(AfroGamers.com) On February 22, Bungie dropped the long-anticipated expansion for its acclaimed open world action MMO shooter, Destiny 2. Since the original Destiny, I have always been interested in what they were going to add next, and even when things got repetitive, I still played. Every three months, on day one, I would happily cough up my $30 just to get my hands on the new content. When they moved to the yearly season model, I gladly coughed up my $80 to get the expansion and all of the season’s content. Not this time though… What changed that damped my love of the game?
Bungie and Their Delays
It is commonplace in gaming today to delay a game for “polish” reasons. It never made sense to me that game developers would announce a release date for a game, and be off by such large amounts. It’s never a week or two or even a month, it’s always a significant amount of time. This has always been the case since Bungie left Activision. Say what you want about the content or whatever people say bad about Activision, but they gave Bungie the manpower to make good on the said release date. If I remember right, back then, they only pushed the game back one or two weeks from when they said that it would release and the reason for it was never because it was not done.
Since the Activision/Bungie split, it seems that Bungie has had a very hard time keeping up with release dates and even their own content windows. I completely understand that there are sometimes things like Covid that comes along and throws a wrench in plans but this was happening way before covid and it is still happening now. This directly ties in to my next issue.
Seasons Last Forever
Like I was saying with the delays, this has a direct effect on the game itself. Usually, I can play Destiny for three months straight, which is considered one season. Most of the time, I start off hot for a month, mellow out for the next month and then start to get excited for the new season toward the end of the third month. For the past one or two years, I could not do this because content is never ready when it supposed to be ready. I basically get excited for no reason. If you are a Destiny 2 player, you know that towards the end of any given season, there is really nothing to do until the new season starts, which is fine. Bungie has a new content drip feed system where every week, something new comes out and it gives you something fresh to do, combined with whatever you already had to do. I think that they have done a great job with this model and it’s something that I think is much better than the previous model where they just released everything at once and if you finish it in a week, tough luck, because you’re not getting anything else until the next release.
The downside of this model is that they usually only do around 8 to 10 weeks of content and leave the rest of that time for players to clean up any loose ends that they may have. I am sure that you can see the issue if the remaining two weeks turn into six or more weeks which has not been uncommon for Bungie lately. If you know that the next season is not ready or that you are going to see some delays, just make extra content so that the player base has something to do in the meantime.
Nickle and Diming
I never fault any game for making its money however they want to make their money. I actually preferred the Call of Duty games back when they made you buy the season pass in order to get the DLC map packs because they always came when they said they are going to come. If I pay for something, I want it when they say that it is going to come. Bungie did something toward the end of last year that left a bad taste in my, and from what I heard, many fans mouth.
The Witch Queen expansion was supposed to come out last year around October (which is still after when it would usually come out), but Bungie announced that they need more time to make the expansion better. Ok, cool… so now what? Well, how about we have some content that is already done that we are going to release, but you have to pay for this content.
Don’t this sound a little strange? You have content, already made, that is not part of the new expansion nor the previous season, and you push back the new expansion and give us this new content… for a price. Not only that, but to me, they tried to hide it under the name of the Bungie 30th Anniversary banner. Not only did I not know that Bungie had been open for 30 years, I really didn’t care enough about it to give them an extra $30 in order to get content that was already finished when the new expansion isn’t and I have to wait more than 30 days to play it.
This broke my spirits to the point where I just said forget the new “mini season” and stopped playing for a while. Even though I do plan on picking up the Witch Queen soon, I am just not as motivated to get it as I used to be. All of these things put together has taken a toll on me over the years and this stunt at the end of last season was the straw that broke my back. While I am excited about the new things that they are adding to the game and the new strikes, raids, and dungeons, it is going to take a little bit to get me back into the mood to play one of my favorite franchises of all time again.
Staff Writer; Tardell Swift
This brother is new to writing yet has many different interests such as gaming, hip hop, wrestling, and manga.
You can follow him on Twitter; PhirewoodGaming and keep up with his thoughts there as well.