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Break Ups are always hard, except when they aren’t!

News broke today from Bungie on their twitter in a simple tweet that says so much.:

Today, we’re announcing plans for Bungie to assume full publishing rights for the Destiny franchise.

Read the full story at https://t.co/nxcJOVXAv6.https://t.co/RyD1jvi0hW pic.twitter.com/giFKmkyc9y— Bungie (@Bungie) January 10, 2019

After reading this tweet, one song has been playing in my head all day

So if you have been living under a rock for the past decade or two, you wouldn’t understand why this is such big news. Back in the early 2000’s a pc game company made a deal with Microsoft to make their title Halo:Combat Evolved for the newly announced XBOX after originally planning to release it for Windows and Macintosh. Bungie had a small cult following after their games, Marathon, Myth,  and Oni, and while the deal displeased their PC followers, the power of the Microsoft wallet was too much. The Halo franchise became one of the most well known, well received, and loved exclusive titles for Microsoft and it’s XBOX line. It was the one thing that drug me away from PlayStation, with the release of the XBox 360 and the Halo 3 title. I still compare most Arena shooters to Halo 3, since in my opinion Halo 3 is one of the most balanced of this game type ever. The lack of classes and different loadouts, the limitations of power weapons and abilities, made them key goals in matchmaking. Plus SWAT mode is one of my favorite game types ever since it relies more on pure skill and quick response.

In 2007 Bungie and Microsoft made Bungie LLC, an independent company which Microsoft had minority stake in the company. Then in 2010, Bungie announced their 10 year agreement with Activision. Which led us to the Destiny Era of Bungie. Destiny’s announcement brought much attention good and bad. It was going to be a Playstation exclusive (thankfully this changed), and be something completely different. A FPS MMO style game. As many of us know, Destiny did not live up to the hype. The Actual Story and lore of the game was nowhere to be found. If players wanted to know what was going on in the world they had to read grimoire cards using the app or website. The gunplay and mechanics that Bungie was known for was still there, the game was pretty to look at, and the score was fantastic. But there always felt like a lack of depth. Let alone much of the later released DLC, was actually already on the disk. This caught major waves of anger from players. This was obviously a move to string more money out of the gamers wallets, and honestly should have been a sign for things to come.

Many gamers spent hundreds if not thousands of hours as we pushed our way to maxing characters and going for raids, to get elusive rare loot, and while the story was never really compelling and had no real meat to it, it did offer a lot of fun. Then comes along the announcement of Destiny 2, where all the wrongs from Destiny 1 would be made right!!! Well, kind of, there was more story, there was more emotion filled scenes, but now the once easy shader process of customizing you character has become much more complicated. Let alone if you wanted to ensure matching your entire ensemble you more than likely had to spend real world cash to get enough shaders to make it possible. On top of that the microtransaction store, AKA the eververse became filled with many emotes and other things to customize your character. The tendrils of Activision reared themselves through out the entire game now. As with many other Activision titles microtrasactions are more of the game than the actual game, one can only look at the past two call of duty games to understand what I am getting at.

But now, Bungie and Destiny, will be moving on from Activision. What will this mean for the future of Bungie and their future projects? Was it Bungie realizing that they had turned away many of their fans? Was it Activision seeing that the Destiny title had little more to gain monetarily wise? I fell in love with Bungie back in the Halo days, I felt that the company was as much a part of their community as I was. When Destiny came around, it felt to me, as if they were slowly backing away from being a part of their community and just being the vessel for which the community existed. Maybe they realized this and decided that the changes Activision brought with them were not changes for good, but changes for business sake. Feel free to leave comments on your opinions of this divorce.

Until later days,
Love and Tentacles
PieRatKing

 

Comments: 1

  1. vurtilopmer says:

    Just a smiling visitor here to share the love (:, btw great layout. “Competition is a painful thing, but it produces great results.” by Jerry Flint.

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