Let’s Talk About Destiny (Again)

First off, whoa, Bungie’s shooter-MMO mashup has been out for almost a full year. In that time, I have not written a single blog post. Whoops. Sorry. I blame Destiny.

A year is a long time. For games, it’s an eon. With The Taken King on the imminent horizon, now’s as good a time as ever to look back on Bungie’s grand experiment. It has been a year of big changes, crazed addictions, emotional roller-coasters, and way too many news headlines. Now, we’re about to kick off Year 2 of what’s expected to be a 10-year marathon. The real question is, does Destiny have the legs for it?

Year 1 Talk

What did we learn in Year 1? Well, for one thing, we learned that Bungie is pretty terrible at PR. It’s a learning process, I know, but for a company that spends so much time talking to their player-base, they’re strikingly bad at it. The common trend here is simple: Bungie wants to be transparent with their players, but they keep talking to them like they need to be handled with kid gloves.

As a fan myself, I gotta say, picking through the weekly updates to find information I care about can be a painful process. The tone in blog posts, forum replies, interviews, and promotional videos is weirdly condescending and secretive. It reminds me not of game developers, but of politicians: talking in circles, using hyperbole and vague promises to divert attention from anything that might upset their user-base. It’s admirable that Bungie wants to keep their players in the loop, but it’s pretty evident that it’s not something that comes naturally to them.

You’re probably wondering, “What’s with all the focus on PR? Why aren’t we talking about the game itself?” We’ll get to that in a minute, I promise. I feel like it’s essential to tackle this issue first because it’s part of an ongoing problem throughout Destiny: there’s a growing sense of disrespect for player time. For every step forward Bungie makes, they take a half step back. Every design decision that seems aimed at helping players comes bundled with a big red “but…” attached to it. Every time I find myself excited, it’s coupled with a twinge of frustration. This problem isn’t singular. It’s endemic, so much so that it has become part of how players’ look at the game.

It’s also solvable, so let’s focus on that.

2 Steps Forward…

To be fair, a lot went right with Destiny’s first year. The foundation has always been excellent, but there were certainly issues that needed fixing. For the most part, Bungie has actually been really good about addressing these. There were some rough spots along the way, but the game you can play today is a vast improvement over the launch product. Moving in to The Taken King, let’s take a look at what’s been changed for the better:

There’s going to be way more story. I can’t actually vouch for this personally, as The Taken King isn’t out yet, but everything that’s been shown to the public suggests that Bungie is finally putting a strong focus on Destiny’s player narrative. House of Wolves made small strides in that department, but Year 2 will hopefully be where we start to see the story shine. And really, who isn’t excited for more Nathan Fillion??

The user interface is getting better. Bounties and quests are now integrated into a menu that feels much more in-line with RPG tradition, and highlights how these features are part of each player’s story. Additionally, the dozens of complex resources required in the game are being simplified down with each major release. There’s still the issue of the low resource caps, and I’d still like the option to turn off player names. Those things aside, though, Year 2 is taking Destiny’s already bar-setting UI and making it even better. Bungie’s UI design team continues to be among the industry’s best.

Upgrading gear is both simpler and more choice-driven. Putting aside the massive loot fiascothat was The Dark Below, Destiny has come a long way in focusing more on player choice. House of Wolves introduced the Ascending system, which allowed players to upgrade any piece of legendary or exotic gear to the new max level. All that it required was a rare resource that could be mined from end-game content. It was a system that made sense, forcing players to reach max level and play the most challenging content, with the incentive of being able to upgrade any piece of gear they wanted. Destiny has since exploded with diversity, with players creating unique characters that use a mix of gear from throughout the year’s releases. Further, the ability to Ascend gear has brought new life to older content. Players once again have motivation to play old Raids, knowing that they can ascend the unique gear they find and build a character that truly reflects their journey.

The Ascending system solved one of Destiny’s biggest problems. Before this change, end-game players often suffered from “clone syndrome”, where everyone at max-level looked and played the same due to a very limited pool of end-game gear. It sucked all the individuality out of the experience, and felt like a huge step backwards after all the work to get to that point. The Taken King is making further improvements to this system, now renamed “Infusion”. In Year 2, instead of grinding for rare end-game resources, players can sacrifice loot they don’t want to boost the power of loot they want to keep. In this way, a player’s favorite gun, helmet, jacket, etc. can continue to grow with them as they make progress through the game. It’s a huge improvement that feels like the natural conclusion to how the loot system has evolved.

With such a huge improvement, however, Bungie has made one major misstep: In a move that weirdly echoes the universally panned changes from The Dark Below, The Taken King is leaving most Year 1 gear behind. After hundreds of hours sunk ascending their favorite gear, players now have to face a reality where that gear will be quickly outclassed and forgotten in Year 2. That’s a pretty hard pill to swallow, which brings me to…

…1 Step Back

No matter how you look at it, loot is the most important part of Destiny. Whether they like the comparison or not, Bungie’s game shares DNA with titles like Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Borderlands. It’s all about the chase for better gear, for creating the ultimate end-game avatar. It’s about power, but it’s also about trophies. Loot is the badge of honor a player wears, a way to show where they’ve been and what they’ve done. In a game like Destiny, unique and powerful loot is the carrot that pulls you through the long hard grind.

And what a grind it is. Love it or hate it, Destiny is an exercise in repetition. Sure, you go to different places and shoot different things, but the core experience is still “go here, shoot everything, gain/upgrade loot.” Variety is handed to the player in the form of ever-escalating difficulty, to the point where end-game content is almost laughably hard. Yet, in spite of all that, the core gameplay just feels so good. Every pull of the trigger, every grenade, every melee hit all feels so satisfying. It’s pure Bungie action at its best.

Even the best combat mechanics can’t save the game forever, though. That’s why loot is so important. One more push through the Vault of Glass doesn’t hurt so much when it ends with a Vex Mythoclast drop. It may take dozens of hours to get there, but once you earn that gun, you know it was worth it. Is a lot of this stuff overpowered and crazy? Sure, but that’s the point. It’s the reward, the gold at the end of the rainbow. Given all the work put in to get there, it’s reasonable to assume that you’ll be able to keep that gear forever.

And you’d be wrong.

Let’s take a step back and talk about The Dark Below for a minute. Destiny’s first expansion was panned by critics and players alike. People rightfully complained that it was bone-dry on content, locked players out from existing activities unless they paid for the expansion, and was generally unbalanced and un-fun. The biggest complaint, however, was centered around loot.

The Dark Below made two glaring huge mistakes: it moved the damage/defense numbers up for all new Legendary gear, but left players with no option to upgrade their old gear to match. Suddenly, that perfect set of armor and guns a player has spent dozens of hours collecting was useless against the updated content. Secondly, Exotic gear could be upgraded to the new values, but only if you agreed to level that gear up from scratch again.

This effectively felt like a big middle-finger to the game’s most dedicated players. Whether intentional or not, it was a massive disrespect of their time. After all the work put in to get that Mythoclast, players now faced the notion that it was functionally useless. The rug had been pulled out from under everyone. Lots of people put the game on hold, including me.

Then House of Wolves happened.

House of Wolves was a revelation. For many players, it was the content update that put Destiny back on their radar. In one move, Bungie single-handedly reinvigorated Destiny’s loot system. With the addition of the Ascending system, even gear from the original launch became relevant again. For the first time, players had real options. They could ascend any Legendary and Exotic gear they wanted, allowing everyone to truly look and play their own unique way. Clone syndrome was gone, and old content felt important again. It boosted more than just loot variety: gameplay variety went up as well. Any activity that could potentially drop Legendary gear became relevant. People were running Vault of Glass again, and not just for the fun of it. For the first time, gear truly started to feel like a reflection of a player’s journey. Do you love that helmet you got from Crota’s End? Good. You can upgrade and take it with you. That Mythoclast you worked so hard for? Bring it up to par and use it. Be who you want to be. Become Legend.

That is, until The Taken King hits…

In a frankly unexpected move, Bungie has decided not to give players the option to bring most of their Year 1 gear forward to Year 2’s new levels of power. As a somewhat baffling decision, the new Infusion system will still cap Legendary items out at the year they were released. Year 1 gear stays at Year 1 levels, while Year 2 gear can be infused and ascended all the way to the new max stats. Further, Year 1 Exotics are locked to Year 1 levels, with a small handful of “select” Exotics getting re-designed into Year 2 versions. Oh, and the kicker? You’ll have to buy and upgrade the Year 2 versions from scratch again.

It’s a decision that simply doesn’t make sense. Bungie has direct examples of what their players, critics, and the community at large do and don’t respond well to. Everyone loved House of Wolves, specifically because it gave all the power of choice back to the player. Everyone previously hated The Dark Below for taking that choice away. The Taken King’s loot changes seem much more in line with the latter than the former. This isn’t a learning process or a hypothesis to be tested. This is a decision that directly ignores what was already proven and known.

Now, I’m not naive. I’ve done this kind of design work myself, and I have heard or can infer many of the reasons behind this change. I’ve thought long and hard about it, and the reasons just don’t seem good enough. I think it’s prudent to address them directly:

Players are less motivated to use new gear if they can still rely on their old gear. That’s just not true at all. In collection-based games, there are two types of growth: vertical and horizontal. Vertical growth is forward progress based on power, rank, content unlocks, and challenge mastery. Horizontal growth is expansive progress, based on increased choices, customization, and scale. The ideal gameplay loop, as seen in games like Pokemon, Dark Souls, and Warframe, encourages both. House of Wolves already nailed this, and proved the above point wrong in many ways. Sure, if you were patient you could just rely on your old gear to hit max-level. The reality, however, was that players still felt motivated to chase down that new gear. There was new armor sold from end-game vendors, exotic weapons hidden behind complex bounties, new ships to find, and more. Do I still carry my Mythoclast with me everywhere? Damn right I do, but I also spend tons of time with my new Lord of Wolves. I have an Osiris chest plate mixed with an exotic helmet I’ve had since the game launched, and a cloak from The Dark Below. In my quest for vertical growth, I’ve acquired horizontal options. Even at the level cap, the fact that players can continue collecting gear they haven’t tried yet encourages replayability. This mix is critical for long-term player engagement. Now, literally dozens of those options are effectively stripped away from end-game play.

Bungie is still giving you options by providing tons of new gear in The Taken King. That’s sidestepping the issue, and everyone knows it. What’s the harm in having more options? This isn’t simply a case of swapping something out. This is telling players their old gear, that they spent hundreds of hours earning, is obsolete. Then it’s telling them it’s ok because they can now spend hundreds of new hours rebuilding their library of choices from scratch. That’s not a plus, that’s sugar-coating a negative. Telling players their available options just doubled, because they have both their old and new gear to look forward to, would have been something to get excited about. Bungie wants players to be stoked about all the new gear they’ve put their hard work in to, but it’s hard to have that conversation when your players are distracted by anger. The whole thing could have been avoided.

Some gear is so unbalanced that it needs to be phased out of the game. No. That’s not a healthy way to treat your player base. When designing something, there are two ways to look at your users: as equals to be respected, or as a resource to be corralled and exploited. I’ve worked for companies on both sides of that, and the egos that lead to the latter are very real. The idea that you need to clamp down and restrict players implies one simple assumption: the players are dumber than you and will ruin their own fun. First, this isn’t true. Second, no matter how hard you try, players can feel that distrust in the work you put in front of them. It’s a guaranteed way to drum up bad press and alienate people. If gear is unbalanced, create new gear that is more exciting to use, and patch the old gear to bring it more into balance. I get that it’s an ongoing monster to chase, but that’s the nature of creating an ongoing online game. Balance is a full-time gig, and taking content away as a fix is the cheap and lazy way out. That’s how it feels to your users. They don’t care if your point is viable or not, they care that the content they’ve earned is safe. If someone did a bad job designing Fatebringer, then go fix that thing. Don’t take it away from people.

No one is taking your gear away. You can still use Year 1 gear in all the old Year 1 activities. I keep hearing this one in interviews with the press, and it just comes off as tone-deaf and absurd. No player is going to do that. Once again, it’s about the marriage of vertical and horizontal growth. Sure, I could use an old gun that’s pretty good in Vault of Glass, or I could use a new gun that has way better stats to plow through that content with even more power. It won’t even matter if the new gun has less exciting perks. If the raw numbers are high enough, everyone will always default to the most powerful thing they have. I don’t want to nerf my character just to relive old content, no one does. I want to blow through new content with a mix of old and new gear, and then take that new power and go back to play old content in a way I’ve never experienced before. It’s the whole point of a power fantasy. As you get stronger, you come to rely on that strength. Capping Year 1 gear is as good as taking it away entirely. No one is going to use it, they’ll just keep it in their vault to collect dust.

Throwing out old gear for more powerful new gear is how all MMOs do it. Most MMOs have some form of transmogrification system, allowing players to at least keep the visual appearance of their old gear moving forward. No one likes looking like a clone, and visual expression is often just as important to players as raw power. Secondly, Bungie often talks about Destiny not being an MMO. They want us to see it as something new, innovative, and different. This is one of those times to be innovative.

Bottom line, locking old gear away behind a Year 1 cap is a direct offense to player investment. House of Wolves was an unspoken promise: that if players were willing to sink the time, they could become whomever they wanted. Their gear was theirs to upgrade and keep, a souvenir that would last a lifetime. That time was sunk, hundreds of hours of it. Now the promise feels broken. How is anyone expected to sink hundreds of hours again this year if they can’t even guarantee that the gear they earn now will matter in Year 3? It’s a sour taste to what is looking like a pretty sweet package.

Back to That PR Thing

All of this really comes down to a lot of miscommunication and mistrust of player attitudes. Bungie has shipped a great game, a game that has touched literally millions of people, yet they can’t seem to go longer than a few months without loudly upsetting their own player base. Most of the issues outlined above make mention of Bungie’s awkward and often tone-deaf style of talking to their players. I truly don’t believe it comes from a negative place, but it’s a skill that needs to be learned fast.

It’s never perfect in practice, but it’s pretty simple in theory: if you’re going to act transparent, be transparent. Talk to your users like equals. If players are upset about losing their Year 1 gear to a power cap, don’t side step with “you can still use it on old content” or “we have all this great new gear”. That’s not a direct answer. It makes people feel like they’re small, like their voices don’t matter. It’s how you lose users. Sure, House of Wolves fixed a lot of the complaints from The Dark Below, but it was only after months went by and little to no information was shared with the public. The fix might have taken that long to design and build, but there’s no reason someone couldn’t have opened a dialog with the community about it. It’s important to let people know their time is valuable, and that their voices are heard. Sometimes it’s not enough to just say so, you have to show people. I hope there are already discussions happening around how to update The Taken King’s loot systems, and I hope that even a glimpse of those changes are shown much sooner than later.

Bungie is a great company full of smart, talented, caring people. I’m not without hope. Just like last year, this year’s problems may very well find their fix. For now, here’s what I plan to do: Just like The Dark Below before it, I’ll log in to The Taken King, finish the story missions, find a few new pieces of gear I like, vault all my old gear for safekeeping, and then put the whole thing aside to collect dust. If Bungie can address these issues, and rebuild a sense of trust and respect for what players have earned, I’ll come back. They did it once with House of Wolves, they can do it again. Except this time, let’s make sure it’s the last time.

Oh, and I still want my own Pike. Seriously.

This article was originally published on Kulture Keeper in August 2015. It is part 2 of 2. Check out Part 1 here.