Oh dear. It's like a much intensified version of Jeff Kaplan's perpetual deer-in-headlights look for the early Overwatch community comms stuff.Sengoku Strider wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 8:02 pm Joe Blackburn, design lead for Destiny 2 did an emergency unscripted live stream walking back a lot of those announcements, hands shaking, voice cracking and looking for all the world like he was trying to stave off a rolling mental breakdown for 15 minutes and only half succeeding:
Not bad. And Chief?! My head knows they're playing with fanservice, but it works a little bit.Sengoku Strider wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 8:02 pmYep, Warmind. That was D2 year 1, which was right before they took it from D2 vanilla's soulless Marvel movie writing to kind of amazing with Forsaken and all the Dreaming City stuff, and much needed system reworks across the board.
Also, petty, but another fun case of the script getting leg-swept by its multiplayer conceit, since every non-NPC guardian dropping their hat to go after Sov at the same time is effectively Ikora's plan but less official bless MMO writing.
I don't mean literal video streaming - heaven forbidSengoku Strider wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 8:02 pmHaving seen the sizes of all those updates, I'm inclined to believe them. When you add up the strikes, raids and campaign missions those annual expansions are a full AAA game's worth of content, never mind the season pass areas and story on top of that. Even if they share some assets, after years of adding new sandboxes there's no amount of video streaming that's going to fit it onto a 500 GB PS4, Sony has guidelines for system overhead they can't just ignore (though Sony says they expect PS4 to be done by 2025, so maybe that'll change). They did go the streaming route with the Stadia version, and most players hated it. The last thing Destiny needs is more latency and network hitches in a matchmade game without dedicated servers and mountains of in-game dialogue and physics setting off chain reactions all over the place.
I'm talking about on-demand retrieval of models, textures, sounds, etc. via network. And not even necessarily in the potentially fragile 'open world game' sense of fetching stuff as it's encountered during gameplay; in broad strokes D2 is still effectively map-based, so it could keep a list of zones visited by the player and their associated assets, then clear the oldest off disk when downloading a new one puts you over a potentially player-configurable local storage limit.
The tradeoff would be a longer load screen (and potential connect to the internet to go here error) when flying to an uncached area, which could be avoided for most-current content by keeping it on-disk.
In that sense it recalls FFXIV, which also had its early game de-bloated recently to make way for the much better stuff that comes after the first couple of expansions. I suppose the difference is in the sales model, since as far as I know FF's was met with hearty at last! from the playerbase.Sengoku Strider wrote: ↑Mon Aug 21, 2023 8:02 pmThe upside has been to de-bloat the less important early game. Keep in mind that D2 is already a sequel in an ongoing story with thousands of pages of lore and hours of cutscenes, and it famously passed the point of being a nightmare for onboarding new players a long time ago. It's built to keep having new things for players to discover in hour 2000 or 5000, so I blame nobody who finds it impenetrable at this point. I definitely feel the "you took away stuff that I paid for" angle, but streamlining things by vaulting some content wasn't a bad move in terms of making a more enjoyable overall game. And it's not like that content is lost, they rotate elements of it back in every season after reworking things. They're still working in areas and raids from D1.
Rotation is well and good for now, but won't last forever. Perhaps future consoles will open up the possibility of a definitive edition, but it's a weird prospect to think about how a game that conducts itself like an MMO but sells like an annual AAA will hold up on the preservation side.