Bungie is in trouble

Preorders are the lowest of any bungie product since Halo CE

pre-orders for Marathon aren't even live yet, you retard

as someone who plays a lot of hunt showdown, marathons gameplay just looks boring.

the original direcotr was fired for "harrasment" and the new guy is a former valorant dev

the art style looked great from the trailers, in game it looks like rancid dogshit while still somehow being completely bland and lifeless

Because according to insiders its been scrapped and rebuilt 3 times.

Marathon was originally an expanded solo gambit set entirely on the space ship, which is why the interiors look so much better than the plants and grass outside, ones only existed for months

The next version was essentially Destiny's Dark Zone as a stand alone game.

Then a new director who worked on valorant came in wanting to make it escape from valokov and the rest is history.

This version of the games probably 18 months old tops. Its another FFXV scenario.

Studios count wishlists are preorders now. I know its fucking retarded but its the new "shipped".

Who is this game even for? Extraction shooters are already a fading trend, the people who care about them have had their games for a long time now and are likely not looking to start fresh, the art style is somewhere between hideous and just plain strange, so you can't even sell it on coomability, and why even call it Marathon to begin with? The Marathon "fan base" barely even exists anymore, and the type of crusty old fuck who makes up that fan base sure as hell won't care for a zoomer-coded extraction shooter wearing the name like a skin mask. If anything, the title just serves to drum up hype with, and then piss off maybe a couple dozen people at most. So who is this game for? Who is the audience? I genuinely have no idea. Disgruntled Destiny 2 players? I assume they're disgruntled for a reason, and won't exactly flock to a reskinned and stripped down game mode from a game they left in disgust. So who is it for? Fucking who?

Marathon was originally an expanded solo gambit set entirely on the space ship

I would play that honestly, much better premise.

Marathon exists for the same reason ole lyin jim ryan mandated sony make a dozen live services at once: "we only need one to be the next fortnite".

Straight up corpogrifters gambling with games companys futures.

i can't wait for september, after destiny 2 bungie deserves the rope

The only thing I saw of this game was an ugly woman with her face painted white. That was enough for me to lose interest in anything related to it. Not because I'm a bigot, or anything, but simply because I noticed a pattern where soulless corporate games with no quality usually put an ugly woman at the front of the marketing strategy.
Someone might say that this is a superficial way of looking at games, but I have 300+ games on Steam, 50+ games on Switch, and more than 3000+ games from all eras on my PC. I simply don't have the time to play everything that interests me and any indication that something isn't going to be worthwhile is enough for me not to waste time on it.
I'm amazed that developers don't understand such simple reasoning and continue to put ugly and/or lesbian and/or black and/or vitiligo women to try to attract attention in a completely saturated market.

no modern developer understands why people play Tarkov and Hunt Showdown and they just keep trying to shove gameplay styles that will never mesh with it.

Extraction shooters are tense. Slow. Tactical. You can't just slap Halo or Fortnite, or Call of Duty or Armored Core or whatever on it and expect people to like it

and they already have a fucking audience. You're not peeling off those people and new fans will always prefer the alternative that has way more content and players already. It's a losing game. And the only reason we keep seeing idiots do it is because game development is led by business executives and every business executive is a sex pest hooked on crack that make decisions based on vibes.

it's another "western monopolies fuck everything up leaving the market open to foreign takeover" episode

buy to play

one game mode

3 player squads only

wipes everything including inventory unlocks every 120 days

have to convince two friends paying to sign up for this over literally anything else is a good idea.

This game is dead on arrival no question. Concord had better prospects than this.

because game development is led by business executives

Small correction: Game development is led by shareholders via business executives. At the end of the day, it's all about "we need more lube to stroke off our shareholders during next quarter's call", and conforming to trends is just one squirt of astroglide they can use.

this is what happens when you hire for skin color and genitals instead of skill and drive

The clearest sign of a developer and project with an absolutely withered soul and no vision. Constant retooling to rehash old shit, or chase some fad. Any game without a shred of love and care is bound to be dead on arrival.

I have no idea what an "extraction shooter" is. Do you have to save a faggot hostage from terrorists or something?

public companies are the cancer of modern society. When your entire organization is literally obligated by law to prioritize shareholder growth besides anything else, THEY'RE running the show.

It's not woke. It's not an agenda. it's fucking nepotistic retards making stupid fucking decisions ruining everything. Trust fund babies thinking they can become the next Hideo Kojima

They hire a quadrillion interns and outsource to third world countries because it's cheaper, instead of nurturing talent inside the company itself. They make unappealing characters because they have dogshit art design because no actual fucking directors with a vision give a shit about your slop AAA money grinding game.

you and other 2-3 guys go into a battle royale map and try to gather loot that sells for cash while fighting bots or and other player teams trying to do the same

if you die or miss the extraction events, you lose all your loot and gear.

Its the divisions dark zone

drop in map

loot shit like a modern sony moviegame survival crafting klepto

get to extraction point

players try to kill each other to take their stuff

if you die the character and all its gear is deleted

every 120 days the season ends and everything including things like vault space extensions are wiped and you are back to square one

the entire point of the game is farming character skins IN A FIRST PERSON GAME

It's not woke. It's not an agenda.

it's both you stupid faggot. How are retards like you so blind lol? Seriously, do you not see what's going on?

Frigg off Anon Babble its always capitalism. Go back to your board getting pysop'ed by mossad.

youtu.be/Y2QgQtoGHRY?si=fzXHaO_yyPjLh2xy&t=1975
I can assure you dipshit sex pest wealthy executive that sexually harasses workers on the daily does not give a shit about "diversity"

there are woke games that are very successful like Undertale, Baldur's Gate 3, Overwatch and more. It's not why games are failing.

but what is the loot and cash for?

you buy better gear and access to areas with better, more expensive loot, that are harder
you usually start your account with dogshit gear and need to gather cash and good equipment before you can comfortably afford to try out the harder content

no modern developer understands why people play Tarkov and Hunt Showdown

neither does Crytek kek

They hire a quadrillion interns and outsource to third world countries because it's cheaper, instead of nurturing talent inside the company itself

This sort of shortsighted, bottom line first development is also the reason behind the brain drain affecting the entire industry. Look at the studios that used to be trendsetters, pushing the envelope, pioneering tech or game mechanics, creating games that became household names on quality alone, and you'll notice that almost without exception the names behind those games have left those studios, or even the entire industry, a long, long time ago. So already you're lacking the heads who used to make the games that sold consoles and defined genres, and then you go lower down the ladder, and you have this bloated overhead of consultants, marketers, assistants, and other pointless adult daycare jobs, built on a brittle foundation of hire-and-fire designers and programmers with no investment in your game, because they know they'll be out of a job the second the game ships, no familiarity with any of your tools, no idea what your games are supposed to "feel" like because they're not and will never be tuned in to your studio's culture and legacy, and all you can crank out are bland, shitty, overproduced and underdeveloped, forgettable pieces of shit that lack any and all identity, and exist only to fluff up your quarterly numbers, where they used to be the expression of a designer's or studio's creativity, or an idea they really cared about making real.

It's fucking grim is what it is.

Actually not in marathon. The focus is more on consumables that make you say immune to gas to loot chests in a room with a gas leak. There isn't actually an end game from what alpha testers have seen.

Bungie is in trouble

good
they deserve to sink.
you shouldn't be allowed to fail this much and still succeed.

as an amateur game dev, you have no fucking idea *how much fucking generational knowledge* has been lost. People have forgotten basic game development processes used since the fucking PS2. It's insane and I hate it. The way this industry treats it's people like they're fucking trash to be disposed is absolutely insane because you NEED THOSE PEOPLE TO MAKE YOUR FUCKING GAME.

But I know why it's the way it is.
It's because all the executives and shareholders running these companies now are tech executives. They come from tech fields. They understand software development. And you *can* absolutely throw money at a wall and make some dogshit web-app in a few months to chase a trend and then lay off all the devs to hire maintainers. You can't do that for games

Is shartny gonna wipe out 2 studios in 2 years? For a total of 3 this generation (4 if we're counting bend not doing shit since days gone)?

Mfw i work at a famous game developer Anon Babble would all know the name of in the AAA space

Almost all the team leads are drunks that ask chat gpt what to do and i am not joking.

I just want to make enough to retire to some bumfuck town in the pacific northwest and ride out the collapse of the union in peace at this point. The american games industry is cooked beyond repair.

this
wishlists are EXTREMELY important.
i think steam makes highly wishlisted games a higher priority in their algorithm
its why indie devs BEG people to wishlist their game.

crying about capitalism

away with ye, bunkertroon

and genitals

or lack thereof

yeah that's what I imagined it looked like nowadays. They just hire whoever is left because anyone with a braincell won't ever join the meat grinder industry after all this shit.

Good luck bro. I hope you can retire and have your comfy farm

to the influencers brought in who say the game needs solo queue's and balancing, proximity chat and the like to succeed

Tarkov is the most popular one and has no solo queue, and most of those extractors don't either, and Tarkov didn't get proxy chat until like halfway into its life. I don't think they are necessary for a game in this genre to succeed, its more about how everything else for Marathon is dogshit.

its too late the hack showed your emails glowniggers you no longer have any power here.

I don't know if weeks, but "two tokens and a blue" was a meme for a reason. Curse of osiris was probably an all time low. Incredibly worse than the episodes they're releasing now, and that was considered to be an expansion

But they aren't tarkov. They want the normie audience and normalfags aint forming teams of 3 to grind shit out they can lose the moment they get got by a more skilled sweatlord. If Marathon can't grab the "i have 10k hours in destiny, but i've never done a raid" GREGOR's then they are fucked.

They could've just given it the DOOM 2016 treatment. A single player campaign about rampant AIs backwards longjumping through alternate timelines would've caught most peoples attention. But I guess investors are still convinced that live service + infinite time investment = infinite money.

gain loot to gain loot to gain loot to gain loot to...

i think bungie forgot a step here.
bungie already solved this with destiny.
there is no "new content" for marathon
you gain loot to become stronger to do the same thing even faster to gain even more loot to do the same thing even faster?
it just doesnt make sense.
there is an end that is much much much closer than the "end" in destiny, and that "end" in destiny is(was) pushed back every 3-4 months, which would usually mean 1-2 months of content, then 1-2 months of low player numbers while those people played other games then those people would come back and gain loot to get closer to the end.
and its even worse in an extraction shooter, you gear gets wiped every reset
imagine if in every season of destiny they just wiped your account and you started from zero, people simply wouldnt play.

Based video games enjoyer.

we know that it's exactly that because Jim Ryan was absolutely jerking his shit off to getting a billion live service games and giving Sony their own Destiny
they bought Bungie to *teach them how to make live service games*. AND THEN THEY SAID THEY WERE MAKING 10 OF THEM. Many of which have been canceled by this point. It's literally just executive brainrot thinking they can become the next Fortnite

The NDA was lifted to try and get more positive spin from streamers but has had the exact opposite effect.

It already had the opposite effect from last year when influencers were invited and no one liked it. But, slow mongoloids like you would never know.

They got bought by sony to make a movie
They dont give a shit about video games

Bungie is like blackberry. They're coming to the end of their road built by their hubris.

Halo made them think they had the Midas touch

They think destiny will be another next big thing

They break off from Microsoft simply due to greed

Immediately drowning in financial costs and with no safety net

Make DLC for destiny

game gets too large and won't run unless they remove DLC?

REMOVE THE CONTENT THAT PLAYERS PAID FOR

NEVER RETURN IT AND NEVER COMPENSATE THE PLAYERS

Fill game with trannies and minorities and gays and never have a straight white male in sight

Develop an extraction shooter when there's only 1 confirmed success story

Everyone from Bungie that worked on the good Halo's have left or been laid off. This is not the same Bungie.

The trailer seemed like a different genre than the game actually is, but the Potion Seller voice saying Traveler was hilarious.

b-b-but i have money in every company, if i push them all to make sloppa maybe one will get me in on the groundfloor or fortnite 2! Then my wife will forgive me for spending all my money on ape jpgs!

You're never gonna convince people communism is the way forward

They get what they fucking deserve.

Wait you think anti woke is government and woke is organic? Motherfucker everything has appealed TOO YOU for the past decade, AND NOBODY BOUGHT IT. If you didn't play them WHO DID.

I love how most of you retards truly are the embodiment of the NPC meme.

Yes anon, nothing else is happening. It's just the suits. Now go consoom please. I need another property and retards like (you) are going to pay for it.

it's fucking nepotistic retards making stupid fucking decisions ruining everything.

yes, browns, women and faggots.

As much as I hate a lot about Destiny, it's one of the most successful games ever. Witch Queen era Destiny 2 was in the top 5 most played games on every platform for a long time. I can't imagine how much money Bungie was raking in with expansions, dungeons, skins, etc during Destiny's peak.

Hilarious how woke went so far that it had an opposite effect on minorities.

Also all of them are dirt poor Russians that use the games as a way to generate revenue by selling hacked accounts with max gear

I don't need to do it.
People are finding it out by themselves because you fuckers broke everything too much and now everyone is waking up to the corporate hellhole you've created.
The generational left wing push that is coming will be apocalyptic.

Have you looked at the latest Lancaster county elections? The county that hasn't voted left since *1899*? They're voting left now and they hate you AND the Democrats for being piece of shit corporate bootlickers right-wing-lite. It's genuinely fucking over.
brown people and women are not what the majority of shareholders and executives look like you fucking idiot.

now go consoom please

I haven't bought a AAA game since 2017

Not much apparently because they are going out of business and fired half the studio already kek

tl;dr
Marathon will be neon zoomerslop kusoge. I'm sure the gunplay will be fine but you can get that from so many other games that don't look like shit and the extraction shooter autists are already too invested into Tarkov.

Plenty of minorities have always cow towed to massa' throughout history

indian hands typed this.

That's just completely false. Not only are you making up how successful it is, you're ignoring how the costs were barely breaking even. They weren't pulling GTA money, or wow money, or fortnite. They were a mediocre live service shooter with a horribly written story scrapped together from Jack Johnsons sticky notes by brain damaged interns.

Wow it's someone from an alt timeline speaking complete gibberish.

Destiny failed because it had a bad story unlike fortnite, wow or GTA

I'm sure they were acquired for billions because they were barely breaking even

this time it will work!

this time true communism will form!

delusional bunkertroon, I must ask. Why did you not address

You can look at the Steam charts, and that's just a part of the player base as a lot of people played on console. Yes, Destiny 2 has been dying for a while now and it had an awful launch but in its peak it was hugely successful.

you're ignoring how the costs were barely breaking even

Sure, Bungie requires a lot of money to stay afloat. But they're also using money made from 1 game to fund like 3 different AAA projects across many years.

2 billion, and it was a horrible purchase made by the worse CEO in Sony's history. Sony made the clause that if they don't pull their weight they have it in their contract to take over all of management.
You know what Bungie did? Fired a significant portion of their working staff to keep management in power.
What a fantastic idea, now they have even LESS workers and MORE MANAGERS to make a game that can somehow break even on 2 billion.
That's MINECRAFT levels of value. And bungie hasn't been worth that since Halo.

Remember, it was the Bungie designers who made Concord. Sony overvalued Bungie BELIEVING in the Midas touch. Probably because they think it's the same studio that could make halo again, but it's not. You get Concord Bungie now.

Anon it doesn't matter how successful destiny was at one point. Did you not pay attention? To when they REMOVED PAID DLC FROM PAYING CUSTOMERS AND NEVER GAVE IT BACK AND NEVER COMPENSATED THEM.
It's dog shit through and through. I barely played the fucking thing because the characters and writing was obnoxious.
That brief moment of success showed how stupid they are. It deluded them into thinking "they still got it". That they can't fail. But they're really just spending the halo money they inherited and blasted it all for an entire generation on a bad game. Nobody else could have done what Bungie did with destiny and that's not a compliment. It was a fucking shit game with so many anti consumer moments that they should have gone bankrupt 10 years ago.

because that's false? People have bought and spent tons of money on woke games like BG3, Starfield, Undertale/Deltarune, GOW Ragnarok, Disco Elysium, FFXIV, Helldivers 2, Cult of the Lamb, Dragon Age Veilguard, Ultrakill, AI the somnium files, Guilty Gear Strive, Spider man 2, Monster Hunter Wilds, Marvel Rivals, Ass Creed Shadows, Avowed, Elden Ring and on and on and on. I have personally seen threads upon threads upon threads of Anon Babble crying about Woke in these games, and yet they still sold well, have a lot of discussion, and sell a ton of merch or MTX.

That's because people who actually fucking like video games and aren't brainrotted culture war cucks don't give a shit about any of this.

Are there woke games that bomb? Yes. But not because they're woke, but because they tend to be dogshit that even people who like woke would hate them.

The director just wants to make his own extraction valorant and refuses to listen

The director painted himself into a corner. He pushed extraction and now he has to brute froce it to not look like a loser. Everyone who has ever worked somewhere knows such cases.

Sony spent $4 billion on this

I have personally seen threads upon threads upon threads of Anon Babble crying about Woke in these games

Anon Babble is not a reflection of the public and exaggerates any negative in anything.

so wait theres no solo queue at all?
who at sony approved this again?
smells like a hollywood tier tax write off desu

Normgroids may have awful taste, but they know total shit when they see it.

For all of Bethesda's faults (and to be clear I'm still worried about the increasingly shitty product they're pushing), they at least tend to keep people for the long run.

Then I won't mention Anon Babble. I'll mention the hundreds of grifters on youtube. The hundreds of alt-right grifter accounts on shit like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Who pull in thousands of idiots every day. Like you. They all do the same fucking thing where they point at games that are failing or will obviously fail because they're corporate cash grabs and blame woke, while ignoring "woke" games that are extremely successful because it doesn't fit their own narrative.
Because you fuckers literally earn money with outrage.

What a retarded post
Let's start with the games you listed that completely bombed

Starfield

Dragon age veilguard

Ass creed shadows

Avowed

Now let's point out what games weren't woke

Elden ring

Disco Elysium

Bg3

Undertale

Helldivers

Ultra kill

Marvel rivals

Monster Hunter wilds

How Ragnarok

You don't know what woke means. You're an obvious Redditor who came here for culture war reasons.
You couldn't explain what woke is in these games. If you tried it would out you as a complete retard. I could explain what is woke about them though. I want you to understand what woke is because you seem to thrive on being some rebel.

the idiots at bungLe are scrambling to put something together so they don't get shitcanned.
they're going to get shitcanned.

Cyan Worlds seems to run a good operation in that sense.

Another Nikita win by doing nothing, the trve disciple of Gabe Newell.

There can't be brain drain if the guys in charge never had any brains to begin with!

I just wanted Destiny to be as good as its lore and music. Those first three years were so awesome, but as soon as they switched to D2 it was like everyone at Bungie was smoking crack.

Escape From Tarkov is shit and dying though...

Did you not pay attention? To when they REMOVED PAID DLC FROM PAYING CUSTOMERS AND NEVER GAVE IT BACK AND NEVER COMPENSATED THEM.

The 'tism is strong in this one. I'm not arguing whether it was a good or fair game. I'm strictly talking about how profitable it was for Bungie from a money perspective.

There's something off about these reaction images. It's like something an outsider thinks we would post here on Anon Babble. But without any context they're just applying them to posts not understanding how they help their argument. I think this is a bot.
The previous post sounded like he was crying but he has a bad screen shot of a random vtuber smiling. Now he has a wojak when he's trying to come off as confident?

Guys we have a fucking boy here and it's baiting us into an argument.

completely illogical nonsensical reply

this is an actual bot post
half of Anon Babble already is

Because at their peak they screwed over their most valuable customers. The ones who paid for their game. Since then they lost all support and have had no growth. You can mention the brief period destiny was making money but financial issues have followed destiny since its inception

that's don quixote from limbus company and I just like to grab images from my shitpost image folder like everyone else does you fucking idiot

doing nothing

EFT is releasing this year though, and with an actual PvE mode and a barebones storyline

Do you have a problem with people noticing things and then making videos about what they noticed? Why?
How hard is it to ignore something like that? There are a lot of worse things on the Internet, like porn involving feces and urine, but I don't see people complaining that these things exist. They just ignore them like normal people do.

as its lore used to be

ftfy
the past 2 years of lore have ruined all previous lore.

Which is it then?

You have actual autism if you don't understand reaction images and just use random images on posts.

Bungie fired all the shitters and they went to Concord, correct, also

only 2 billion

kek

Both. It's shit that is being finished. Imagine a fat Russian pushing out a turd.

You're right, I should've said that. To be honest I've been pretty checked out ever since beyond light, but I've known something was wrong ever since they made those dogshit Osiris comics in 2017 or 2018.

None of the games you listed were woke and successful. You don't understand what woke is and you're trying to use some woke argument that it's big business and nothing else but you still can't really explain your side at all.

This failed because other contributing factors AND NOT BECAUSE ITS WOKE

Why did Bungie steal the art style from Battlebit Remastered?

witch queen was really good... until the end where they revealed the witness.
anything that even touches the witness' lore is ruined
everything from that point on is just slop
to this day i still cant believe people genuinely say that the final shape had a good story.

Good, I never understood why they always want to make shit one-life multiplayer games like Extraction Shooters or Battle Royale games when the market is starting to reject them

the team is being moved to Destiny and Gummy Bears

oh shit will i get more sexy blue cat wife?

Do you have a problem with people noticing things and then making videos about what they noticed?

Yes, because those videos are about fake shit that generate a false narrative that fool hundreds of people and dissuade public opinion. Due to the death of forums and the centralization of corporate social media, the internet is made up of basically a massive single open space that has a limited oxygen, and grifters try to make some of that oxygen be about a culture war that isn't real because it makes them money. If they were a bunch of idiots on some niche alt right obscure forum with other stormfaggots, I couldn't care less, but they're everywhere.

The modern alt-right is built on annoyance. It's about how much some people annoy you. It's all about how those damn woke games are so fucking annoying and everywhere. Because it's the only thing they have to talk about since nearly all of modern society's struggles are caused by right wing corporate decisions and the rising costs of living. The people nowadays, especially americans, are privileged treat hitlers that cannot imagine a world without their treats, and so the only way to make them mad is to pretend the reason their treats are getting worse is because some people are too annoying.

So yes, I do have a problem, because those people are comparatively the porn of feces and urine of the modern fucking internet and you cannot spend a day anywhere without hearing at least once about it.

literally everyone does that, including you. Right now. You have no fucking argument so the only thing you have left is trying to pretend I'm a bot.

what the fuck is "successful" to you? Those games are talked about nearly every single day everywhere and have sold millions of copies. They ARE successful and they have diverse characters with LGBTQ+ elements. They are woke unless your definition of woke is conspiracy blackrock deep state bullshit.

The problem is that, in D1, there was mystery to everything. There wasn't some overarching narrative to follow. And you were just some Guardian making a name for himself.
In D2, just about everything has so much unnecessary plot and narrative. Most of the mysteries and lore from D1 have already been solved and resolved. Many enemy factions are either our friends or gone. And the plot is centered around your Guardian as if you're Jesus of Nazareth himself.
The plot and writing isn't even that great. Probably the best update/content drop D2 has gotten in recent years was Into the Light. It provided great loot, a great game mode, and it didn't have some narrative/story element interrupting the flow. It was "Hey Guardian, thing happening over there, let's go deal with it!"
The future of Destiny or D2, whatever, needs to stop focusing on storytelling and plot. Just "Hey Guardian, our sensors picked up something odd way out in the Keplar system. We trust you to investigate it." and leave it at that. We should be just another Guardian doing our thing like any other Guardian.
Its annoying how low-skilled all these other "elite" Guardians are. Like I remember one of the strikes in launch D2 on Titan where like three fireteams all died to a big shrieker. Then there's us, who can clear it without issue. Like why are we the only capable Guardians?

AAA Cruelty Squad visuals

Tarkov has 1 shot kills all over the place and no real HUD indicating friends vs. foes making running groups inherently more disorienting and challening to play around. Solo players can leverage the fact that group play is difficult to manage and come out on top because of it.
Marathon doesn't have friendly fire, tells you who your teammates are, has revives from down AND revives from kills meaning killing 2/3 opponents as a solo means you could still get 1v3'd if you let up the pressure for 30s. If tarkov had on the spot revives you'd see the viability of solo tarkov completely disappear.

Veilguard is not successful by word of the devs themselves, bunkerfaggot. Nor was avowed, and Ass Creed went with the "players" cope which has been stagnant for weeks.
Marvel Rivals has been causing the leftysphere to go into apoplectic tantrums since it's release.
But whatever, I'm certain these games failed entirely because of bad evil YouTubeman, along with whatever other unmedicated delusions you have.

The problem is that, in D1, there was mystery to everything.

They weren't mysteries, they were mystery BOXES. It was "oh shit we gutted the story with nothing to replace it, just be cryptic about everything and work out an explanation five years from now"

Pete vaguely heard of Tarkov and wanted to get in on the ground floor of the next fad. If Bungie goes under its all on him.

Agreed.
Honestly, I could believe that they're surprised, but probably because they're not used to reaction to a brand new Bungie game to be "meh".
After they had all the goodwill from Halo, the reaction to Destiny and the reveal was massive. Destiny has destroyed basically all that goodwill. There's definitely highlights in Destiny's history, like The Taken King, Forsaken, The Final Shape and to a lesser extent, The Witch Queen, but almost ALL of the seasons have been shit with maybe 4 exceptions and after the current saga finished, a lot of players dropped off as the story came to a natural end and they could finally break away from the abusive relationship.
Marathon honestly looks intriguing to me, but a purely pvp game that's $40 at launch? With all the free alternatives? It feels greedy and honestly, the game doesn't even look like a must-have. It needs to have a free-to-play edition that limits what you get so that you can get people hooked.
People don't trust Bungie like they used to, so $40 for a game so close to concord which collapsed almost immediately, rings a bit too close to home.
I'll be sad if Bungie dies, but it won't surprise me.
I will blame Sony and Pete Hines though. Fuck both of them.

Woke isn't real

These games are woke and successful (they're not)

People are wasting their time talking about something that isn't real

This is the problem with leftists. When someone mentions immigration is a problem you simply denounce the problem. When someone mentions there is an straight anti white male agenda in games and movies you say "nuh uh". When someone has a problem that falls outside your bingo card if leftist problems, instead of researching and learning, you get upset and tell someone NO THAT ISNT REAL.

we're well past 15 years since Obama repealed the Mundt act that allowed domestic propaganda in the United states. Which also opened the floodgates of woke to infect everything.
Not only was everything woke, it was a problem, now we're past trying to explain the problems to you. Because you just deny that they're problems, or that they even exist. So what's the point?

Your solutions involve kicking all white men out of our hobbies. Pro immigration, pro women in all positions of power. Having leftists political slogans about big business and free healthcare and trans rights in a medieval fantasy games.

There's really no conversation here. You want to be ok your soap box and tell us we're making shit up and it's the dumbest strategy you could possibly have.

Marathon honestly looks intriguing to me, but a purely pvp game that's $40 at launch?

It's hard to say how much will be PvP. Seems like they're reaaaaally pushing this super secret 3rd map that's like the Marathon itself that has raid mechanics. I wouldn't be surprised if some maps become PvE only in the future. Could be a good bandaid fix for people who just want to shoot aliens.

Nah, cruelty squad is anti cyberpunk. It's explicitly biocorpo. You play in a world where everyone uses bioenhancers that stink like shit and leave slimy detritus everywhere. You're an actual glowie corpo grunt and the game looks like seizure aids because you're pumped up on so many combat meds it makes you halucinate.

Marathon is going for GiTS.

NTA, but I really think that a lot of the mystery and world building was coming from Joe Staten. The people that replaced him started Destiny off with the bones of his work, fitted together in the hodgepodge we got in the end, and then upon further expansion and given a little time they managed to get some stuff out that worked.
Then they hired some actually competent people to write a few of the lore books and those get some legit good writing.
The in-game story has honestly been very basic and pretty dull. It wears its heart on its sleeve and there's almost no nuance to anything. Characters will tell not show and they're portrayed extremely two dimensionally. They are also constantly repeating stuff from the lore or just previous seasons over and over again. I remember season of the deep, I really noticed that all of the radio messages you listen to are literally just exposition dumps yet again.
It's frustrating because there was some legitimately good stuff. The Vault of Glass team stuff had so much potential, and knowing that the ishtar lot were trying to get them. When the current team decided to use that, it turned into the oversimplified dreck that was the first season after TFS. We never even heard from Praedyth again.
There's occasional good moments, like in the end of Arrivals where we get snatched up in teleport to the room where the darkness tells us to go to Europa was unexpected, mysterious and cool. Even stuff like hearing the Nine talking to the Emissary and trying to understand the world was great, but hasn't gone anywhere and if it does go somewhere, I fear for how dumbed down it will be.

The Vex must be your favorite faction because they have absolutely no story relevance whatsoever.

Everything that ever went wrong with Bungie can be always traced back to their immersive fuck up of a development cycle that was Halo 2. The fact they survived that mess and fucking thrived in every measurement from financially, critically, culturally, and industry influence resulted in them repeatedly pulling the last minute reboot and crunch consistently. Halo 2, ODST technically, Destiny 1, Destiny 2, Lightfall, and now Marathon. They unironically cannot keep getting away with it.

how would I best engage with destiny lore? Where is the line between good and bad? I played D1 and D2 campaigns, I consciously chose not to watch Blyf out of protest, so I've only ever heard bits and pieces of lore since the games themselves do nothing unless you read lore books.

you didnt read the grimoire
and you didnt understand the lore of d2.

um akshually

STFU you Maricon

Proving my point

raid mechanics

They keep talking about this and I'm finding it incredibly difficult to believe, particularly in a PvP scenario, but I'm also having a hard time grasping how big the maps are. Bungie typically makes pretty small maps for multiplayer and the current ones we've seen don't look like massive sprawling areas, but maybe I'm wrong.
I just think that they're misusing the term "raid mechanics" because they know it'll catch the ear of Destiny or ex-Destiny players.
The first trailer got me thinking about playing the OG marathon games to try and get into the lore of it, and that's something that Bungie has been very good at for a long time: making enticing trailers that incorporate the lore into them.
Hearing youtubers get excited and start pointing out events it's referencing seems cool and had me feeling that I wanted to find out what happened/what happens in the up coming game, but with the setting, I don't see how they'll tell the story in a meaningful way if it's just extraction shooter stuff.

If they'd announced Marathon in 2014, as their next title after Halo Reach, there'd be no question I would have been incredibly hyped for it. But I've had a decade of Bungie floundering and fucking up Destiny consistently under-delivering, so now I don't trust them. I have no plans to buy this at launch and am going to wait and see if it stays around or collapses.
If it were F2P to begin with, I'd dip my toes in and see if it was worth the season pass/buy.

how would I best engage with destiny lore?

well
you cant
vanilla d2+ the first 2 dlc were deleted
and the 3(4) seasons that come with every expansion are also deleted
so you can only play the actual campaigns which suck and most of the lore(just like d1) is hidden in lore books you have to read yourself
but to get these books you have to play content which doesnt exist anymore.
so yeh, you either have to watch youtube videos, buy the literal books bungie wrote(just compiled the lore books from the game into physical books, they are pretty good tho, i have them all) or read everything on ishtar-collective.net/ buy its not really compiled in a readable way.

tldr: bungie fucked you and everyone else who wasnt there every second of every day playing the game.

One of Bungie’s worst sins is their copious amount of streamer worship which did absolutely zero good for Destiny 2

NTA, but I'd say the best way is to go to ishtar-collective.org, find the lore books in the menus and read them from the bottom to the top.
They're not all good, but they're proper writing.
The lore books are really the best part, but ishtar collective also has a pretty good timeline on the website that helps figuring out wtf is going on there.
Byf's voice is annoying as fuck and he reads the stories like it's an anime which grinds my gears too, but he is comprehensive. I'm not recommending him, but he can be quite good to throw on to get a bit of clarification on some of the more obscure story stuff.
The campaign stories are generally pretty poorly written and basic storytelling with maybe a bit of a twist or surprise here and there, but by and large, they're not worth bothering about.
The real challenge is starting and trying to figure out anything, but I'd honestly say hit the lore books and see if you like them.
Ones that I'd recommend best are The Book of Sorrow (universally liked), Unveiling and the Black Armory Papers.
There's a few gems and a few shit ones, but they're pretty short.

how would I best engage with destiny lore?

Either youtube videos or combing through:
ishtar-collective.net/releases
Alternatively, Bungie released physical grimoire anthologies you can look into. But in-game its not easy since a lot of it is tied to item drops that are unobtainable now thanks to their retarded seasonal model.

Where is the line between good and bad?

Anything written before before Destiny 2, so sepembter 2017 is your cutoff point. Most of Destiny 1's lore is from when Joseph Staten was still there, so there's an overall higher quality to it.
That said, there are some gems in Destiny 2's lore.
destinytracker.com/destiny-2/db/items/1328791939-resurrecting-flight

uhm ackshually everyone hecking loves woke and if you think differently you are a grifter!

Just kys.

YOU HAD TO BE THERE!

well streamers were the only people keeping their game alive at multiple points.

luke "scarab lord" smith got shit canned last year

pottery

NTA, this is a constant source of frustration for me. It's clear the current lot of Bungie writers has no fucking clue what to do with the Vex and so they basically just ignore them and focus only on the Hive.
I wish they'd delve into them, but at this point, idk if it'll ever happen.

Bungie typically makes pretty small maps for multiplayer and the current ones we've seen don't look like massive sprawling areas, but maybe I'm wrong.

If the 3rd map is the Marathon, it will be an indoor space ship so less sprawling outdoors and more tight knit corridors with secret passages.

I just think that they're misusing the term "raid mechanics" because they know it'll catch the ear of Destiny or ex-Destiny players.

Probably, but even games like Dark and Darker have dabbled in similar ideas. It's just not a great idea because bossing while being able to be third partied always feels bad. It creates a situation where the best way to play the game is just to wait around for someone else to do the important thing before you ambush them.

but with the setting, I don't see how they'll tell the story in a meaningful way if it's just extraction shooter stuff.

OG Marathon games tell a great story through only text terminals with very light visual storytelling through gameplay. It IS possible to tell a great Marathon story through just terminals as the OG games showed us but it's unclear whether the current Bungie writers are skilled enough to do it. I really do not like the heavy handed good vs evil shit from Destiny, it's the antithesis of what Marathon was all about so lore nerds should be very reserved before getting excited.

joe staten wank

hes literally the worst writer
d1 lore is shit because its a mess of the multiple failed games d1 was before that cobbled something together for launch

how would I best engage with destiny lore

Download Destiny Lore app on your phone, i am not joking.

like the artstyle

hate everything else about it

It IS possible to tell a great Marathon story through just terminals as the OG games showed us but it's unclear whether the current Bungie writers are skilled enough to do it. I really do not like the heavy handed good vs evil shit from Destiny, it's the antithesis of what Marathon was all about so lore nerds should be very reserved before getting excited.

oh god I can't wait for the metaphysical and poetic storytelling element of the player character being a warrior reincarnated across time/space and (you) the player and other games you played can be interpreted as being part of said reincarnations, getting reduced down to a comparatively much simpler literal in-universe reincarnation for corpo milquetoast anti-capitalist trite.

It's more than just annoying, it's actively anti-human (which is why wokeshit is being pushed be literally every single major corporation)

It IS possible to tell a great Marathon story through just terminals as the OG games showed us

I'm not doubting that at all, but OG marathon was a linear shooter, right? This is a free-for-all map so there's no linearity that can be had. Maybe they can pull it off, but I think it'll be very challenging.
Thinking a bit about it, perhaps that's what the first trailer's Ozymandias reading is about. We'll just be discovering historical events and piecing together what happened. Kinda ODST-like, just actually non-linear this time.

unfortunately for bungie you cant play an aesthetic.

Halo 2 and ODST the still best writing Bungie ever had in their actual campaigns, what makes you say Joe Staten is the worst. Or is it his contributions to Destiny are the worst part of it?

The high concept detergent core looked cool in the reveal trailer, but in gameplay it looks kinda shit.
There is something dissonant about how it actually looks in game.

Who the fuck is this for?
Destinyfags want more destiny
Tarkovfags want tacticool milsim
BRfags have cod, apex, pubg, hunt

Like who is the target audience? I really doubt casual are gonna flock to a game where only way to get any story is going around standing on plates and shoting random dots on a wall after watching a youtube video like they are destiny community puzzles they had.

Destinyfags want more destiny

Correction: we want GOOD Destiny. We've gotten too much and none of it has been good.

D1 lore is shit because Joe Staten had written the Destiny universe and established a linear story through it. like, 9 months before release, the higher-ups got him to show them the whole story and he did.
They said they wanted it non-linear, you can do missions in any order and that it was too campy and to go and redo it.
He decided that it was too much and left because they were being unreasonable.
Now you look at the story and it's desperately trying to add back the campy jokey stuff Joe added to Halo and the writers just can't do it. It comes off so forced and bad.
After Joe left, the remainder of the staff and Jason Jones who isn't a writer, basically stuck together random pieces and attempted to make a new story out of it.
I guarantee that the writers now are still using pieces of Joe's original script. We can even see it recently, where Joe's character The Crow was entirely repurposed as Uldren. Now they've gone back and written some story shit around making him The Crow again. There's even more instances, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.
At least Joe's universes felt lived in, Destiny at the moment feels like every single thing entirely revolves around the player character and nobody else has any real agency.
As Marty said kinda recently, the biggest mistake Bungie made was keeping Pete Parsons and the other ex-microsofts at Bungie.

you're viewing it the wrong way, the extraction shooter audience is still up for grabs. The trouble is BRs were a natural extension to death match and an easy sell, extraction shooters are a more niche appeal but the developers chasing the audience are treating it like the 2017-19 Battle Royale gold rush.

This. I've basically ignored the current seasons over my summer (southern hemisphere) but getting back into them, it actually seems like Heresy was pretty good. The nether is fun and court of blades is cool, but maybe it's because I haven't engaged with them and I've only played them a few times, not the usual 1000 bungie demands.
TFS was for sure good though. Best campaign we've gotten, a pretty satisfying conclusion, a good destination, a very good raid that did feel epic and respectful of the big bad and even though the code barely held together, Excision as the final nail in the Witness's coffin was an awesome capstone.
I feel like the reveal for Frontiers or whatever this shit with the Nine is, better be significantly fresh and new. If it's just another season, I think there's going to be a lot of upset people.

lol
lmao
joe writes the same way a child in high school does when doing their first creative writing assignment.

At least Joe's universes felt lived in

holy shit it fucking did not.
"his universe" barely made it off the cutting room floor and was universally attacked for being empty and meaningless.
it took years OF TEAMS MADE UP OF OTHER WRITERS to actually make a coherent story.
same as with halo, most of what joe wrote got cut and other writers filled in the gaps and finished the job.

I guarantee that the writers now are still using pieces of Joe's original script. We can even see it recently, where Joe's character The Crow was entirely repurposed as Uldren. Now they've gone back and written some story shit around making him The Crow again. There's even more instances, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.

when the fucking brought back the Exo-Rasputin cut plot thread but reversed, man fuck you Bungie seriously. Joe Staten unironically has had the worst fucking luck since Halo 2 shipped, he deserved so much better, I hope he at least got paid handsomely.

Are they tho? Extraction shooters are just BRs with a extra step and a massive draw back for casuals.

I checked steamcharts the other day and was honestly stunned that PUBG is still high up in the charts.
I had such a lot of fun with it in early beta with buddies, but I haven't touched it in a long time. I was surprised there were still a lot of players.
I thought that aside from fortnite, battle royale games had kinda died off.
It's kinda interesting that it feels a little like zoomers lock into one game and then only ever play that, instead of jumping around to new flavour-of-the-months.

Bungie is in trouble

Good

idk if you meant to reply to me or the other anon or us both.

Halo 2 is a great narrative and is only harmed by the ending getting cut, the original intent of the cut ending is great, and Halo 3 slight change to that plan doesn't actively harm H2.

"his universe" barely made it off the cutting room floor and was universally attacked for being empty and meaningless.

What is your citations for any of this, he was universally attacked for a story that was never released to the public?

it took years OF TEAMS MADE UP OF OTHER WRITERS to actually make a coherent story.

what point do you even think you are making anon? Staten's plot was thrown out during the reboot, then awkwardly cobbled together amongst the scraps, why are you trying to pass judgement off on something he walked out on when they ditched his work?

same as with halo, most of what joe wrote got cut and other writers filled in the gaps and finished the job.

Halo 2 and ODST is all Joe, the only major cut Staten's Halo contribution suffered from was Halo 2's ending getting cut.

when the fucking brought back the Exo-Rasputin cut plot thread but reversed

Holy fuck I'd forgotten about that.
That season was so close to being good story-wise, but they fucked up Clovis so much where Clovis Bray actually feels like he cares about saving humanity, even if it's for selfish reasons, he still at least seems to care, while Ana and Elsie spend the whole season whining and crying about how he's so evil and a big meanie. Godawful bullshit.
Then there was the ending. The final cutscene was perfectly done, but I was fucking annoyed that we spend the season gearing up Rasputin so we had our big fucking gun to help fucking up the witness (also there's the D1 grimoire lore where Rasputin describes how he was unable to fight the Witness, but that in hindsight, he could then see a way to beat it, which never came to bear) and then, at the last fucking minute, they decide that Eramis hacks Rasputin out of fucking nowhere. I think they had some stuff planned, but ran out of time or whatever to animate Rasputin doing stuff and it was just easier to kill him off entirely.
Fucking BULLSHIT. Rasputin was a dope character, his retelling his side of the Felwinter story was honestly one of the best in-game story moments we've ever had, his early record of the darkness and the collapse were phenomenal and his aesthetic was cool as fuck. He shouldn't have been killed off like he was, but he did go out with a bang.

It still gets new content like Fortnite. It's probably the sole reason why everyone else wants a piece of the live service game since if you manage to hook someone in they're to stay for years to come.

I agree and disagree with you, but my main point is the extraction shooter space is wide open for a more established developer to step into it and claim it. Blizzard's entire early success was built off taking casual unfriendly genres and making them palatable for more audiences. It makes sense that Bungie thinks they could take that spot, to me at least.

no gooning=dead game

The OG Marathon games are linear but you discover the lore in a non-linear way. It took many playthroughs and a lot of out-of-game discussion with other nerds to get a good grasp on everything.

One thing I'm wondering if they have the balls to do is have each seasonal wipe a timeline reset just like in Marathon Infinity. I'm not sure how well received this would be but it would be pretty bold.

I think you replied to the wrong post, but anyway

"his universe" barely made it off the cutting room floor and was universally attacked for being empty and meaningless.

Do you mean for Halo or Destiny? Because it's pretty well documented from insiders and the Marty court case that Joe's story was rejected because it was too campy and the execs wanted all serious all the time. Emptiness had nothing to do with it.

it took years OF TEAMS MADE UP OF OTHER WRITERS to actually make a coherent story.

The quality from those writers varies MASSIVELY but as of now, if you compare Halo's narrative, there were many many things happening as you were exploring your part of the universe. In Destiny, nothing happens when the player character is asleep. No other character has any real agency, it's all on the player guardian to do everything.
As for most of what Joe wrote got cut, I think you're a little right here, but that's because most of what ALL the writing team wrote got cut. Halo and particularly Halo 2 had enormous amounts of content that was left on the cutting room floor. Some was repurposed, but a lot was scrapped entirely.
Destiny seems to have had that in an even more significant way, where they threw everything on the cutting room floor and then picked up a few pieces every year and then tried to stick them together.

Destiny never actually put the player into a different timeline despite being very able too, outside of the one time with Saint14, hell Bungie dumpstered the Vex entirely to avoid timeline shenanigans. I don't think they have the creativity to contextualise seasons via timeline shifts.

That actually sounds very cool. Are they worth playing today? Or are they too dated?

It's kinda interesting that it feels a little like zoomers lock into one game and then only ever play that, instead of jumping around to new flavour-of-the-months.

Probably not a new phenomenon. Like how WoW, Halo, or Call of Duty got so big back in the day. WoW people were known to play little else than WoW. Call of Duty people have kind of been the same over the years.

To be honest, people who jump around playing the new flavor-of-the-month is getting rare these days. Mostly cause people get sucked into a live service they like and aren't all that interested in spending their time or money elsewhere unless they get really bored or frustrated with their favorite game.

That's exactly why. If you get a live service that hits, your studio and your team could be good for a decade or more. The game doesn't even have to be THAT big. Just big enough to sustain your team. I don't think all games are gonna become live service though. It just means a studio usually needs at least one live service game to allow them to consider making other types of games.

Never should have left Xbox.

Bungie needs to return to Halo.

How long until Bungie presses the emergency button and exploits the fact that Destiny/Marathon are pseudo-canon to one another to attempt to draw in lore nerds?

I actually like the Fallen the most. I think the lore behind them, their designs, and culture are pretty neat.
The House of Light started out okay, but everything involving them and Eramis dragged them down substantially.
Eramis was fine at first. But then Bungie fell in love with her and tried doing some stupid redemption arc for her.
She should have started and remained as a power-hungry, human-despising, warlord sort-of character.

If you are an ally of the Guardians, you are her enemy. If you join her fight against them, you are her enemy.

I hate 343 so much it's unreal but even I'm not sure I want modern Bungie dealing with Halo.

It's feeling very "toxic positivity" at the moment. Why did we bother redeeming Eramis? Why are we redeeming Savathun? They're mass murderers. It's ok to have bad guys.

proceeds to create an ODST Extraction Shooter in your Halo universe

Tbh I wouldn't even hate that.

Marathon (supposedly) has a much different cast of writers so perhaps some of these people are actually competent. We'll see.

Marathon 2 is my favorite game ever so I'm very biased. I think the map design of the trilogy will filter a lot of people, they are very maze like and you can get lost easily or not understand what you are supposed to do if you're not paying attention. That said, I do think the gameplay is solid even if on the basic side. The story is also very well written and the games are all free on Steam so it's worth just checking out if nothing else.

both.

yeh i forgot to add the other poster.

never released to the public?

no no no, thats not what i said, i said "barely made it off the cutting room floor" some of joes original story made it into d1.
and the parts that did make it were attacked by players as being empty and meaningless.
im sorry but you dont get to be judged by what didnt make it into the final cut.

Staten's plot was thrown out during the reboot, then awkwardly cobbled together

wait was it thrown out or cobbled together?
it cant be both.

but but but he walked away

so? its still his writing.

Halo 2 and ODST is all Joe

yeh, 2 extremely overrated games with mid at best story.
also joe doing his signature heavy handed religious allegory

Halo 2's ending getting cut.

was the best thing that happened to the franchise.
clearly someone at bungie from the beginning could see joe wasn't good enough and restrained his retardation just enough to make it work.
joe is a boring, 1 dimensional character that tried and failed to become a fed and tried and failed to become a Hollywood writer and then tried to become a videogame writer and had most of his work cut from the final product.

the games are all free on Steam

Oh shit, cool I'll give them a go. Thanks
As for the maze shit, I feel like Halo CE was a bit like that (pillar of autumn and the library in particular) where they reused a lot of hallway assets often.

After Heresy, Savathun is our sworn enemy again because we stole Malok's skull from her ritual that was meant to steal Oryx from Eris Morn's throne world.

Halo 2 is a fun game with good spectacle, but the story itself is actually shit when you sit and think about it for more than 5 minutes. The game begins with the Covenant invading Earth and ends with...the Covenant invading Earth. The Covy story is interesting but it also removes a lot of the mystery from Halo and turns it into an alien soap opera instead of a cool space opera.

the art style presents well in a cinematic trailer but it really falls apart when you reduce the graphical fidelity. i'd hate to see what it looks like when you run it on a toaster

All ceo and the v*lorant director but somehow they won't be getting the boot they deserve

Well to be expected

Make sure to tinker with the settings. You should want to have at least the modern HUD and reticle on. Optionally you can turn on interpolated FPS if you want to go over 30 FPS. The mouse settings will also need some tweaking to get right. Hope you have fun with them, they're great games if you can get past the 90's jank.

Let’s make a xtrac fps with no proximity chat, no solo queue, no gimmick for no playerbase.

Yes

wait was it thrown out or cobbled together?

it cant be both.

The whole story he wrote was trashed, but the bones of the universe he built were still there. They started cobbling it together using one of the 3 starting quests. Each race was going to enter the universe slightly differently and they ended up repurposing the Exo's story as the one we see in D1.

so? its still his writing.

It's his universe and the bare bones of his writing. His writing essentially provided inspiration for the writers who came after him.
I agree with the heavy handed religious allegories, those absolutely permeate through Halo, but I enjoy them.
As for Halo 2's ending getting cut, the revealed ending would have potentially saved us from 343 fucking up the forerunners, not that they wouldn't have fucked it up a different way, but I think it would have been fine to reveal in Halo 2 that forerunners were human. It's heavy handed enough in Halo 3 where it basically says that forerunners were humans.

Noted, thanks I'll tinker a bit and give them a go.

We can't, Anon. The Bungie that made Halo is long, long gone.
They were. Originally.
Pathways into Darkness -> Marathon -> Halo -> Destiny.
That was the original plan.

The writers focus on the Hive (and the Taken by extent) because they have always been the only ones with a serious motivation.
The Fallen were always enemies out of unreasonable spite.
The Cabal had a nebulous motivation in D1, then after Ghaul they've been the same as the Fallen.
The Vex are irrelevant because with how they have been always presented, they have either already won, or they can never win, so every conflict is just delaying our or their inevitable destruction.
And the Shadow Legion, Scorn and Dread are just as much pawns as the Taken are.

The game begins with the Covenant invading Earth and ends with...the Covenant invading Earth.

If you actually pay attention to the story you would know that it was just Regret jumping the gun at the beginning of the game because he found some coordinates that he thought would lead him to another Halo ring. He took a dozen ships on an exploratory mission (and defied Truth/Mercy) not realizing that Earth is our home base. That's why the beginning of Halo 2 we weren't wiped out completely in a matter of seconds.

They should’ve made it a co-op game like Lethal Company where you control a bunch of BoBs

Marathon just looks so fucking generic.
Like the art style is nice but everything about it otherwise is just bland.

Their biggest mistake was reviving Marathon which was never an especially popular IP and was always seen as a lesser sci fi DOOM clone on Apple computers. They should've just called it anything else instead of tying it to a 30 year old series that nobody remembers.

Eramis is awful in the sense that she should’ve died a long time ago. By all accounts she’s despicable and our guardian would have zero issue tracking her down and killing her. Her coming back in plunder as a poi to Eido was fine, but at that point I would’ve just pulled a Darth Vader and revealed her to be Eido’s mother if they were going to drag her along this much.

Its corpo magical thinking "if we build it they will come". They don't believe in primary target audiences and market data anymore. Epic turned a minecraft clone into fortnite, there are no rules! Just swing and aim for the bleachers, theres a .1% chance you make it big and just have streamers build that audience for you!

It's marketed like a free to play game and it costs $60.

This is what Bungie gets for getting TLOU2 Factions cancelled.

it's current-day Bungie so "removal of" is more likely

They already disowned that idea in a Q&A but that said there are explicit references to Marathon in Destiny. Savathun explicitly references K'lia, the travelling moon world used by the ancient S'pht'Kr, in Truth to Power. The Book of Sorrows subtlety references the W'rkncacnter ("the waves") and the MIDA Mini Tool is the most direct reference, talking about the MIDA rebels and the Marathon ship itself.

stop doing this bullshit man

its his but its not

so you can suck him off and give him credit for all the good but excuse him from all the bad by hand waving and saying "yeh but thats not his fault man"
fuck off.

343 fucking up the forerunners

343 saved the forerunners by actually making them interesting
in joes original vision he had forerunners as humans... the end.
holy fuck how boring.
its this high school level writing that im talking about where you cant write more than a few paragraphs because you cant think ahead, you cant create depth, you just write "x =y and w = v and a = b and then and then and then and the end"
talk about killing the mystery of a universe, saying forerunners are humans is the biggest mystery killer you could have.
"ooo i wonder who the forerunners were, oh they are just humans.... ok..." like there is literally nothing to even think about there. nothing interesting, nothing mysterious. it just ends.
there literally isnt even a conversation you can have about forerunners if they are just humans.
joe had gotten A LITTLE better by the time of destiny.
listen if you want to say he was a good "ideas guy" sure, i can find middle ground there, but writer? no, never.

Don't forget, you were always my favourite"

Cades gone again, we can move on lads. Its over.

You're right, but I think that's just lazy writing. In D1, the cabal were all but irrelevant, then D2 decided to focus on them and introduced the empire, showed us Ghaul and then came out swinging with Calus who I still think was a legitimately interesting character who got shafted into a bumbling retard in the end.
Season of Opulence made Calus really feel like a powerful character, but Lightfall was so rushed and poorly written that they change Calus into a sitcom dad who can't do anything right.
The Vex had some potential to do something interesting in shadowkeep and beyond light, but they didn't bother. Echoes also made me feel like if the vex get taken over so easily by Maya, that they're not really that much of a threat. The Vex were easily the best in Vault of Glass and there's some fun lore around the black garden or the hypothetical garden the gardener and winnower were in, but nothing seems to come of it and bungie has clearly shown they don't know what to do.
The scorn still being a thing is still weird. Uldren/Riven create them with the intention of raising a zombie horde, then bungie repurposes them to I guess keep using the assets because building a new enemy type is expensive?
Dread are just mindless drones and are lore-wise, uninteresting afaik.
I don't think there's much else you can really do with the Fallen. It feels like the whole species has consolidated in one way or another and there's not really any story threads to pull there and after Torobatl fell, the Cabal don't feel like a system-spanning species either and there's not much there outside of a little bit of a resistance movement with the psions, but that's really it.
Maybe it's ekeing out 10 years worth of story content, but I feel like the current Bungie writers are good at writing themselves into a corner, where they resolve stuff, but then don't leave themselves anywhere to go from there.

But problem there is, what is there to to change?
Blizzard made MMOs more casual but wow also came out in early days of internet getting bigger.
It was part game part social hub that struck just right.
BRs and extractions are the same genre with only one key difference and it isn't easy to change it without changing the whole game.

They were. Originally.

Pathways into Darkness -> Marathon -> Halo -> Destiny.

Really?
I'm so sure there's no way you could join them together now.
They're similar, sure, but at the very least, humanity goes in different directions in all of them, right? I'm only really familiar with Destiny and Halo, but the traveller enters the solar system in 2014 in Destiny, so for Halo to be set like 200-ish years in the future, it'd have to ignore Destiny entirely.

honestly if it was a single player pvp thing where you get dropped into hyper dangerous remains of a lost colony and have to get in, loot relics and get out risking everything on you like a roguelite ala Prey Mooncrash i would play it.

It's funny watching devs get burned chasing trends from half to a full decade ago. Had they gone with and made it something in the genre range of difficult cooperative FPS á la Lethal Company, Repo, Helldivers 2, etc. since that's what's popular now they'd be swimming in it. Fuck, it was popular even back then when they started making it with their OWN IP Destiny, but some retarded higher up looked at the Crucible, looked at PUBG, and said

You know that mode >10% of our player population consistently engages with? The one we have to force players into by locking exotic quests and class abilities behind to get any casual players to touch?

Let's make a full game about that, but with streamerbait extraction elements

But then Bungie fell in love with her

Because they realized they accidentally made an OC and went all "donut steel".
destinypedia.com/Veekris,_the_Shipstealer#Trivia

I was satisfied with the ending in TFS. Which is not something I would have ever expected from this clusterfuck of a franchise. So I haven't touched anything in D2 since. Marathon doesn't really appear to have anything that appeals to me beyond, potentially, the gunplay. I just want them to make more single-player/co op shit. The last three campaigns (yes, even Lightfall was fun in this way, story aside) having Legendary modes that scale with your fireteam was scratching an itch that hasn't been sated since the days of Bungie's Halo. Booting up into the campaign on legendary with two of your boys on launch day became the thing I looked forward to most in Destiny. Besides maybe the raid launches. I just want them to be longer. SOMEONE MAKE FUCKING GOOD CO OP FPS CAMPAIGNS!

I mean shit I think everything post Red War has been vastly shit. They had no idea how to proceed with the universe after the fantasy scenario of Cayde’s death.

Really?

No lol. Pathways and Marathon are likely the same universe since the Jjaro alien race is explicitly mentioned in both. The connections to Marathon and Halo do not and never have existed. It's all cope.

So Destiny

everything post Red War

i know for a fact you havent played any of it.

Theres this one really cool mission i spent ages on since apparently it was a hard exotic mission not meant to be solo'ed where you explored a derelict cabal ship infested with this weird fungus nobody had seen before and that stuck with me.

Then like everything they retconned it into being more witnesssloppa because everything in destiny has be shrank down to the smallest of scales for the writers who only watch MCU movies.

The Cabal Empire was actually referenced in D1 in particular in a taken king side mission where Zavala drops his “Thanks for the tip” dialogue. Within the Grimoire the D1 cabal were inferred to be conquering their way through the galaxy in order to escape something which could now be explained as the fall of Torobatl at the hands of Xiva Arath and Savathûn. They were under-developed narratively likely as a result of being the last faction introduced in D1.

lots of Tarkov shills in this thread...

Which, if you think about it, is also a plot they reused for Reach. (covenant artifact explorers finding Reach by accident and then a bigger fleet coming in support some time later).

how I understood it, it went like this. There are two universes.

The Marathon Universe: Pathways into Darkness -> Marathon

The Halo Universe: -> Halo -> Destiny.

All have one underlying feature, The Hero. Beowulf. The player's character who is always there to halt the damnation of his people, who comes when he is needed: The Soldier, The Cyborg, The Spartan. Reincarnated, every time, and given his faithful sword, Cortana(Durandal) to help him.

Soldier of Pathways completes his mission, but dies.

He is the first one brought in for the Mjolnir Cyborg program.

After the events of Marathon Infinity, he lives out his life and dies.

The W'rkncacntr from the Star survives the death of the universe, horribly misshapened and monsterous, becoming the Flood.

A piece of Durandal survives the end of the universe, that piece is found by the Forerunners, which is then in turn found by Cortana(She was originally meant to have been created through pieces of a destroyed "Ancient AI")

The Flood know John, they remember him, they know that it was HE who kept them inprisoned in that Star for eons, until the universe died and broke them into what they have become.

Destiny was originally pitched as a sequel to Halo, but Microsoft wanted more Halo, so Bungie left.
The story was discarded, the line drawing Halo to Destiny served, and now both are cast to the winds, so close, yet so far away.

don't be silly lad, Tarkov players can't read anything but base Cyrillic.

Theres this one really cool mission i spent ages on since apparently it was a hard exotic mission not meant to be solo'ed where you explored a derelict cabal ship infested with this weird fungus nobody had seen before and that stuck with me.

presage
and it was meant to be soloed.
after the 3rd week of doing solo runs it became second nature, i think i did it solo like 20 time not including running my friends through it.
it was extremely hard the first 2 times mainly because of how much of a maze it is.
youtube.com/watch?v=hLkzrHJDct8

I can agree that we can't know what was or wasn't Joe's writing that was left on the floor, and of course I agree that it's a whole team of writers, not just him.
The 343 forerunners thing, I'll give you that the storyline they had where they had the original humans vs forerunner war, where humans were glassing forerunner planets because of the flood, while the forerunners were fighting humanity back only to realise that humanity was nearly extinct and the flood were out of control was quite well done, but almost all the other shit in those games sucked balls.
The big mystery of forerunners being humans would have been showing the hypocrisy of the covenant that they worshipped the forerunners and everything they built, while trying to kill humanity off entirely.
Idk why you think that an ancient human race that was wiped out wouldn't be interesting to further explore, like did they find other aliens before finding the flood? Were the precursors humans too? What wiped them out? I'm not a writer, but I'm sure a good writer could think up tonnes of stories for if forerunners were humans.
I don't know, but I'd still say Joe was a good writer, because there's notable drop in quality in Bungie writing after he left.
There's a few sparks here and there, but that's mostly attributed to writers they hired temporarily.

Honestly I don't even think watching this game crash and burn will be entertaining. I just kinda want to see things hurry up and it goes away, it really is that uninteresting.

As much as people (rightfully) shit on Destiny it really had its moments. Feels like Bungie missed the chance to reboot it with a new setting with Marathon. I just want to raid cool sci-fi dungeons. I don't want to play Dark and Darker with guns.

Yeah I remember that, but it's a little teaser line that just says "cabal empire was called in" and as you said, they were very under-developed in D1, so I didn't think anything of that line.
When D2 happened and developed them, then all of a sudden the Shield Bros strike lore actually felt important.

The problem is that, in D1, there was mystery to everything

there was a mystery to everything because not even the writers knew what the fuck they were doing. Lets not kid ourselves and think destiny in any way had some kind of consistant lore or cannon.

They can’t make or hold a story to save their lives. Everything either gets dropped or executed in the most boring fashion.

Destiny was originally pitched as a sequel to Halo

Are you sure? You might be right, I don't know, but I was under the impression that Bungie wanted out from Microsoft and Microsoft owned Halo, so they knew they had to leave Halo behind.
I thought that while they built Destiny from the Halo Reach engine, the actual game, story and universe were always going to be unique and separate from Halo.
According to Marty, Bungie wanted out from Microsoft as early as after the release of Halo CE.

You're right but it did have mystery. It felt cool. Why is there a giant Vex robot underneath Venus on a glass throne? Why is there an advanced udnerground bunker on the cosmodrome? Nobody knows but it's cool. Destiny 2 has no mystery. It doesn't feel cool at all, it feels like a Marvel movie. Vibes are way off.

but almost all the other shit in those games sucked balls.

id rather have 50 books that suck shit than a single line on a page that says "humans are forerunners"
but thats just me.

would have been showing the hypocrisy of the covenant

except they already had hypocrisy of the covenant without the "humans are forerunners" plot line.
literally nothing changes about the covenant story and hypocrisy changes if you remove the "humans are forerunners" plot line.

Idk why you think that an ancient human race that was wiped out wouldn't be interesting to further explore

but i do think it would be interesting, and thats exactly what happened in the 343 lore. you dont need "humans are forerunners" for that story to exist.

but I'm sure a good writer could

joe clearly couldnt.

Presage was so good. I started playing D2 a couple of weeks before Season of the Chosen was released and chasing the high of Presage is what kept me playing for almost three more years.

You're right but it did have mystery. It felt cool. Why is there a giant Vex robot underneath Venus on a glass throne? Why is there an advanced udnerground bunker on the cosmodrome? Nobody knows but it's cool.

the "vibes" in both D1 and D2 are the exact same. The difference is that in D2 they couldnt get away with the videogame equivalent of vagueposting because they were running out of space in their own cannon for vague cool bullshit

chasing the high of Presage is what kept me playing for almost three more years.

yerp
sadly nothing lived up to it.
it really felt like bungie didnt understand why it was good and kept trying to replicate it but failing.

Pretty much this, it was a fool's errand from the getgo and with them trying to use apex mechanics in a tarkov genre it was doomed from the start
Recently yeah but the core game still has the same identity, unfortunately it's been slipping more and more by the patch

sometime after that
if you watch the GDC presentation about the trainstation comparison, they outline the financial woe of d2
Forsaken was the make or break for destiny 2, the combined effort of all the activision satellite studios (high moon + vicarious vision) and bungie created the comeback that rejuvenated its playerbase, however, all of those goodwill were pissed away from shadowkeep onward and completely killed off in lightfall

I would play this gay ass looking game if it was PVE coop. PVP in modern day is just getting shit on by hackers from china or some other hellhole.jtn8r

NTA but I disagree. In D1, you were just another guardian and there were all sorts of little excursions happening around you, while you were just another part of the universe.
Eventually, we got to the Taken War and you were the main guy leading the charge, but it did also feel like there were other guardian teams doing stuff.
Even RoI had you sneaking off to the plaguelands and leaving the rest of the tower stuff behind for other guardians to deal with.
D2, it feels like the entire universe stops when you aren't there. Nobody can run their own ops, nobody else can take down anything themselves, you have to do everything.
There's not really any mystery because the writers just started answering everything and never adding new mysteries to the game.
They definitely could keep going with vagueposting style stories, they just forgot to add to the mysteries.

how would I best engage with destiny lore?

Youtube or wikis because legitimately like 3/4 of the story is gone. The first three parts (vanilla and expansions) got deleted then half of the story from the still available expansions were limited time because they locked them behind fucking season passes WHEN YOU STILL HAD TO PAY FULL EXPANSION PRICE ANYWAYS.
How people put up with this shit is a mystery especially seeing as Destiny was and still fucking is marketed as a heavily story based game.

Presage is the coolest Destiny ever was. Remember opening up the doors the fallen sealed in the cosmodrome and finding a lightless den of hive and nobody even knew they were on earth and it feels like when the flood were revealed and you wonder how dark shit was gonna get but it never got spooky again outside presage?

Just incredible "run through corridors as villain heckles you on the radio before turning into two blues and an engram" carried them for a decade.

and we never found out if we were doctor shim or not.

like every other new game launch these days fails disasterously due to the guys in charge having an ego the size of the sun wtf. Like we're in the middle of a global recession and expensive media entertainment is the first thing to go when bills get tight yet these faggots think they can just do fucking whatever and gamers will give them 10 trillion dollars

it feels like the entire universe stops when you aren't there

this is exactly how d1 is, you are just too biased to accept it.

To be fair Bungie killed themselves, Sony just paid them an outrageous markup to survive for an extra few years

Im glad I experienced the peak of Destiny with Destiny 1. Then I quit and from what I saw, I made the right decision because the playerbase was still searching for the same highs D1 gave but bungie could never deliver.

Bungie will be closed down by Sony soon

Halo's Project Ekur will be a complete failure leading to Microsoft finally pulling the plug on Halo's multiplayer

Halo will become a singleplayer-only series starring the Master Chief

gameplay-focused singleplayer games will take over gaming in general while multiplayer games will die in a fire and lose their mainstream status

Feels good that all of my predictions have been coming true. I live in the right timeline.

it defies understanding that sony wasted all that money on them instead of buying some studio that's currently good

Its crazy to me that people found D1 to be enjoyable after the first season or whatever. I dropped it when there was only one raid and never went back. I did the same thing with destiny 2 and they were both the same experiences. Same barren endgame where you grind for godrolls, same quests that are absolute chores for the latest meta exotic, same insanely bloated numbers on endgame shit while you look like a scifi clown, and so on.

mfw marathon made me reinstall d1 again

no crazy aim assist

while textures are lower res the game looks better because the lightning and particles are so, so much better than D2's

Aim assist is barely there, compared to D2 where a thrall running across your ADS can pull you like a fucking magnet

You are exploring the ruins of humanities golden age, booting up systems after centuries of disrepair and chasing out the alien invaders left behind after the warmindS, plural, chased off the darkness

tfw Rise of Iron was more kino than D2 ever was.

and the real, real fucked up part?

More players in the tower and the patrol zones than D2 has had in like a year.

Maybe because its complete and every piece of content from launch to the end is still there but Destiny 2 is a fucking frankensteins monster of seasonal live service sloppa and the current expansion thats not been aborted from the game. Yet.

Go reinstall and start a new guardian, come home to the real tower friend.

No, D2 is a better game than D1 in most aspects and expansions (with notable exceptions) but in D1, the mysteries were done far better. In D1, we were given teeny hints to Crota and Oryx in vanilla and when Dark Below happened, we were hinted further at Oryx and hearing rumblings about Fallen moving.
I get that it was early days then and we could get a lot of random new stuff dropped on us and it didn't feel bloated, but almost all the time D1 would reveal/answer a mystery but add a little bit of something brand new and unexplained to the answer which we wouldn't yet understand.
D2 very rarely does that.

No

yes
how you personally feel about a game doesnt change how a game actually is.

Its sad that the closest we will ever get is Warframe now they actually brought the zariman shit into the current timeline and its not just farming grineer and corpus in shitty space station tilesets.

Daughter>Eris Morn btw

Marathon wasn't just a Destiny spin off with none guardians doing merc shit for the Drifter, letting you play as none humans as well.

but almost all the time D1 would reveal/answer a mystery but add a little bit of something brand new and unexplained to the answer which we wouldn't yet understand.

DESTINY 2 HAS BEEN DOING THIS SINCE LAUNCH YOU FUCKING RETARD
HOLY SHIT
NICE SELF REPORT THAT YOU HAVE NEVER ACTUALLYED PLAYED DESTINY 2
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.
fucking d1 tards i swear to god.

not really. we know for a fact and bungie has said on lifestream they "didnt know what the darkness was" and even at one point in D2's lifespan tried to remove it from canon including the "the darkness takes you" game over screen till they realised that was a MASSIVE mistake as people went "oh okay this really is throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks with no plan" and dropped the game.

D2 has always been "what did focus testing tell us the zoomers who are more open to funpay minibuy surprise mechanic cashshop valuetainment likely to buy?" and never a single planned narrative with real forshadowing. They would just look at their many hooks with no intended resolution and go "uhhhh fuck, go with this?" for years.

destiny loresages explain wtf is up with the hive. Also why is there a giant hive monster in the oceans of titan?

The generational left wing push that is coming will be apocalyptic.

Under 18s in the US are polling more right than 75+. AfD is the most popular party in Germany. Reform are the most popular in the UK, and Farage has been bullied by his supporters to back mass deportations.

All you had to do was leave our video games alone and not flood our countries with browns, and now you're getting a resurgent right wing that could easily shift to open fascism if we don't get our way.

We Are Going To Fucking Kill You.

The fact that they're already seemingly start to bump the number of invites being sent out because the numbers aren't high enough tells me more than enough....and Sony still has that other GAAS Hei$t$ or whatever the fuck it's called because they didn't learn anything from Concord and or in too deep to cut their losses

Aren't they worried that people will just keep playing fortnite? Why would zoomers even switch away from their game they have ten billion skins in?

Concord only failed because of chuds
We need to remove the chuds so the modern audience can take their place. All twenty of them.

I can tell you are 14 from your Anon Babble nigger image fuck off back to your discord

The hive are just a bug people like the eliksni but they were tricked by worms that turned them to dark magics, but the one on titan is an earlier proto worm that isn't down with the devil.

but fun fact originally the hive were literally undead. The thralls were eliksni, hence why in the earliest concept art they have four arms and the wizards and shit were the moth race they cut.

If you check steamcharts people are playing about an hour then getting the pop up that they unlocked a vault expansion but vault size is wiped at the end of the season then dropping it and uninstalling.

Also why is there a giant hive monster in the oceans of titan?

youtube.com/watch?v=9kTKozruZpU
youtube.com/watch?v=sBjvQ_rBJH0
tldr bungie turned it into a woman and made it gay(no really)

Destiny is what happens when you combine god tier concept artists with drooling retard writers

holy fuck you literally dont know anything about d2.

nta but he's right i vividly remember their "sooo, yeaaahh, about that darkness stuff" livestream. Are you a chatbot? can you end current task and draw me a horse in ascii art?

so for Halo to be set like 200-ish years in the future, it'd have to ignore Destiny entirely.

Several millennia actually. WQ expac introduced the 13000 year old guardian in the lore book

suffer through Echoes

revenant is worse

but the lore books talking about eliksni monster hunters getting their bloodborne on back on Reis was ludokino

Realise we will never see this

Burn out

Never even finish the season

Log in for about an hour of Heresy

Was hoping for the dreadnought and story about leaving the solar system

Was more taken trash and the dreadnoughts now built like a gambit map and the acitivity is a much shittier version of the duviri circuit

Dont play more than an hour, dont even bother to keep up with the story

Reinstall Warframe after like 5 years in time for 1999 and go through all the shit like the new war FOR FREE and realise i've been a fucking fool.

cannot trust bungo with a new game, fool me twice shame on me.

I wanted to like TFS. By no means is it the worst story Destiny 2 ever had, but after 10 years of Destiny I just felt it didn't measure up. I liked the stuff to do with Zavala, and I think (You) pleading to the Traveler for your ghost to come back was really good. But overall it didn't feel like a culmination of everything we the players had been through. There's too much focus on Cayde being back and not enough focus on what any of this stuff means to (You). This is a broader problem Destiny's struggled with in everything since Vanilla Destiny, but (You) don't have an actual character. You don't talk, you don't get dialogue options, you don't have much of a stake in the world. The game really needed a major overhaul to the city, so you could actually interact with it and NPCs living there instead of just popping by some vendors in the tower once a week. This kind of stuff goes a long way when your story's premise is that the last pocket of human civilization is under constant threat. The lore sometimes does an ok job at it, but the removal of factions was essentially the death knell for the idea of ever caring about the city.