A Halloween event called Festival of the Lost starts on Tuesday in Destiny 2. With the event, a new Horde mode comes to the shooter. This could actually determine whether Destiny 2 takes a new direction or continues as before, says our author Schuhmann.
The original problem of Destiny: Since 2014, Destiny has suffered from a major issue, content drought. There simply isn’t enough to do to keep Guardians engaged over time.
The Destiny year goes as follows:
- In September, the main attraction of the year is released
- In December, the first major expansion
- In the spring of the following year, the next and final push of new content
With each of these content releases comes a balance update that changes the weapons and starts a new “season”. Otherwise, not much happens in a year of Destiny: apart from minor quality-of-life improvements or bug fixes, which often take a while, like the nerf of the Sleeper Simulant.
This leads to long content droughts in Destiny:
- From late October to early December
- From January to May – this varies
- And then from July to August
This is what Bungie says about content droughts: Ever since 2015, Bungie has promised that these content droughts would come to an end and things would get better. Already in February 2015, Eric Hirshberg from Activision spoke of a “robust pipeline” of new content. Since then, Guardians have been waiting for this pipeline to flow.
For Destiny 2, Activision promised something similar in different words. But so far, Bungie has never really been able to deliver on that.
That’s why Destiny always experiences such long content droughts
This is why Bungie cannot solve the problem: Apparently, Bungie vastly underestimated how much effort it takes to develop a game the size of Destiny live.
They simply couldn’t manage to work on the next expansion, maintain the ongoing game, and then also “on the side” develop content.
Structures to ensure that had to be painstakingly created:
- By the end of 2015, they had built a “live team” – that was supposed to support the ongoing game – which was heavily promoted in December 2015 with a “We’ll do it live” Vidoc.
- At the same time, Activision had assured that “partner studios” would assist with Destiny: the High Moon Studios or Vicarious Visions
- Additionally, Bungie has also constantly expanded its own staff – they are said to have over 700 employees
Destiny had a very ambitious plan for years, meaning that there was always a “large content expansion” in the works that was delayed or had issues and required more resources than originally planned.
The main team at Bungie always worked on the big expansion, while the “live team” could only organize smaller events and content updates for which no new content was created.
It’s said that creating new content in Destiny is notoriously cumbersome, as highlighted in a report by Kotaku.
There, an insider reportedly described how cumbersome Bungie’s editor is. You have to load a map for 8 hours overnight, and it takes another 20 minutes to open it. Moving a simple node a few meters takes only a few seconds, but then everything still needs to be compiled for another 20 minutes.
This is how free updates have been so far: This has led to hardly any notable content being released outside the paid DLCs. They then resorted to “recycling events.” This contributed to Destiny earning a reputation as the “recycling champion.”
The three largest of these free content updates were:
- Sparrow Racing in December 2015 – back then, Bungie actually wanted to take the entire game in a different direction. Destiny was supposed to become more of a hobby or MMO – but they quickly abandoned that path.
- The “The Taken Spring” in spring 2016 – where Bungie had to improvise and updated content from “Prison of Elders.”
- And “Age of Triumph” in spring 2017 – a recycling of the old raids and the introduction of achievements.
The special thing is: All these “larger free content updates” actually only came in situations where no DLCs were planned.
This time, everything is supposed to be “really” different
New plan: With the “new” Destiny 2 Forsaken, things are supposed to be different. Bungie has once again promised to give Guardians something to do every month.
With the first event for Forsaken, “Festival of the Lost”, Bungie actually wants to bring new content on Tuesday, October 16:
- The Horde mode in the Spooky Forest is supposed to be a new activity, where players fight for survival for 15 minutes
- Additionally, a new quest is supposed to come, where players investigate the murder of the Cryptarch Ives
New direction or Déjà vu – Where is Destiny 2 headed?
The exciting part: Until now, events in Destiny have actually only been opportunities to promote the cash shop. On Tuesday we will find out if that really has changed and whether Bungie can finally fulfill its promise to provide players with substantial content throughout the entire year in 2018.
These could then also stay in the game permanently and bring variety.
One should probably not expect too much, but one may be curious whether Forsaken really signifies a lasting change in Bungie’s philosophy.
Much will depend on whether Bungie has succeeded in improving its production processes behind the scenes and possibly using new partner studios effectively to release fresh content more easily.
The question is:
- Can Bungie really expand and keep Destiny 2 fresh with free updates in 2018?
- Or will the event remain below expectations and be interesting for only a few hours?
I am certainly excited to see how the long story of Destiny will unfold next Tuesday.
