GymratAmarillo said:
ok first of all I completely forgot when Japan Studio was restructured LOL, I thought that happened in the first years of the ps4 and it wasn't so that's why I had to edit my comment for the sake of the joke. I don't know if Heaven is going to be a good dev or not, I think the name of their game is terrible and the first trailer was meh but the description sounds interesting enough on paper so I'm 50/50 about it. Now let's make something clear Bungie and Bend aren't bad developers, they are good developers. Days gone is a solid game with a very slow first half that didn't got the sales number Sony wanted in their first year but since has sold more than 7 million copies and judging from the comments that the ex director makes about everything I think most of the problems with the game came from the Director of the game and the Sony administration not from Bend itself. Different to Haven I have full confidence in bend. Bungie just released what for many fans is their best job in almost 10 years, what happened to the studio was once again thanks to the a rotten administration but this time it was the Bungie administration. We haven't seen anything from Marathon, the only thing we know about the game is that it went hero based and that isn't a bad thing if the game is good enough. Concord didn't fail because it was a hero game, it failed because the only good thing about the game was the technical aspect, everything else was bland. So no, we don't know enough to say it isn't looking good and that report of Bungie employees "don't feeling good about the game" was about the release date not the game itself. After what happened with Concord I doubt Sony will rush any of their remaining services. We also have have Media Molecule supposedly making a service, their games have been platforms of creations without monetization for years. They have enough experience with what a service is so they fave my full confidence. The new studio making a MOBA. I was more interested when that game didn't have a whole studio behind it but they are only 40 people, people Sony saved from being fired so I don't even going to act like they shouldn't have another service because that studio may no longer exist next year. The game from the COD guy. There was a report last week that is going to be fantasy not just Sony's COD so I'm kind of interested. Realistically only Haven's game and the Horizon multiplayer worry me. Everything else I have faith in the developers, a game isn't bad just because it is a service. |
The thing with Bend is that they're inexperienced with live service games and if history has shown anything, typically single player studios haven't made the best transition to the live service model. Not saying it's a bad thing as we have no idea what they're working on, but it would be quite the miracle if they successfully made the transition.
As for Bungie though, as someone who has played all their games religiously for the past 25 years, even before Halo, I can tell you that in terms of Destiny alone, there is no franchise that has been as inconsistent as Destiny has. After thousands of hours put into the franchise, it's always been the case that for every good expansion the series has had, it's been followed up by or preceded by a middling to terrible expansion. The Final Shape was preceded by arguably one of, if not the worst, expansion in the franchise's history, and that is consistently how it's been for the past 10 years.
Not only does the middling track record concern me, along with how terribly development is going in terms of what developers think, along with reporting from Jason Schreier and Tom Henderson about how the game is turning out poorly, but also repeated play tests over the past year have continually been that the game is just not fun. 2025 seems to be the target release and with how development has rebooted to have heroes, it seems like it's going to be a rushed product. The thing with Destiny was that there really wasn't much else competing with it in the market, so it was able to handle turbulent launches for the most part. With Marathon though being an extraction shooter, a very niche genre up to this point, and a lot of the creative leads that were in charge of not just Marathon development, but also the most recent expansion of Destiny 2, have been fired.
So with Bend being inexperienced in live services and Bungie going through the studios arguably most turbulent time, it's unsurprising to be nervous about how things are going to turn out rather than the argument that live services are inherently bad. Because they're not. I'm hoping they can turn out to be good. Especially Marathon because Bungie has always been a special developer to me, but I'm terrified for the future of the studio. Especially as you mentioned the administration side, which has plagued the studio since the early Halo days.
