Paid DLC vs Free Events w/ Wally (PlanetDestiny Podcast #48)
In the weekly update, we got to hear from Urk, who elaborated word-by-word on a teasing tweet about the
Live Team’s plans. We invite you to go read it in its entirety, but we’ll sum up the positives here.
Looking towards the future:
http://planetdestiny.com/auto-rifle-transparency
mp3 download: http://planetdestiny.com/podcastgen/download
.php?filename=2015-12-13_48fin
.mp3
1.
DLC will not just be in the form of timed events for all of Y2.
While not explicitly saying this, Urk all but confirmed it by posing the concern as a rhetorical question that he then rebutted.
2. There will be a smaller event soon, on the size of
Festival of the
Lost
This will be the next installment from the Live Team in “early 2016”. If you liked the Festival of the Lost as a little excursion away from the meat of
Destiny’s experience, then it’s probably a safe bet that this next event will appeal to you, too.
3. The next will be “far larger” than anything we’ve seen since
TTK released.
That’s right. It’ll be much bigger than
SRL, Festival of the Lost, and whatever upcoming event arrives first.
It’s hardly specific, but it’s good news to anyone who feared the binary choice of ambitious and unpolished DLC packs or light-hearted, meaningless fluff like Festival of the Lost.
4. We’ll get a sandbox and “world” update about the same time
The sandbox team is responsible for balances. If you were worried we’d have to wait 6 months before the next balance path “
World” is a little less clear, but definitely exciting.
Does Urk mean a new location?
Encounters like prowling
Wolves or
Hive rituals?
No doubt we’ll learn more when Bungie is ready to reveal it.
5.
Everything above will occur in either the
Winter or
Spring of 2016
Straight from the man himself.
Whether this means February and May or January and March is anyone’s guess. You can hold Bungie to this one.
There’s currently a giant list of reported issues (both confirmed and hearsay) with the rollout of the newest patch in r/DestinyTheGame. In a recent hotfix, Bungie caught and remedied an exploit that had
Guardians who shelled out $10 for the SRL book up-in-arms, and made sure our
Exotic Boot Engrams would decrypt properly again, but there’s a ton of minor bugs and anecdotal testimony that tell the story of a patch whose rollout could be considered bumpy at best. While the Twitter
Help team continues to confirm their awareness of oft-reported problems, some of the most disconcerting ones remain unacknowledged.
Fusion Rifles, for example, were hit incredibly hard with this update. The nerf to hipfire stability was draconian, and the supposed buff to
ADS stability has been consistently reported to be non-existent; in fact, many Guardians are saying their favorite Fusion Rifles fire with less ADS stability than they did before. This was not an intended goal from the patch notes, and it’s understandable that Guardians would be afraid any sort of fix would be months away.
And if Bungie was able to overlook numbers on a page in their own update, then who is to say they would ever catch and fix something like Fusion Rifles not behaving as they’re supposed to, or
Firefly crashing the game client, or Bounties and Quests being stuck at a certain stage?
Obviously they possess the tools to fix these problems – but do they have the time or inclination to do so?
Newsk asserts that the team already had their nose to the proverbial grindstone to work on the next release, but Destiny needs constant care and attention if it wants to keep its polish. A backlog of bugs is a black mark for developer reputation.
If there hasn’t ever been a game like Destiny, then there hasn’t ever been a struggle like Year 2.
We are already seeing how hard it is to navigate uncharted waters, and the community and Bungie still have plenty of growing pains to weather. The uneasy transition away from standard DLC packs will be more sustainable. There certainly has to be sacrifice, but this is all the more reason for Bungie to prioritize clarity and accuracy in everything they communicate to the playerbase. Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to have patches a little more often. You know, so that when the inevitable screw-up happens, we don’t have to go through this roller coaster ride every time.
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