Does Bungie Really Care About What Their Fans Think Anymore?

Curse of Osiris does include two new strikes, but both are pulled directly from the campaign with no changes. Crucible doesn’t fare much better with only two new maps on Xbox One and PC, and three on PS4. Unfortunately, as of publication, Crucible is wholly broken thanks to the Prometheus Lens, a new trace rifle that is completely unbalanced. Bungie says they’re working on a fix, but a solution has yet to materialize nearly a week after launch.

That same week the raid dropped, I was able to pull a fireteam together for the weekend, landing epically on Leviathan's Golden walkway towards the gates of opulence we made our way in. Having watched and read up on what to do because we didn’t feel like messing around with figuring out mechanics, the Bath House was up first. We did not succeed on getting it that first night and spent a number of hours just trying to get coordination down, eventually calling it and deciding to try again the next day. Meeting up the next night we aced it no problem, coordination was up, fatigue was gone and we were on point. Next was the all too known (by now) Pleasure Gardens. Stealth isn’t Destiny’s strong point and that’s all that will be said on the matter. What did cause us grief was attempting this freaking room for the next four hours while the dog (bosses) continually got more glitchy. They would cut in and out, reset their paths, see one of us even though they were facing another direction and it lead to general frustration among the whole group. We had figured out what to do but the game mechanics weren’t helping, especially when they constantly kept breaking. At this point we had already spent nine hours banging our heads against just two rooms. The fireteam called it quits for the second night and a third night seemed less hopeful.

Casual players are the single largest audience in gaming; there’s no getting around it. This is the audience that every major publisher wants to appeal to; the one group that every development studio hopes will latch onto their game. After all, capturing the attention of the casual or mainstream audience usually means massive success and wondrous profit. So it’s understandable that they, publishers especially, would have a vested interest in making their games more accessible and appealing to that audience. Making that appeal often means simplification. The simpler the game is, the more accessible it is, the more mainstream appeal it can have. While there’s nothing innately wrong with making one’s game more accessible to the wider gaming audience, doing so always comes at a cost. Just as a game cannot be both simple and complex, neither can it simultaneously serve its niche and successfully appeal to the mainstream audience. Therefore compromises must be made, usually ones that rob the game of what made it special in the first place.

This new loot box is known as a "Prismatic Matrix" and works very much like a package gacha. The Prismatic Matrix has its own pool of ten possible items for Grenade Launcher god roll players to pull out of it and players can make ten pulls per week. Once the next weekly reset hits, the matrix will refresh with a stock of ten new items. The Prismatic Matrix only awards items players don’t already have, so each pull will award the player with something new. It sounds good at first, but there are a few catches. Players only get one free pull per week and all the others have to be paid for with real money. Players can’t even bank their weekly pulls in order to guarantee themselves something they want because Destiny 2 will only allow players to bank a maximum of three free pulls. This means that the absolute most one could get for free in a week is four items. That...really doesn’t sound like much of an improvement does it? If anything, these boxes will encourage burst spending as overeager players race to make sure they have all the items available for a given week.

With Destiny 2 though, it feels like the opposite is true. They’ve been caught lying multiple times, have made little effort to improve their communications with fans and what improvements they do deliver are hampered by the likes of the Prismatic Matrix. Destiny 2 is in deep trouble right now, but that doesn’t seem to matter to Bungie so long as they can keep the remaining players just happy enough to keep buying loot those boxes.

Then thoughts of what Bungie had envisioned for Guided Games began cropping up in my head. When Bungie announced Guided Games, it seemed exciting. Here was a feature that would ease the stress of finding a group and knowing that group could be handpicked by the seeker. It meant not having to sift through toxicity, feeling a bit closer to strangers and maybe making a friend or two along the way. Guided Games has a long way to go and needs some serious refinement. I was not about to spend another hour waiting for the next group, for fear of having the same thing happen all over again. Destiny 2’s Leviathan was proving to be more of a monster than first imagined.