• Disappointed to see so much mention in the press release of Bungie’s experience with Live Games, monetization, etc. Those have absolutely been the worst aspects of Destiny. That game has so much potential, and the studio has a lot of talent, but as long as they are designing around FOMO and grind, it’s going to keep the game from reaching it’s potential IMO. I had hoped that whatever Bungo did next would be a little less aggressive on the grind, but it’s sounding like they will probably be leaning into that aspect even more.

    • I played Destiny 2 from launch up through a few expansions. I was used to the idea of buying new xpacs every time they came out, but the constant grind for new equipment was annoying since I mostly played for the pvp aspect. I also didn’t like the way they dealt with balancing - they often caved to the community’s whining, which meant a slow decline back to the state of Destiny 1… pvp dominated by shotgun rushers with no real counter except to also be a shotgun rusher. I found this an incredibly low skill ceiling and simply boring to me. I preferred high skill weapons like the single shot GL where you needed to understand trajectory and predict player movement… also one of the only counters to shotgun rushers. It was nerfed to no longer be able to kill on direct hit and thus shotgun rushing became the defacto strategy again. The only other possible counter at that point were the few single headshot killing weapons in the game which had the same ttk (effectively 0) but having two weapons with the same ttk but one with a much lower skill ceiling seemed like artificially handicapping myself and when you’re playing competitively with people who are also looking to max their rank every season it’s not worth it.

      • I had almost the opposite experience from you. I primarily played D2 for the PvE content, I didn’t care about PvP at all, but Bungie’s insistence on trying to balance PvE and PvP sandboxes together meant that good PvE weapons were often getting senseless nerfs because of issues with the PvP meta. It was really frustrating. And it felt like the amount of grind just increased every season, after a while it felt like a job just to play the game.

        It’s a shame, because the core gameplay of Destiny is hard to beat. The game feels good to play in a way that not many other shooters manage.

        • Yes one of the core issues was how they attempted to balance both PvE and PvP gameplay through the same mechanisms. Most modern games which have both components have figured out that locking stats on weapons in the PvP environment is how you do it, because you can then just modify where that lock is and not touch the PvE component at all.

  • yesterday Sony announced what seem to be the first explicit plans that come from this acquisition: Sony planning more than 10 live service games before March 2026

    “The strategic significance of this acquisition lies not only in obtaining the highly successful Destiny franchise, as well as major new IP Bungie is currently developing, but also incorporating into the Sony group the expertise and technologies Bungie has developed in the live game services space,” says Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki. “Through close collaboration between Bungie and PlayStation Studios we aim to launch more than 10 live service games by the fiscal year ending March 2026.”