Destiny

Originally posted by Newjak
have you actually done large scale application coding?

An even better question would be, "Have you managed large-scale software development projects?" And the answer to that is "yes: many."

My point was, nothing you are I do for a living adequately compares to working on a $500 million video game. But if you're going to do the "I'm an expert in this field so I'm right", I'm a better example because the reasons this game fell short is so many areas is due to the Project Directors, Program Managers, etc. People who do what I do for a living. Those assholes. If you think a script-writer/code grunt are who people (in this thread) think are at fault , you're mistaken. Most of us know our video game development shit.

The developers at such a large organization working on such a large project have very little creative input into the process. They get minor project deliverables, they deliver them. That's their job. If they deviated from their deliverables, even if they are trying to be creative, that can be met with a termination. This is apex corporatized video game development: this is not an indy-dev team of 7 dudes right out of college.

You have to get up to the director level before you start hitting on the points we are bitching about.

For example:

http://creativeskillset.org/job_roles_and_stories/job_roles/328_creative_director_games

http://creativeskillset.org/job_roles_and_stories/job_roles/337_project_managerproducer_games

So what exactly is your point, again? I'll quote it (because I strongly dislike it when people strawman my points so I'll avoid doing that to yours):

Originally posted by Newjak
But you guys keep saying all this stuff should be easy yet I doubt any of you actually have any real large scale software develop experience much less game design experience.

Originally posted by Newjak
All I've said what I will continue to say is that people make it sound like large scale enterprise development is easy. Speaking from personal experience it is not.

To address that last quote:

It is easy: if you're not a moron. Here's what's great about these process areas: we literally have decades of refined and reformed best practices that can be used to make a best approach on these massive projects. Sure, new ideas and improved approaches can be undertaken but they are not going to create a paradigm shift in best-practice methodology (there are also multiple best practice approaches for the same project).

But, speaking from experience, this shit is easy as hell. From my perspective, the hard part is convincing investors to fund the project. Bungie got that. What happened afterwards (all the negative aspects of the Destiny game) is the fault of the higher-ups, NOT the low-level devs.

Originally posted by Newjak
It drives me crazy when you guys say these things are easy fixes cause their not. Especially when have so many aspects you are juggling together.

I don't know who said these are "easy fixes." They were certainly easy fixes 3 years ago. Now they would have to overhaul major aspects of the game to fix the many of the issues. Some of the smaller complaints, however, are extremely easy fixes.

Edit - I should point out that this game has always felt highly polished. This is one of the things that is on my list of "things Destiny did well." I have about 13 more bad things and then I'll post the top 10. I'll be posting the final lists to the Destiny subreddit (but I am making the list, here, first, so you gents can tear it apart, if you wish).

I think the script writer might be at fault. Or it could be upper management who gutted a decent script for the sake of DLC.

Originally posted by BackFire
Or it could be upper management who gutted a decent script for the sake of DLC.

I suspected this quite a long time ago. I may have even posted that theory in this thread.

Regardless, the Creative Director probably is pissed as hell. No normal person, would sign off on all of those disjointed, half-assed, world and story-building "ideas." I'm more likely to think that the Creative Director and writer go so fed-up with their bosses constantly f*cking up their vision of Destiny that they quit. 😐

Wait a minute...that's exactly what happened:

http://www.vg247.com/2013/09/24/destiny-creative-director-and-writer-leaves-bungie/

Long-serving Bungie writer Joe Staten has parted ways with the developer.

Staten’s departure was announced in an update to the Bungie website, where he gave no explanation for the move beyond a desire for new challenges.

“After 15 great years at Bungie, from the battlefields of Myth to the mysteries of Halo and beyond, I’m leaving to tackle new creative challenges. While this may come as a surprise, fear not,” Staten wrote.

“It’s been my pleasure building Destiny these past four years, and after the big reveal this Summer, our hugely talented team is on track for greatness. I’ll be cheering all of them, with all of you, when the game launches next year. Thank you for your support of me, and your continued support of Bungie. We couldn’t have done it without you.”

Joe or Joseph Staten joined Bungie in 1998 and worked on Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2 and Halo 3, and wrote novel Halo: Contact Harvest.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised as well.

I think it was Angry Joe who mentioned that there was videos of SP content that was showed prior to release that showed a much different story campaign.

Originally posted by Smasandian
Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised as well.

I think it was Angry Joe who mentioned that there was videos of SP content that was showed prior to release that showed a much different story campaign.

SP?

What is that?

Single player.

Originally posted by Smasandian
Single player.

Oh. So if what you're saying is true, Backfire's theory is probably the most correct. Add in that the people who would get the most pissed about the game and story elements getting gutted for a trickle release approach, and it makes sense that the Creative Director and writer would quit Bungie.

This is a conspiracy theory but it does not take much to pick up the subtle shitstorm that brewed over the direction that Activision higher-ups likely forced down Bungie's throat. I'd probably quit, too, if I was in their situation. They probably had 20-30 years of combined experience on churning out, literally, some of the best (seriously, the Halo Franchise is easily top 20 material from a numbers perspective) story telling in video gaming history. And then they got their vision of how they wanted Destiny to be, shit all over and turned into an almost unrecognizable piece of "art."

So, basically, they had a decent Single Player for this game and it was gutted to look like shit, huh?

Originally posted by dadudemon
An even better question would be, "Have you managed large-scale software development projects?" And the answer to that is "yes: many."

My point was, nothing you are I do for a living adequately compares to working on a $500 million video game. But if you're going to do the "I'm an expert in this field so I'm right", I'm a better example because the reasons this game fell short is so many areas is due to the Project Directors, Program Managers, etc. People who do what I do for a living. Those assholes. If you think a script-writer/code grunt are who people (in this thread) think are at fault , you're mistaken. Most of us know our video game development shit.

So you are on of those people booo. Just kidding but when I was talking about development I am in fact talking about the entire development process from management -> devl -> testing -> to market

And I do agree Managers and other business folks have tremendous impact on development. Most importantly on things like what is high priority, what needs to go in at what time, all things that can drastically alter how things happen. Of course those people often have little input on how those items get implemented since they often have little to no technical expertise.

The developers at such a large organization working on such a large project have very little creative input into the process. They get minor project deliverables, they deliver them. That's their job. If they deviated from their deliverables, even if they are trying to be creative, that can be met with a termination. This is apex corporatized video game development: this is not an indy-dev team of 7 dudes right out of college.

You have to get up to the director level before you start hitting on the points we are bitching about.

For example:

http://creativeskillset.org/job_roles_and_stories/job_roles/328_creative_director_games

http://creativeskillset.org/job_roles_and_stories/job_roles/337_project_managerproducer_games

I will actually disagree whole heartily with the notion that developers have little creative input on a project, or that they should have little creative input. Often times you need developers to be a part of that process to help define what is and is not possible from a technical standpoint ie the creative team creates 20000 character models but the system can only handle 100 character models.

Devs also are the ones that create and implement the RNG algoritms, build game engine.

What I am trying to get at here is that development has many aspects from business to creative to developers. Having issues in anyone of those areas can cause problems.

I mean ultimately it is the developers though that have to do the implementation of what they are told to do. Which can be the bulk of a projects life if it causes lots of redesigns and research.

So what exactly is your point, again? I'll quote it (because I strongly dislike it when people strawman my points so I'll avoid doing that to yours):

To address that last quote:

It is easy: if you're not a moron. Here's what's great about these process areas: we literally have decades of refined and reformed best practices that can be used to make a best approach on these massive projects. Sure, new ideas and improved approaches can be undertaken but they are not going to create a paradigm shift in best-practice methodology (there are also multiple best practice approaches for the same project).

But, speaking from experience, this shit is easy as hell. From my perspective, the hard part is convincing investors to fund the project. Bungie got that. What happened afterwards (all the negative aspects of the Destiny game) is the fault of the higher-ups, NOT the low-level devs.

I also disagree that it is easy if you are not a moron. Yes we have a lot of refined practices that have helped boost development quality. Acting like they are easy to implement or continually do is not true. Perhaps you have a team of good veterans that have lived and breathed good practices and need little to no direction but that is often I find to be the exception rather than the norm. Why because maintaining good coding practices is a lot like maintaining a good military. You need to be disciplined and continuously practicing what you preach. From managerial perspective it maybe as easy as you think but from a down in the ditch part it is not.

I don't know who said these are "easy fixes." They were certainly easy fixes 3 years ago. Now they would have to overhaul major aspects of the game to fix the many of the issues. Some of the smaller complaints, however, are extremely easy fixes.

Edit - I should point out that this game has always felt highly polished. This is one of the things that is on my list of "things Destiny did well." I have about 13 more bad things and then I'll post the top 10. I'll be posting the final lists to the Destiny subreddit (but I am making the list, here, first, so you gents can tear it apart, if you wish).

My point remains Destiny was not an easy undertaking from a game development standpoint. People saying it is probably don't know what they are talking about. From a design standpoint they probably tried to put together a regular hodge of different gaming elements especially including the multiplayer competitive element to it.

Originally posted by dadudemon
Oh. So if what you're saying is true, Backfire's theory is probably the most correct. Add in that the people who would get the most pissed about the game and story elements getting gutted for a trickle release approach, and it makes sense that the Creative Director and writer would quit Bungie.

This is a conspiracy theory but it does not take much to pick up the subtle shitstorm that brewed over the direction that Activision higher-ups likely forced down Bungie's throat. I'd probably quit, too, if I was in their situation. They probably had 20-30 years of combined experience on churning out, literally, some of the best (seriously, the Halo Franchise is easily top 20 material from a numbers perspective) story telling in video gaming history. And then they got their vision of how they wanted Destiny to be, shit all over and turned into an almost unrecognizable piece of "art."

So, basically, they had a decent Single Player for this game and it was gutted to look like shit, huh?

This could just be that ultimately people had different visions for the story and because there was conflict or multiple redesigns the story content had to get shortened due to time constraints. Which would make sense.

Originally posted by Newjak
Truthfully though we do not know if the original SP was good or not.

Based on how well I thought the Halo stories, from Bungie, were, I'd say the writer and creative director would have a difficult time royally ****ing up the story and "feel" of Destiny unless their bosses f*cked up their vision.

Originally posted by Newjak
This could just be that ultimately people had different visions for the story and because there was conflict or multiple redesigns the story content had to get shortened due to time constraints. Which would make sense.

I think the thing that makes even more sense than that (not saying you're wrong: what you're saying there is true of any large scale development project) the big bosses gutted much of the game and story to sell it to the consumers, piece-wise, to maximize profits. That plan, though it clearly pissed off tens of millions of people (who quit the game mere weeks after launch across all platforms), is probably going to work. As I said before, probably not as well as they had hoped, but it will work well enough that the fat-cats can justify their shitty approach.

Originally posted by dadudemon
Based on how well I thought the Halo stories, from Bungie, were, I'd say the writer and creative director would have a difficult time royally ****ing up the story and "feel" of Destiny unless their bosses f*cked up their vision.

I think the thing that makes even more sense than that (not saying you're wrong: what you're saying there is true of any large scale development project) the big bosses gutted much of the game and story to sell it to the consumers, piece-wise, to maximize profits. That plan, though it clearly pissed off tens of millions of people (who quit the game mere weeks after launch across all platforms), is probably going to work. As I said before, probably not as well as they had hoped, but it will work well enough that the fat-cats can justify their shitty approach.

The notion of some rich suits purposely withholding content from users to sell later would sicken me. I hope that is not that case here.

Originally posted by Newjak
That's a fair point. They have put out good quality before.

You could be right. I'm always try to get as much quality content out to a user as soon as it is deliverable. I only push things off if I do not feel it up to standards yet.

Yup. 👆 That's how a good project manager does things under tight/cutthroat timelines. Prioritizing with customer/requestor sign-off (that saves your ass if you get the customer to officially agree to pushing the due-date).

Originally posted by Newjak
I like to think most developer companies try to do the same.

Maybe. But it is also possible that your group is a bit better at business and management approaches. Speaking from experience, it seems that most development shops are dreadfully shitty.

Originally posted by Newjak
The notion of some rich suits purposely withholding content from users to sell later would sicken me. I hope that is not that case here.

Like you said, this game is probably going to be kick-ass in 2 years or less. And I think they will have learned, greatly, by the time Destiny 2 is ready for launch. Just thinking about Destiny fixing most of my bigger gripes gets my balls wet. Destiny still has awesome game-play and story potential. I still love the setting.

Originally posted by dadudemon
Yup. 👆 That's how a good project manager does things under tight/cutthroat timelines. Prioritizing with customer/requestor sign-off (that saves your ass if you get the customer to officially agree to pushing the due-date).

Maybe. But it is also possible that your group is a bit better at business and management approaches. Speaking from experience, it seems that most development shops are dreadfully shitty.

Like you said, this game is probably going to be kick-ass in 2 years or less. And I think they will have learned, greatly, by the time Destiny 2 is ready for launch. Just thinking about Destiny fixing most of my bigger gripes gets my balls wet. Destiny still has awesome game-play and story potential. I still love the setting.

I agree and like I've said everyone has some legitimate concerns about Destiny. I still think people underestimate what Bungie had to develop and do just to get it to this point.

Truthfully they may have just been trying to tackle too much. For instance I believe if they had not tried to add a multiplayer competitive mode to this game then most of the complaints I've heard about content probably would have gone away because Bungie could have given more time to those aspects.

As it stands they took on a lot. Personally though I've enjoyed the multiplayer aspect so I'm glad they added it. Iron Banner has been one of my satisfying events in the game to play.

That and three manning the Vault of Glass raid.

Originally posted by Newjak
Truthfully they may have just been trying to tackle too much. For instance I believe if they had not tried to add a multiplayer competitive mode to this game then most of the complaints I've heard about content probably would have gone away because Bungie could have given more time to those aspects.

Hmm. Yes. Thinking about it, now, if they added in the multiplayer aspect in the next expansion (6 months out from launch, IIRC), I bet you this game would have gotten a massive surge in purchases. And had they focused heavily and released a polished story and setting (and fixed all the shit about playing missions that I bitched and moaned about such as the match-making), I could handle all the other crap and love this game. I don't mind the grinding but when a game forces you to replay a mission 100+ times (and still not have decent gear), it's clearly an artificially inflated grind (meaning, they were clearly running out of ideas, time, budget, or all 3).

Originally posted by Newjak
As it stands they took on a lot. Personally though I've enjoyed the multiplayer aspect so I'm glad they added it. Iron Banner has been one of my satisfying events in the game to play.

That and three manning the Vault of Glass raid.

Do you think my idea of bumping up the number of players for raids, to 12 players, is too much?

I think the strikes should have 6 players and the raids should have 12.

Hey I have a question: who gives a flying **** how easy it was or was not to make Destiny, or how easy it would be to fix it?

Regardless of the effort or lack of effort required, the final product performed below a lot of people in this thread's standards.

Similarly, it's a real shame that Destiny's lackluster setting and story ("We want this to be compared to Lord of the Rings or Star Wars" lol) are a result of the writer's vision being assblasted by the higher ups. But that doesn't change that the actual game's painfully boring story, setting, and characters are painfully boring, lol.

The Lore is very good. They were just really really stupid with the grimoire cards.

I'm psyched to read all the planned DLC for the game. Bungie will be working for a long time. Can't wait.

Originally posted by dadudemon
Hmm. Yes. Thinking about it, now, if they added in the multiplayer aspect in the next expansion (6 months out from launch, IIRC), I bet you this game would have gotten a massive surge in purchases. And had they focused heavily and released a polished story and setting (and fixed all the shit about playing missions that I bitched and moaned about such as the match-making), I could handle all the other crap and love this game. I don't mind the grinding but when a game forces you to replay a mission 100+ times (and still not have decent gear), it's clearly an artificially inflated grind (meaning, they were clearly running out of ideas, time, budget, or all 3).

Do you think my idea of bumping up the number of players for raids, to 12 players, is too much?

I think the strikes should have 6 players and the raids should have 12.

YouTube video

Blax sent me this video contrasting Destiny and Borderlands. Any thoughts you who have played more of Destiny have on it? Save "Skyrim and Fallout aren't MMOs, idiot".

I really enjoyed this game for the first few weeks that it released. I recently went back to it and was bored to tears,

Originally posted by NemeBro
YouTube video

Blax sent me this video contrasting Destiny and Borderlands. Any thoughts you who have played more of Destiny have on it? Save "Skyrim and Fallout aren't MMOs, idiot".

The video is extremely accurate. I was the one that pointed out that Borderlands managed to accomplish more in their first release with complicated worlds/player classes/story than Bungie did with Destiny.

Someone else mentioned that Gearbox did this on a MUCH smaller budget.

I do believe that Borderlands 2 is a much much better game than Destiny. It is far more polished and the story is decent. Match-making is near perfect (I have only minor complaints). Never once did I have issues in Borderlands 2 matching me up with the lowest levels possible for a particular strike and we end up with 3 shitty low levels trying to tackle a difficult strike. You could end up with a stupid strong level 36, one shitty level 17 (lowest level possible, for example), and one guy inbetween. Your level 36 rape-stomps everything, revives you all the time, and just makes the mission fun. That doesn't happen in Destiny.

To Bungie's credit, they tried to improve the "team" chat stuff a bit. Now you can create a channel out of your strike team. It's a bit late to patch such a glaring oversight, however. They didn't patch until they had already lost the tens of millions of players, combined cross platform, from the game (PSN, Live, and PC).

Before I finish my top 30 list regarding Destiny, I really should start a top 10 list of things Bungie did well with Destiny. They did do some good stuff with Destiny.