There’s no game I get more questions about than Destiny 2, so here’s a little tidbit for those of you who are desperate for news on Bungie’s next big game: It’s still on track for 2017.
Said Activision in a slideshow attached to their earnings call today: “Full Destiny sequel in 2017 to broaden the franchise’s global reach, which along with follow-on content plans, sets the stage for growth.” In human-speak, that means it’s still planned for this year.
Although some of the folks behind Destiny 2 might crave more time to add content and beef up the game, here’s an interesting bit of news to consider: If Bungie misses this year for Destiny 2, Activision is awarded a hefty chunk of the independent studio’s stock, according to two sources familiar with goings-on at Bungie.
Bungie employees’ stock vesting schedule is also based on game releases, including Destiny 2, which gives them major incentives to get the sequel out this year.
Fans had been worried — mostly thanks to the lack of news — that Destiny 2 might be delayed out of this year, but consider this: with the first Destiny, Bungie started talking too early and wound up showing a number of features and plot points that never actually made it into the final game. This time, they want to avoid those mistakes, which means we likely won’t hear about the game until closer to launch. The roadmap will likely include a Destiny 1 autumn update, then a Destiny 2 reveal with a launch this spring.
They have got a lot of people on this one: From what I hear, at least three other Activision studios are working on the game in addition to Bungie. Destiny 2 is also coming to PC, and will likely be a total overhaul, so don’t expect to bring your Destiny 1 gear with you.
In other Destiny 2 news, the nonsensical Reddit rumour floating around today is very fake.
Comments
26 responses to “Destiny 2 Is Still Coming This Year, Activision Says”
I think I would rather the game be delayed rather than a broken game released. Please don’t fuck it up.
We would all rather see practical delay over rushing out any title.
It was the heavy business focus mentioned here that created most of Destiny’s problems and it’s still the main motivating force behind the sequel.
I genuinely hope they pull it off or otherwise by this time next year, we will be reading how Activision has “purchased” Bungie and either keeps them around by name or liquidates and absorbs them.
As soon as they announced their partnership with Activision way back when the game was first teased I knew this corporate shareholder appeasing bullshit would damage the creative vision of the game. That said, I loved Destiny.
It’s an inconvenient truth at this stage.
I think it’s clear that what ever happened before release, had the potential to ruin the game and place Bungie well outside their contractual obligations.
It seems the decision was made to tie up the loose ends, avoid any negative press and release while maintaining a positive facade.
It worked for the business side, but resulted in a very negative response from many players.
At its worst, the forums were a mess of confused people demanding answers and getting ignored in favor of positive PR.
(The few times they attempted to manage the anger it ended badly)
I truely hope Bungie is able to deliver a complete title this time, a proper representation of what they wanted to do originally.
As much as I liked Destiny, I think that like is built too much on the potential Destiny had rather than its actual merits.
They are going to have to win me back again
Take me I’m ready
Cant wait, so ready
being on PC, I’m keen to know more about Destiny 2 following the disappointment of Division
Based on experience with Destiny 1… don’t pre-order.
oh was it that bad?
I heard Taken made the game so much better. I guess it’s like an iteration thing
Based on my experience with the games industry my entire life and also my common sense… never pre-order.
Destiny 1 was fire emoji though. If you had friends who logged on regularly and you were willing to be patient with a brand new IP in a brand new console genre ironing out its kinks, there was nothing better this generation. I’d buy a hundred flawed games shooting for the stars but falling short like Destiny than another goddamn Ubisoft open world sequel polished to a mirror sheen. We need more 70% successes that take risks, not less.
Enh. Playing darts is a great time with friends, that’s hardly an endorsement of the game experience. I’m hazarding a guess that you actually like PVP and don’t particularly care about narrative experiences in games? Destiny’s shooting was able to carry it as far as it went, and its skyboxes were pretty the first – maybe second – times you saw them, but once that shine wore off there was nothing left. I played for hours and hours in pursuit of something that I thought was right around the corner but turned out not to exist. It took the familiar notes of the skinner box for me to realize that if not for its shooter mechanics, there was nothing else TO the game that isn’t routinely done bigger AND better in your average MMO. Raids, dungeons, open-world scavenger/kill hunts, gear-grind, diversity in classes, skills, races… even story is done better in most MMOs.Not to mention that their community-facing attitude was one of the shittiest attitudes from any publisher/developer in gaming. Destiny was not a flawed diamond that needed more polish to truly shine, it was Icarus’ wings – a textbook case of hubris. When you shoot for the stars and miss, you don’t always land on the moon – you die in the overwhelmingly vast void of space in between.
I’m sure Bungie’s corporate ego has taken a slight (multi-million dollars in lost bonuses kind of slight) bruising enough to WANT to err on the side of caution (though you’d never fucking know it if you read their smarmy-as-fuck, smirking ‘lol OK, sometimes we fuck up, but we’re still the best and you still love us’ blog/forums), but I still strongly recommend AGAINST being on Destiny 2’s test-flights. Because wanting to err on the side of caution isn’t going to work. Remember, the thing’s being released on time because Activision said so. Whether it’s ready or not. Odds on it won’t be ready. Just like last time.
Dead wrong. I steer clear of PVP centric experiences almost completely. I look at critically acclaimed games like Overwatch as far more guilty of the charges brought against Destiny than Destiny ever was. I think it’s my love of narrative that makes Destiny such a good game for me.
The only narrative based game that has truly succeeded in the last two generations for me is The Last Of Us. I really appreciate Destiny’s humility (at least in my eyes) of focusing on lore, not plot, because too many other developers have the (again, something people accuse Destiny of) hubris to believe they are good enough to write stories worth telling in video games. Almost all of them are wrong.
And going back to your darts analogy, I believe that’s exactly what makes darts a good game. Ultimately, the games we play as a society aren’t about the games themselves, they are about us. In poker, you play the man, not the cards, for example. These games have extremely limited “content” but are beloved around the world and provide as much depth as you’re willing to dive for, because, and this is a lesson Ubisoft needs to learn with their open-world addiction, having heaps of content doesn’t make it a good game.
Destiny’s gameplay repetition, the flow of the mechanics, the PVE / PVP based missions, even the slow as hell loading times; all of it serves to create the perfect game to spend hours playing with your friends. You can pay a different kind of peripheral attention to the game once you become familiar with its repetition and then use the rest of your attention to socialise. This is something i’ve only truly realised after the fact, why I kept coming back to Destiny even though, as we have all said and heard and argued about countless times, the “content” was so small. I was determined to understand what kept me coming back. Destiny really is the perfect game to play with friends, not all of it was intentional, but it all feeds into it. Bungie had the clear-headedness to focus on the only thing that matters: the 30-60 second gameplay loop.
Their assumption that their was enough good faith in their brand to take a devil may care attitude towards community interaction was a misstep. But I think everyone fucks up there, the developers, the publishers and especially the fans, who are responsible for some of the most toxic goddamn behaviour on the planet.
I don’t know where this narrative came from that Destiny was anything other than a huge success for the company, at the very least, financially, but you need to shake that notion. Critical acclaim is one thing, but Call Of Duty was getting unanimously positive reviews for years when it was putting out truly trash gaming experiences, and something like Bioshock Infinite is sitting on 93% and 94% on metacritic, even though it’s deeply flawed both in gameplay and story. I don’t pay too much attention to the critics these days.
For every person who complains loudly online about Destiny, there are millions of people who loved the experience and still log in every weekend for Trials Of Osiris and or Raids and Nightfalls. Destiny 1 was a success, it just wasn’t the specific success that every single player (myself included) wanted it to be.
BUNGIE corporate, not Activision. I think perhaps the rose-tinted glasses have coloured your memory, but Destiny did NOT do well in review scores, and the fact that it fell short of its target cost Bungie literally millions of dollars in bonuses. And that volume of criticism was definitely in their minds as they struggled to correct the course of the godawful-to-patch behemoth that was their live build. Something too hard to fix by their first two ‘expansions’, and only starting to be remedied with TTK.
(Also, I can’t believe you count lore as one of Destiny’s strengths. It’s one of the worst-delivered examples of game lore that I can think of in… Jesus, in quite possibly the entire history of gaming, let alone that the content of that lore was butchered to fuckery by a committee of designers who had the unblinking arrogance to assume they could do a better job of writing than actual professional writers. And who, as previously mentioned, suffered precisely for that hubris.)
Yeah i do remember the reviews. And I like I said, game reviews in general are tough to really quantify in terms of individual consumer value. Nioh is getting strong reviews but I know for me as a consumer it’d not be the game for me. Like I said before, there are games like Bioshock Infinite that crushed it in reviews but were ultimately far below that in quality and importance. Critics are just as susceptible to hype as anyone else. Destiny especially was a game that revealed its value, and its specific appeal, only after weeks and months of play. The 7 out of 10s within days of release felt both justified and slightly misleading when it came to the Destiny reviews. They didn’t paint even close to the whole picture.
The lore IS there though. There’s one Australian youtuber who covers the lore found in the grimoire cards in really good video breakdowns and there so much good content there. The delivery system of that lore is flawed, but the fact that they took time to create it and that it informs every decision in the world building and even mechanics is the reason why Destiny’s world really draws you in. You feel the care taken in Destiny’s lore with every in game step you take. It’s not written down or spoken to your face, it’s literally all around you.
Here’s one that breaks down the Book Of Sorrow, which gives the Hive and all their characters so much more context.
I’m really not sure why you’ve taken such a personally offended position when it comes to Destiny. I see your comments all the time on Kotaku and this is the only subject matter where I’m left scratching my head about what you’re saying. You’re also making a lot of assumptions about how i feel and the reasons why, but I only ever talk about Destiny from a very pragmatic position. I acknowledge its flaws, the public perception of it, and its place within the industry as a whole, and then provide my opinion. And it’s never as simple as “I LOVE DESTINY”, and it’s certainly not a “rose-tinted glasses” nostalgia fest for a game that’s too young for that anyway.
Bungie are not infallible. They fucked up numerous things with Destiny. But they got enough right, and the fixed enough later, that its one of the most important games to be released so far this generation. Not just because of the things it did well, but because of the lessons everyone learned from this new kind of game that hadn’t really been tried before on consoles. I don’t really see how that’s up for debate at this point, but, as always, i’m willing to discuss.
We may simply have a miscommunication there, perhaps you reading a level of vehemence or forcefulness to an otherwise dismissively bitter and disappointed experience with Destiny.
My experience is dramatically different to yours. If you genuinely want to understand where the bitterness is coming from, then you need to consider this very specific context: Firstly, I was here for the space opera promised, not a game of darts with mates. You might dismiss the notion that games should be anything BUT ‘darts with mates’, but there are plenty of games who DO manage entertaining if not outright gripping experiences for the solo gamer. Destiny was not one of them. Even on consoles. So to start with, it failed to deliver what was advertised or hoped for, but to compound its failure, it also failed to do much – if anything – original or new compared to MMOs (who do everything Destiny can do bar FPS bigger, better, and deeper), and punished those who attempted to endure the grind without only playing with friends. By this point, the third failing of having one of the worst lore delivery systems in any game ever, and the fourth failing of abominable community management were just adding layers to an already uncommon disappointment, and the icing on the cake for me personally was that I personally got fucked out of various bonuses and cosmetics that I was entitled to, with only a quiet acknowledgement of the bug up front, then nothing but silence ever after.
Maybe you’re used to playing nothing but shitty games, so this experience of failures, disappointments, and uncommonly awful performance on so many fronts is quite common for you? But I’ve not been so badly disappointed, disgusted, or personally put out by a game on so many levels for a very, very long time. So yeah, Destiny holds a very special place in my heart for not being what was advertised, doing inexplicably worse at the things it tried to do than the industry gold-standards, and handling those failures in the worst possible ways.
****
That was the broad lines, but just to get specific on this point:
I genuinely do not understand how you think that ‘MMO, but as a FPS’ somehow qualifies as ‘new kind of game’. They weren’t building a flying car, here, that might require some weird fusion of aerospace AND road-automatic engineering. It was a bog-standard MMO-lite, shifted to the shooter perspective. And every mistake they made they could have learned from the lessons already learned elsewhere. The very flawed idea that this was something somehow groundbreaking and new, never done before, is the exact reason those arrogant idiots didn’t bother to look to where those problems had already been solved. Take the infamous issue with the Cryptarch and purples not dropping purples. If they’d pulled their heads out of their asses to stop smelling their own farts for five seconds and asked their once-removed cousins over at ActiBlizzion to borrow some specialists on handling loot systems and player psychology they could’ve fixed that particular issue in beta by learning the lessons that WoW learned in its beta nearly ten years ago. Or, say, FF14 if you insist on the idea that console players and designers can’t/don’t/shouldn’t learn anything about very basic game design principles from the PC market.
This idea of them getting a pass because they were doing something uncharted is just so inexplicable to me in the face of years of evidence to the contrary.
@transientmind
I honestly am not impressed by 90% of the games I play. As I said multiple times now, even the highest rated games still don’t cut it, especially story and characterisation wise. I’m used to playing shitty games because triple A for a generation and a half has generally meant “disappointment”. My standards for games are higher than most.
I’m not saying all games need to be the equivalent of darts with friends at all. But it’s ok for some to be. It’s ok for Destiny to be. At this stage in my life (27 and not being able to hang out with my friends as much as I used to) I would rather something like that than something that thinks its an epic tale of blah blah blah and this and that like fucking Horizon Zero Dawn is pitching itself to be. I will personally apologise to whoever needs it if that game is anything but trite, two dimensional storytelling and characterisation, but i’m not too worried about having to deliver.
The big problem with Destiny is that we all let our imaginations get the best of us. We saw the concept art and we heard the PR spiels and we gleefully filled in the blanks. I personally thought Destiny was going to be radically different from the final product. But once I played the thing and came to terms with the fact that what I imagined, and the details I ignored, leading up to the release, were separate from the reality we received, I found a lot to love. If you actually go back and listen to stuff, there’s the usual changes and removals of things that happen during development of all games, but their articulated vision for the game is actually pretty much all there. Gamers did the exact same thing with No Man’s Sky. Even from day one they were always careful not to promise things they had no intention of doing in the game. Some stuff got left on the cutting room floor, but it was the audience who misled themselves more than anything.
Perhaps it’s because I was fortunate enough to play the Alpha and the Beta before release, so the final product wasn’t as much of a shock to me as it was for other people?
I really think downplaying the significance of fusing two already established genres (and their tropes) together is completely oversimplifying the complexity of it. It’s easy to say “what’s so hard, it’s an FPS with MMO elements?” but MMOs generally operated in 2D space. You auto locked, you auto attacked, and generally the things like targeting and movement happened on a 2D plane. Destiny’s combat and movement is fully three dimensional and tied to MMO elements. You can’t just cut off gun range arbitrarily (like MMO targeting generally works), which means a whole extra layer of consideration with perks, damage falloffs, and combat spaces needs to happen. There’s also things like raids which were an entirely new experience for so many players. I don’t know enough about game design to go into the detail I need to here, but there are so many “learned lessons” from MMO and FPS that if implemented in the exact same way in Destiny would have flat out broken the game.
Destiny made some stupid decisions, sure. I can’t explain away the failure of basic armchair psychology that would have told them that the purples to blues bullshit would have rubbed people the wrong way. And it was wilfully naive to think that all players would always be able to find people to play with them for the end-game content. But you know what would have been worse? Matchmaking in raids. That would never have worked. It required too much time commitment, too much mastery of the mechanics, and too much communication. I am glad they put content like that in there that didn’t make concessions to be more accessible.
Honestly, they could and should have communicated that the end game content was a strictly social affair in a better way. They could have been clearer about the fact that it wasn’t HALO BUT DIFFERENT SORT OF for players like yourself. But most of this sounds like you bought a game that just wasn’t right for you. It happens to everyone.
It’s like Fable all over again. People chose to hate those games and dismiss Peter Molyneux for what they weren’t, instead of celebrating and finding enjoyment in what they were. I spent hours staring at screenshots and artworks for that game imagining something completely different from what I got. But even as a 15 year old, I was able to accept that I was the one who lied (to myself), not them.
I hope you give Destiny 2 a try. I’m confident that they’ve learned a lot of the lessons they needed to from Destiny to deliver a truer articulation of their vision this time around.
Good morning, give me more options as a clan leader please. Things like a clan banner that can be customised (member the Halo series!?) along with clan colours.
Also, give me the needler form Halo. My clan only thank you, exclusive to the Ghost.
Hmmm, short list. Keep controls the same? So damn smooth.
I really hope they’re going to allow us to either carry our heroes over if the timeline hasn’t progressed much further, or at least carry key items across (dyes, banners, ships, sparrows, emotes).
Nah. New Destiny, new me. New phone who dis?
Never played because I’m a goober at FPS on console. Looking forward to this on PC
I care nothing if it’s a complete reboot and there’s no character continuity.
I care that the environments are amazing, the level design is as good as it is now, the enemies are fun to shoot, and the gunplay and weapons are as utterly addictive. Plus this time, a story that makes sense…
Also, a wizard that came from the moon, please.
Destiny was a pretty huge success and yet activision have applied an ultimatum for D2? There is clearly no limit to their rampant avarice! I feel sorry for Bungie being held to ransom by this fuck arsery. My expectations are going to be held very low for this release.
Actually those ultimatums and requirements were already in play.
If you recall, Bungie signed on to make two Destiny titles for Activision under contract, nothing has changed.
From a basic angle, both titles will need to make X amount each.
It’s the complex way that X is achieved that can make it very risky business.
If Bungie fails, they will become part of Activision, no question. (That’s just who Activision are now, the quiet EA)
From memory Bungie retain the Destiny IP, learnt their lesson from Halo.
I’m seeing a few studios with that clause, I often wonder how that translates in to additional requirements or if it’s just more money needed.
“plot that never actually made it into the final game”. FTFY.
In all seriousness are there plans to expand the narrative side of the game in any meaningful way?
I feel sorry for anyone who played Destiny 1 and hung around hoping that it was going to get a decent amount of content, only to hear that it will all get kicked to the curb.
Will be interesting to see how #2 sells… (fool me twice?)
By the end it had a ton of content, what are you talking about?