Our author Schuhmann takes a look at old news from Bungie about Destiny and notes: They have three days left to release a new expansion.
December 2015. At that time, the mood around Destiny was at its peak. However, it was slowly starting to tip.
In September 2015, the Destiny world was still in order
In September 2015, “The Taken King” was released, by far the best expansion for Destiny up to that point.
TKK kept the Guardians engaged for over 6 weeks into November. Even hardcore players, who spent every free minute in Destiny, found something new every week, as certain things only went live gradually. Puzzles arose, were solved – the Black Spindle, the mysterious basketball room in the raid, the Sleeper Simulant. When would the remaining Exotics finally arrive?
There was a lot going on. From September to November 2015, Destiny was THE topic in the gaming world.
Already in December 2015, things started to wane a bit
Then in mid-November, the euphoria settled. Even the best hype eventually passes. Nothing new came, and the first said: “Now the next DLC could actually come. When will they announce it?”
Probably in December 2015, everyone thought. Then was the PlayStation Experience. Bungie would surely announce the season pass, the new DLCs for 2016, and much more! Fat chance.
There was only a Sparrow event and nothing else. No schedule, no DLC, no word about Destiny 2. Nothing that indicated how Destiny would continue in 2016.
At that time, when many were disappointed by the PlayStation Experience, the marketing chief of Destiny, Eric Osborne, stepped forward. He realized, like many others, that the mood was tipping, and Osborne said: 2016 will be great! We are working on things.
The days of waiting five months for new content are over
Osborne said: Some feared that Bungie would now deliver nothing substantial until they release the next “full Game”. The fear is that there would only be “events”. Osborne contradicted this. Bungie is also planning real content.
They have so much in store for Year 2. A whiteboard is in one of the meeting rooms full of notes, scribbles, and sticky notes filled with new events and activities. The days of waiting five months and ten days for new content like in Year 1 are over. Now they have a new plan.
Last year, we all waited five months and ten days between content drops after December. This year, the plan is to deliver new experiences at a faster clip.
So, let’s take the marketing chief at his word. If we now look at the calendar: Rise of Iron, the last content, was released on September 20, 2016. Since then, apart from “The Dawning” no new content has been released: 158 days.
The date Osborne referred to was the interval between “The Dark Below”, the 1st DLC, and “House of Wolves”, the 2nd DLC – that was 161 days.
Bungie, you have three days left
This means Bungie has exactly three days left to release new content. And one may doubt that they can pull it off. In the last weekly update it was said that maybe next Thursday we will get a roadmap for March. With the next game content, one might expect it at the end of March or mid-April.
So we will have to wait even longer for new content than back in that terrible time that should never happen again. Sometime at the beginning of Year 1.
With all due respect, Year 2 was, no matter what Bungie promised back then, a disappointment due to the postponement of Destiny 2. Today we know that all the concerns Guardians had in December 2015 have come true: Destiny has had far too little substantial content since then. The information policy has even worsened. Now we haven’t received any information since then that they might regret. And everything seems to be waiting for the release of the next “full Game”.
Year 3 does not look good so far. It is already halfway through and almost nothing has happened.
Unless you really count “The Dawning” as a full-fledged content drop. But oh my, “The Dawning” brought recycled strikes and a few new features. That is even further from a content drop than the Prison of Elders – and that was already really thin.
It has long been evident that the concept of “events” and a live team, which can change and expand features but hardly deliver anything new, simply does not work.
You can only keep players engaged to a certain extent with re-skins, shiny ships, sandbox updates, and glowing weapons; then they want the promised substantial new content.
If nothing happens in the next three days, then we have a new record … but not one of the good kind.
We address further consequences of the content drought in this article:
The MMO shooter Destiny combines the action-packed gameplay of a top shooter with the long-term enjoyment and character development of a classic MMO since 2014 ...
