactly what I do.
I love the game and am a day 1 player. Over the last 2 years I’ve had a few breaks of month or so and have come back refreshed and ready to immerse myself in the universe again and again. I’m impressed with how Bungie have gone from strength to strength and whilst certainly not ground-breaking this game has great scope, lots of depth (currently reading the Book of Sorrows which give’s some nice links to the world of the game) and all packaged nicely in a MMO/FPS universe which I find compelling and fascinating.
Totally agree with you. Story and character are by far interesting and fascinating than vanilla version. Seems like Bungie took this idea really on board. Can’t wait to see what happens in ROI.
Hey trans remember the good ol days when we thought it was fun? 😛
To counter: I tried WoW back in ’07 – it was utter rubbish. I couldn’t understand how people could stand to play it – questing was dull, repetitive, boring, frustrating, and unrewarding. I don’t think I ever saw a character I recognised form W2/3. I swore off it for over a decade, wondering how that tripe managed to be successful, year after year. How were people excited for this game where every quest came down to “kill stuff”, “gather stuff”, or “gather stuff from the things you kill”. Even if the endgame was somewhat compelling, how did anyone get there without becoming a shrivelled husk by the end of the multi-month-long levelling process?
My last two weeks giving WoW another shot basically answered that for me – the difference between what I played back in ’07 and Azeroth today is astounding; but they didn’t fix 1-60 levelling until six years after release. Hell, Northrend is probably the first properly epic content I’ve seen thus far, and it wasn’t added until four years after launch.
It’s learned from its mistakes and (somehow) evolved fast enough to retain its audience. That’s precisely what Destiny is trying desperately to do, and in a much shorter timeframe, with a much more impatient (and entitled) audience – it’s catering to FPS fans, so it doesn’t have the luxury of taking 4-6 years to patch in the “fun”… TTK demonstrated quite a few steps toward understanding what its players wanted from it, PvE-wise, and RoI is looking to be a more confident step in that direction, but there’s definitely still a long way to go.
How am I still interested in Destiny? Probably because I’ve stopped trying to continue playing it religiously when there’s nothing left for me to do. It’s not an MMO to me – it’s a casual-friendly co-op looter-shooter with satisfying mechanics and occasional challenging content, with a world sufficiently interesting to make me want to see more of it, and content updates that will keep me coming back.
And it’s only been around for a couple of years… if it’s still around in 2020, maybe give it another shot then? I doubt it’ll be the same game it was at launch.
That’s fair.
And my vitriol isn’t so much directed at the blandness of Bungie’s current little experiment so much as the attitude they’ve taken toward it. At a certain point, Bungie’s bravado about their untouchability rings false when they can’t back up their attitude with results. The unresolved bugs thing quietly ignored rather than apologized for, let alone fucking FIXED, bothers me the most because I was affected by it and won’t be buying any more of their bullshit until they can prove that they’ve changed… but in the time I spent monitoring their forums and broadcasts, their twitter, each time looking for some kind of acknowledgement of the many, many, many flaws with the game, their overwhelming message to the community was to pretend there are never any problems wherever possible, and where not… to diminish, belittle, shrug off with a gung ho attitude of smug superiority, “Ahh, you love us anyway, right? Right?”
They’re writing attitude cheques they can’t cash and I am done accepting them. Especially when it comes to the task of failed promises, that they’ve handled more poorly that far smaller, less-accomplished, but at least fucking honest and earnest dev teams.
Also, the excuse of, ‘it took other devs years to turn something bad into something good’ doesn’t really fly when so many problems Destiny has faced have been known – and solved – problems, and solved for a long, long time. Yeah, it took the auto industry a few decades to come up with power steering, but that doesn’t mean new entries to the industry can just get a free pass on not including it for their debut model because they haven’t figured that shit out, yet.
That’s what bothers me about Bungie investing such proudly blind faith in the delicious appeal in the fragrance of their own shit. They BELIEVED their own hype that they were making something new and never-done-before while reinventing the same old MMO loot-grinder, so they didn’t bother to look for existing industry solutions to their not-actually-new-at-all problems until it was way the hell too late, let alone anticipate those in the first place.
Bungie’s arrogance is why they’re turning out so much less than their best, and it makes me understand why all my teachers got so mad at me as a kid when I tured in work I hadn’t bothered to try on. Because they knew I could do better and was wasting all my talent because I either didn’t give a shit or assumed I was great without bothering to put in the work to back that up.
I’m genuinely curious – which games have done this before? A matchmade, shared-world loot-driven PvE shooter with cordoned-off PvP?
I can name a few that have some aspects, but none that have all of them, and (not trying to make excuses here, more an effort at diagnosis) a lot of the problems Destiny’s design has on a gameplay level are purely because it’s trying to tie all those components together in a globally consistent manner (whether that’s a good idea or not).
Pretty much every MMO has done this before?
See, the shooter part makes no difference. That’s the trap. That’s the part that fooled them, and anyone who hadn’t really played an MMO before because they thought that destiny being a shooter would mean that none of the other design elements were relevant anymore. They were dead wrong. It’s an interface thing, and it’s largely irrelevant when it comes to any other facet of design. And they learned that, after finally – FINALLY – getting Activision to send some Blizz devs over prior to TTK and tell them how it’s done.
But initially? Bungie took a really, really standard MMO model – on a really tiny, restricted scale – and pretended that making it a shooter should have any degree of impact on the underlying MMO’ish systems. The largest being the skinner box. Frequency, reliability and method of loot drops, variety in or meaningful differences between races and classes, factions, delivery of storytelling, mission variety, instancing, populating a large world with things that reward exploration, achievement-hunting, lore delivery, enemy/level scaling, social features and functions (or the lack thereof; eg: social hubs in which you can only communicate through one of maybe four selected emotes to other players and no chat without going outside the fucking game to do it), approaches to community communication about bug-fixing and balance, prioritizing fixes of exploits over negative bugs, balancing skill trees, any depth or distinction between skill trees, identifying mechanics that didn’t fit with their cookie-cutter plans and modifying to block them while bugs STILL stayed unfixed, trying to get the balance right on PVP vs PVE, reward systems, etc…
NONE of that is 1st-person shooter vs 3rd-person hotbar specific. Destiny has only one or two legitimate claims to excellence, and those are the handling and feel of the basic mechanics of moving/shooting, and the art. If you were to create a copy of WoW that could capture those in 1st-person, the overwhelming points of difference would be all the things that I mentioned before.
What kind of problems were solved? Let’s take a look at the Cryptarch. Remember all the complaints about getting a purple orb, handing it over to the cryptarch and getting some green bullshit back? Simple gaming psychology that WoW learned in 2004. About surpassing expectations, not failing to meet them. Back in their beta testing, Blizzard trialled an exp-penalty after spending too long out in the world. People HATED it. So, they reduced the overall exp down, and created ‘rest exp’ to reward logging out. Functionally identical exp-gain for their desired session length. But people fucking loved it.
Now anyone who’d bother to study MMO reward systems would’ve known this. But Bungie? Nah. They’re doing something new and different. It only looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, which means it’s totally different to a duck and couldn’t possibly be expected to share other duck-like behaviours.
Hey, can you count how many times you heard someone from Bungie say “Destiny is not an MMO”? Maybe it wasn’t initially meant to resemble an MMO? Social features weren’t a priority because it was intended to be played with your friends, with other online randoms to lend credence to the world more than to help with top-tier activities. It’s why raids still don’t have matchmaking. It’s also exclusionary as hell to someone who has no irl friends.
Honestly, I see that tale of WoW’s XP-penalty, and all I see is Blizzard learning a lesson that supermarkets have known for decades – raise your prices slightly and put things on special at the old prices, and you’ll make more sales, and earn more good will in the process (“honey vs vinegar”, etc). Which is not the lesson you’re hinting at – to communicate in worst-case scenarios in order to never disappoint – something pessimists have been mastering for generations, and an attitude marketing departments are desperately trying to kill off. 😛
But more seriously, if the story got completely reworked a year before launch, isn’t it reasonable to believe the end-game systems could have suffered similarly? It’s no secret that Destiny launched with an identity crisis the size of Jupiter; it’s not beyond the realm of plausibility that someone at Actiblizz saw what they had planned (remember when they demoed Riksis dropping a bunch of loot, including a Thunderlord?), made an offhand comment that the systems were too rewarding, and wouldn’t have player retention beyond the first week or two, so they hurriedly mashed in a bunch of MMO-esque endgame systems, lowered drop rates across the board, and hoped for the best, which is why taht side of the game was so bare-bones and occasionally missed the point entirely. Evidently it didn’t work, as Blizzard had to go back, and managed to help them rework their endgame – which is why 3oC and faction quests now exist, I suppose.
As an example of something where Destiny being an FPS does matter – weapon balancing, or difficulty scaling, or anything that involves shooting something. In any MMO, a weapon is a weapon. The difference between two staves or two swords can be determined by a spreadsheet – it doesn’t change your playstyle, or your skill rotation, or anything that actually influences how you play, your decision on which to use will come down to “which stat do I want to prioritise?”. In an FPS, each gun feels different – every person has their own preferences, and people either follow that or whatever the meta happens to be.
Another – variety between classes – is somewhat broken thanks to another of Destiny’s core tenets, for better or worse – eliminating the Tank/Healer/DPS trinity that every MMO eventually boils down to. The result was a fairly simple set of gameplay axes to place subclasses on – ranged/melee, weapons/abilities, stationary/fast-moving (respectively Voidwalker/Striker, Gunslinger/Sunsinger, Defender/Bladedancer). Unfortunately, because you use your super relatively rarely, the gameplay differences are minute to none. They could have gone further to differentiate them, but the more you differentiate, the higher the risk of breaking that tenet. Also explains the limited options in the skill trees.
On prioritising fixing of exploits over game-breaks – might I point you toward The Division’s endgame? Exploits left unchecked can break internal PvP balance, which with the PvE/PvP link in Destiny, could unintentionally break PvE even more than PvP balances already do.
Enemy/level scaling… I, um, don’t see an issue with it? With the exception of difficulty in CE/Skolas when they were relevant, I’ve hand no problem with enemy scaling. Emulating something like WoW’s “I’m ten levels above you so I can one-shot you by flicking your nose” would kill replayability in the lower-level patrol zones, and Destiny didn’t really have so much content that it could throw away an entire zone as soon as you outlevelled it.
I could probably write an essay on the decision-making processes that likely led to Destiny’s launch state and why certain MMO solutions were ignored, but this isn’t really the place for it, so I’ll stop there before we’re writing dissertations at each other, and bid you a good night. 🙂
Tl;dr: I honestly don’t think Destiny was designed to be an MMO, and it seems like everyone except Bungie were determined to treat it like one.
I agree with you completely, there are reasonable explanations or at least sensible thought processes that can easily lead you to why Destiny is the flawed gem it is. @transientmind this sort of position is a little shocking coming from you to be honest, most of the interactions i’ve had with you here paint you as a sensible person, but you’re acting like a commenter on a No Man’s Sky youtube video right now.
There are tons of PR reasons alone why Bungie doesn’t choose to shine a spotlight on every single bug or exploit the game has. There’s also the issue of patching things without creating a whole slew of new problems. The uncooperative nature of the engine has been written about at length in the past and i’m sure this is a key part of why some fixes take ages to do. Also, don’t let yourself fall into the trap of assuming what’s happening to you is happening to everyone, most problems individual players run into a rarely shared by many others and not patched as soon as possible.
Destiny is very different from a PC MMO, from player expectations (such as the communication “issues” in the tower, PC players demand it, console players don’t really care about that) to the fact that most MMOs, especially ones like WOW, basically operate on a 2D, turn based plane, not a fully 3D world with real time gunplay. It’s wilfully naive to believe that solutions to games with completely different gameplay systems and audiences will be transferrable to every game with a tenuous genre connection.
Bungie aren’t perfect, they’ve never claimed to be perfect or untouchable, they have a PR presence that pushes confidence above all, but that doesn’t mean they are making light of the problems in the game. That’s without even mentioning the level of entitlement modern gamers feel with standards that are essentially impossible to match. Have they made communication missteps, definitely, but they aren’t the dickheads you’re painting them as.
I’ll leave you with Hanlon’s Razor, and hope that you can see past all the negativity the game now represents for you and acknowledge Destiny’s place as a groundbreaking part of console gaming’s history, flaws or no.
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Well, let’s not go nuts. :3
Also, these are people who use “I want to wear Oryx’s arse as a hat” to promote their game. They’re trying to engage their community by communicating on the level of “a bunch of college mates who get together every other night for a LAN party.” Is it professional? F&%k no. Does it piss some people off because it makes it sound like their frustrations are never acknowledged? Of course it bloody does. Combine that with the complexity of making changes to the game resulting in some bugs being almost impossible to diagnose, let alone fix in a reasonable timeframe, and people very quickly stop believing the devs when they say “we’re aware of the issue” and “we are currently investigating.”
Those who aren’t aware of the technical complexity behind the scenes see the devs as incompetent or uncaring, those who can imagine the complexity question their decision to launch it in that state at all.
As far as @transientmind’s grievances go, I don’t think their communication is going to change any time soon, because regardless of how unprofessional and annoying it is, it’s effective at engaging their target audience; and their technical issues aren’t going to be adequately resolved by anything short of a complete engine rewrite, so it’s unlikely that that side will change before D2. Suffice to say, I really hope the D2 team have learnt from D1’s problems – Bungie’s communication might not end up changing, but hopefully by then they’ll be able to match their bravado with actual results.
I appreciate that you’re actually willing to have a discussion about this unlike transientmind, but I really want to know why you don’t think Destiny was groundbreaking for consoles. It takes a lot of elements used in previous genres and games, sure, but combining together in that particular package had never been done previously on consoles, and to my knowledge, even on PC (but i’m admittedly ignorant about a lot of the PC platform, so feel free to correct me on that).
Hell, games like The Division (and its slew of far more game-breaking issues) alone, which heavily aped at what Destiny was doing, should prove to you how hard it is to marry together the ideas that Destiny is playing with. It might look like one misstep after another, but Destiny’s doing a pretty damn good job in relatively untested waters.
Their PR strategy isn’t for everyone, it’s certainly not for me, and one thing I agree with @transientmind on is that Deej is extremely punchable. But that PR strategy has not a whole lot to do with the game as a product, more our experience of Bungie as a brand. It certainly doesn’t justify erasing all the things Destiny does amazingly, such as the feel of the gameplay and the visual and audio feedback through said gameplay. It’s that alone that’s kept me coming back regularly for 2 years in (a feat never achieved by any other triple A console game in my opinion).
I agree with your assessment in response to geometrics. (I wasn’t even going to bother to respond, given that they actually wrote that Destiny was somehow ground-breaking… sure, maybe in terms of how low their review scores were compared to how expensive their marketing budget was, I guess? But it’s really not like they were doing anything that new. A more-polished Borderlands with better match-making and worse loot-generation/storytelling?)
The thing that bugs me most about their communication is the condescension and the outright ignoring. I don’t expect spotlights to be shone on bugs, but I expect some acknowledgement. As it is, if it’s not one of their ‘server is down’ bugs, you will get ZERO response. Not a, ‘We don’t know when that will be fixed, because it’s hard’, not a ‘known issue’ response, it’s just straight up ignoring you and hoping you’ll go away. That’s the height of rudeness in anyone‘s language.
Also, Deej – the community rep – seems to have been instructed to write in the most punchable tone of blase, gung ho, smug arrogance ever.
If you don’t think Destiny was a groundbreaking game in the console space then you’re just being deliberately difficult at best, and completely ignorant at worst. If you’re not “even going to bother to respond” based on a difference in opinion about that fact then you shouldn’t even be commenting at all. It’s a discussion, in order to for it to happen you need to actually discuss things.
@geometrics
Well, it’s not meant to be an insult so much as it honestly gets to a certain point where I don’t really know where we can go from there. We don’t share the same reality.
When you call something like Destiny ‘ground-breaking’ then I really don’t think we’re living in the same reality. There was nothing ground-breaking about Destiny beyond its marketing budget. It didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done before (and in many instances, better). Sure as hell not for PC, but also not even on consoles. It didn’t ‘revolutionize’ anything. It was a highly-anticipated, highly-marketed, (mostly-)highly-polished (in some areas – certainly not story) FPS loot-grinder with some MMO-lite/drop-in social features, by a popular studio.
The consoles have all had multiple MMOs on them before (and proper ones, not just MMO-lite), and untold FPSes, including FPS loot-grinders. Maybe you’d consider adding elements of one to the other to be ground-breaking, but even if we agree with that, someone else still already did it first, multiple times, for several years previously, to critical and commercial success.
Seriously, name one thing that Destiny does that the Borderlands games haven’t? Nothing I can think of. ‘Social’ hubs, maybe? (If you can call a shared space to spam one of four gestures at randoms ‘social’.) The illusion of a persistent, open world? (NB: Illusion. It’s not actually persistent, it’s instanced, just as if you joined a host player’s overworld in Borderlands.) Destiny does a great many things BETTER than borderlands – its competitive PVP is better-structured, its match-making is improved, its gun-feel is more satisfying, for example. But literally everything else Destiny does has been done before. Not only did they do it first, but multiple times. Sequel and prequel.
Hell, every Borderlands game (of three) has actually rated better on average on game review sites, and the titles have been coming out since 2009. This was NOT a niche/PC franchise that no-one knew about. And even with the benefit of a half-decade’s worth of that title’s successes to borrow/steal from, there are still things Borderlands did better than Destiny.
If you’re going to hold on to the idea that Destiny was ground-breaking, then I really don’t think we share enough of the same reality for any discussion to actually be taking place within the same frames of reference.
@transientmind Creativity and originality is literally “stealing” from multiple sources to create something “new”. Borderlands definitely paved the way for recontextualising RPG mechanics in a FPS package, but it itself borrowed many of those RPG elements from games that came before it such as Diablo (enemies dropping loot, the loot being colour coded, etc.) If you’re going to invalidate the strides Destiny made into new territory because Borderlands did some of it first, you can’t stop there, you must invalidate the innovations of Borderlands because Diablo did some of it first.
Destiny does a lot of things that Borderlands (at least Borderlands 1 & 2, they are the ones I have played) doesn’t do. It reframes the entire experience into a shared world shooter. Borderlands had multiplayer, sure, but it never felt like the core experience, more a bonus element to the game. Destiny has things like raids and daily and weekly missions, with year 2 it began implementing really novel ideas such as secret, community driven missions and items. Not even mentioning the raids, which truly leverage the 3D real-time space unlike most PC MMOs which essentially operate on a flat, turn-based plane.
You can’t pick and choose what counts and what doesn’t, that’s not fair or a sound argument.
To be fair WoW and Destiny are very different beasts catering to very different player bases and playstyles. In addition WoW has totally different internal infrastructure to Destiny which allows their devs to patch problems or glitches on the fly.
Destiny’s biggest problem wasn’t the fact it was rough around the edges but the fact so many systems were broken for so long a time before devs finally patched shit out. When they would patch it up they would go and break something else. Eventually it just felt like they took an attitude (or arrogance as transient put it) akin to “hey we broke this for the next 6 months so play around with that, after we patch it there’s something new that’s going to break so go check that out”. In WoW at end tier content I feel like I’m on the same page as devs, in Destiny I felt I was at constant war with them.
Destiny = flavor of the month to game breaking problems, WoW = constant patching/hotfixing since they devs have a preset notion fed by player feedback as to what they want their game to be.
I guess MY biggest problem with Bungie that I can kind of narrow down to the root of all this negativity is I wanted them to succeed. However when they started failing they refused to own up to it, communicate and fix their shit in a timely manner.
This is how I play Destiny. I am going to get TF2 and when Destiny will become stale again, I will be kicking some asses in my titan.
Touhou: Scarlet Curiosity is only out in the US this week. An EU release date has not been announced yet AFAIK. Slain is also something you feel you’ve written about because it was delayed a week from last week. Tokyo Twilight Hunter: Special Gigs is also a US only release with the EU version out next month around this time.
Also out this week:
Hopiko (PS4)
Super Meat Boy (Physical PS4)
Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness (PS4) Might be this week, might be next week. Eevryone has a different date…
I actually come to this post every week for Casual’s updates, as they do the weirder stuff.
Seriously why are you not doing these posts considering the amount of additional games you’re always adding every week
As the comment above says, I only come into these to read your posts as youre the only one who lists the games and systems I am interested in
Although, to be fair, this weeks summary is a hell of a lot more detailed than the usual weekly ones
Is it only certain retailers that are releasing Horizon 3 early for pre-orders? I have mine preordered at JB hifi but it says it is releasing on the 27th.
I think it’s only the ultimate edition where you get the early access
Live Action?