Does Bungie Really Care About What Their Fans Think Anymore?

The third piece of DLC starts off with the Taken King, and Hive God, Oryx, travelling the stars in his colossal dreadnaught ship to kick off the Taken War. Apparently he wasn’t too thrilled with the Guardians killing his baby boy. The Awoken rally a pre-emptive strike, but it ends up being a massive failure, with their armada destroyed, and their Queen presumed dead. After this, Oryx begins enslaving members of other races, ala the Taken, so it’s up to the Guardians to put a stop to this. The Guardians obtain a new set of powers and are able to land relatively safely on the Dreadnaught where the Cabal are also waging war.

Over the course of its lifespan, most players agreed that Destiny’s most persistent problem was a general lack of content. There just wasn’t enough to do between DLC expansions. The thing is, those expansions never actually helped all that much. It would only take a week or two for the hardcore crowd to start complaining about a lack of content again. Some would blame those players for spending too much time with the game and burning through that content too quickly, but it’s only natural that players would quickly burn through expansions when they often didn’t include many new features. I was cautiously optimistic that Gambit Removal Destiny 2 2 would address the real issue at the heart of its forebear’s content woes, but this sadly hasn’t been the case. It’s added a few minor features in the form of the new director, a map, small activities in its explorable spaces, milestones and flashpoints, but that that’s it. Oh wait, scratch that. Milestones and flashpoints are just re-branded bounties, so they’re actually not new at all. So not only does it offer less content than Destiny’s final form, but it still hasn’t addressed the first game’s core problem.

We’ve created a game that has its own culture now and every Destiny player has adapted to the current classes. What we wanted to do was strip those powers away, make players think about their characters in some new and exciting ways, and then embrace new forms of fighting within each subclass.

It would seem that the Fallen have been able to get their hands on the Golden Age SIVA nanotechnology, transforming them into technologically enhanced beings capable of mass destruction. This story is pretty cut in dry as you’re initially tasked with investigating the Plaguelands, which leads you to gain further information on SIVA itself, and then you need to destroy the Splicer leadership.

There’s no real choices and trade-offs to be made anymore. The same goes for the rest of the game. The in-depth and often rewarding dialogue trees are gone, replaced with options that boil down to whether or not the player character is going to be either nice or sarcastic nice. There are no karma checks, no skill checks, no special checks, nor even long and interesting conversations to be had. Dialogue might as well just be there because previous Fallout games had it. The list could go on, but is perhaps better saved for another time. As it stands,Fallout 4 has gained massive mainstream success. It just had to become a different game in order to get it; a game that’s much more a shooter with RPG elements than it is an RPG with shooter elements. It became a game one that fans of the old Fallout games have grown to hate and possibly a series that RPG fans in may no longer care about in the future. Taken on it’s own It’s a decent game, but one that has nonetheless been compromised for the sake of short-term sales. The same is true of Dead Space 3.

Jumping in, the beta opens with a great start, showcasing the opening mission which immediately wraps up a story arc for old players and wipes the slate clean for new players. It’s a guaranteed win-win. Unless you’re a guardian, that is, then it’s a significant loss. For a mission showcase, this is an excellent example; this story mission had more feeling in it than all of my time spent with my guardian. Characters are interacting with you. Mysteries as to where other characters went are easy to spot in the environment and it all around creates a sense of awe. Where is Eris Morn? Her glowing green jar half buried in ruble where she once stood. Or the cleaning bot that maintains its programming, casually sweeping up the blood of dead Cabal while the Tower is literally on fire in every other regard. Seeing some of the most famous guardians in action, working with you. Entering a hallway and seeing the very people Guardians are supposedly protecting, scared, huddling together as their home is taken away. Destiny 2 wants to hit with impact, and it does.

Dead Space 3’s compromises were a bit more subtle , but they still resulted in a not-so-minor departure for the series. Where the first two games were horror games first and shooters second, Dead Space 3 was the opposite. It traded careful resource management and situational weapons for resource crafting and all-purpose creations. Rather than a tense experience that required its players to think on the fly, players got an occasionally startling but overall leisurely romp through an undead ice planet. Once players acquired enough resources to craft a gun with both long and short range firing modes, any semblance of genuine scares and vulnerability went right out the airlock. Supposedly, Isaac isn’t even alone for most of the game thanks to his partner, Carver, appearing out of the ether during every other cutscene. Just like with Fallout 4 and Destiny 2, Dead Space 3 represented a shift in genre for the sake of more mainstream appeal. The semblance of the game its fans loved was still there, but that’s all it was: a semblance. The traits that made it unique, that attracted a fanbase in the first place, those were either severely watered down or cut out entirely in the name of attracting more casual players.