Two Destiny developers speak frankly about what went wrong with Destiny 2. In the attempt to polish Destiny, much of the magic of Destiny 1 has been lost. Especially the mod system is simply terrible, says one who has worked on it.
Experts among themselves: In the Destiny Community Podcast, some key streamers are gathered who have been following Destiny for years. They used to be with Planet Destiny, but for some time now the podcast has been independent. This time, the panel had two of the leading Destiny 2 developers as guests:
- John Weisnewski, the weapons specialist,
- and Josh Hamrick, who is responsible for balance.
No PR talk: This is a different atmosphere than what one usually experiences from Bungie, when PR specialists like DeeJ or Mark Noseworthy are fronting. Hamrick and Weisnewski provide insight into the design and what lies behind it. It’s an open atmosphere, although they too do not throw colleagues under the bus or reveal secrets.
Mod system simply terrible, says developer
“Mods are terrible”: When the conversation turns to the mods of Destiny 2, Weisnewski and Hamrick laugh a little and shake their heads. It is clear that they can understand the criticism well. Hamrick says: “The mod system we brought with Destiny 2 was terrible. I can say that, I worked on it.” The system is too complicated and simply bad.
There were probably internal contradictions. Weisnewski says to Hamrick: “I told you that (about being bad and complicated) back then,” but by that time it was already very late.
Hamrick explains: The way mods were introduced did not give developers the opportunity to truly make it what it was supposed to be. Now they want to revise and improve that with the new knowledge.
However, the developers did not want to go into the exact causes of what went wrong with the mod system. Weisnewski said: “The real reason is not worth discussing here. Making games is just difficult.”
Armor in Destiny 2 worse than in Destiny 1
Armor in Destiny 2 feels interchangeable: A major point of criticism was that armor in Destiny 2 no longer feels important. There is no reason to specifically hunt for raid armor. Previously, there were fantastic raid armors in Destiny 1 that everyone wanted.
The developers agree. The problem in Destiny 1 was that armors were tied to specific attributes. Whoever wanted to play in a certain way had to look a certain way. If you wanted to be a “bad, dark motherfucker,” it could still happen that for gameplay reasons you had to wear a rainbow-colored armor, explains Weisnewski.
In Destiny 2, they wanted to separate that:
- The weapons should influence gameplay
- The armor should mainly be for “fashion”.
The problem was that this decision made armor arbitrary and interchangeable, making it mean less in Destiny 2. Therefore, they want to go back and significantly revise armor again. Apparently, they also focused too much on “exotic armor” and overloaded it with perks – legendary armor then fell short.
Buyer’s blindness a problem
Destiny 1, the ugly duckling: Hamrick talks about Destiny 1 as a game that Bungie was proud of, but which was technically an ugly duckling. Destiny 2 was meant to be smoother, more polished, cleaner. In the attempt to make the game so clean, many edges and corners have been sanded down, and they lost exactly what players had fallen in love with in Destiny 1.
But you can see that much better when you are outside the building where everyone works on the game. Because in the studio, they think: “Of course, people now prefer the polished version, because it is much better.” But players fell in love with the ugly duckling because it was fantastic.
Just like with Resident Evil: Hamrick says that he observed exactly the mistakes in another game from the outside that are now occurring with Destiny 2. He loved Resident Evil 4, but was very dissatisfied with Resident Evil 5 because the studio made exactly that polish that Bungie is now undertaking with Destiny 2.
- With Resident Evil 4, the developers looked back and said, “We can do this much better now, we know what our fans like!”
- With Resident Evil 5, the fans said: “You lost exactly what I liked.”
Apparently, Hamrick sees clear parallels between Destiny and Resident Evil. They want to counteract this, as the statements indicate.
A few weeks ago, we wished for exactly such open language from Bungie:
