I've been active on these forums since July. While I am a long time Bungie fan, I never really got into the whole "game forum" thing until Battlefield 4, and even then it was just because of how broken and buggy that steaming pile of code was at launch. I've seen a ton of whining, a ton of complaining, a ton of defending, some crazy logical fallacies, and a ton of legit criticisms. (So basically, the internet, lol) Hell, I'm probably guilty of having participated in all of the above in some form or another. Like many of you, I was glued to a seat on the hype train. This was going to be one of the greatest games ever made. Truthfully, I don't think I fully understood what this game was going to be. I had ideas about it that, looking back, had no real foundation in reality. I'm not trying to let the devs off the hook. They did say and show some things that were misleading, but my point here isn't to bash anyone. I'm writing this to explain how I look at this game today and why I'm fundamentally okay today with what I was bitching about a week ago. [b]Exhibit A: Borderlands by Gearbox Software[/b] Have you ever played Borderlands 1? I have, I played the crap out out of it and loved it. I still long for another game that gives me the feeling of satisfaction I got when I received my first Pestilent Defiler. I had no idea what it was or what it could do, it just looked badass. I figured out later on that this amazing masterpiece of ballistics nirvana was the bane of the Atlas soldiers. I fondly remember their shrieks and screams as they ran into their comrades, spewing acid all over everyone, and inadvertently furthering my cause of bringing agonizing deaths to the lot of them. There's one thing though. That game had a crappy story by most standards. We can argue over that point if you like but I don't think you are going to change my mind, nor Gearbox's because they rectified it dramatically in BL2. The fact is that the vanilla game was pretty short, it didn't have a high level cap, and they later added guns to the loot pool to enhance the system. So why did it take Gearbox years to make a short campaign and a lackluster story? (Forgive me Gearbox, I love you guys but I had to make a point) Simple. They had to build the engine. They didn't build it from scratch (it's built on Unreal Engine 3) but they did HEAVILY modify it. This is where the bulk of the dev time is in a new IP. It takes a long time to get the framework of the game up and running. Borderlands 2 came out with tons of upgrades, a way better story, far more playable content, larger areas to explore, and much, much more loot. The huge amount of work that needed to be done to make Borderlands 2 was heavily cut down by the fact that they already had an engine on their hands with code that was proven to work. [b]Exhibit B: Rage by id Software[/b] Rage had a 7 year development cycle. SEVEN YEARS! That insane. But go play it. It has some of the most visually appealing textures and graphics of any Xbox 360 game that I have ever played, in my humble opinion. Once again, the bulk of the development cycle was eaten up by building a new engine from the ground up. It was short. That's the only negative thing I can say about Rage. It didn't take nearly as long to make Wolfenstein because they used the same engine. So what am I getting at? 1) Bungie has never made a loot based game before, but, unlike my last experience with a developer and patch times, they are on the ball. I had to wait 8 months for DICE to fix Dawnbreaker on the Xbox 360. That map crashed 100% of the time for, according to research done by a forum user on Battlelog by collecting Battle Reports, at least 60% of Xbox 360 players. Eight months it took them. Bungie is trying to work out the kinks in the loot system after only 3 weeks. It could be SO much worse. 2) I guarantee that the bulk of Bungie's time and money during the development cycle was spent creating an engine from scratch and building a sophisticated server system. It takes expertise and technical knowledge that the average gamer can't even begin to understand to accomplish stuff like this. I'm a Video Game Design major and I will only ever scratch the surface of all the technical aspects of creating a game from scratch throughout the course of my degree. 3) Bitching, without context or constructive things to say, accomplishes nothing. How can anyone expect them to know what to fix if one is spewing insults and not being specific enough? We, as a community, need to remember that there is no shortage of liars and manipulators on the internet. One has to look at everything without preconceived notions, lest you convince yourself that either someone else's opinion or outright lies are 100% fact. 4) (EDIT: I consider this one a side point, not something to especially focus on right now.) Destiny 2, based on other industry examples, has the potential to be one seriously kickass game. The engine is there, the datacenter has been built, and the bulk of the connection errors will have been largely ironed out. They can focus on building levels, story, and gameplay without having to spend anywhere near as much time and money on infrastructure and "from scratch" development. 5) Other games, with far less potential than this one I might add, have turned out pretty good with the addition of some extra content. See Exhibit A: Vanilla Borderlands 1 was good but it feels like only half the experience without the DLC. Destiny, by its' very nature, is setup to mature into something uniquely awesome. When you bought the game, you weren't simply buying a game, you were purchasing a ticket on a journey, one that we have only taken the first steps on. Is this game lacking in content? Yes, IMO. Were we shown things that didn't make the cut in the final release? Absolutely. NOTE: Marketing, by its' very nature attempts to convince people to buy something. When was the last time you bought a hamburger that looked like the one on the board at Burger King? Is it still fun as hell? Hell yes. Grab some friends and kick some ass. The most fun I have ever had on this game was yesterday. My friend and I two-manned some difficult content that I hadn't tried yet like the Nightfall strike and were rewarded with some badass guns and flaming helmets, not to mention extra XP gains and the other cool items we picked up along the way. To summarize, this game has flaws. Everyone can see that. However, no matter how bad those flaws might be, [b]this isn't over[/b]. On the contrary, with our help and Bungie's commitment to their product, this has only just begun. To quote something my father once told me, "If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem". I know this is long. Thanks for hanging in there. Now, on to the phase where I get ripped apart for my beliefs and way of thinking. TL;DR - Go away. Just kidding. Seriously though, read this. I'd like to know what you think. EDIT: I decided to add this reply that I posted to someone in this thread who is still focused on the negative. This about sums up my attitude towards the game and the forums right now. [quote]Look man. I get what you are saying, but everyone else is saying the same stuff in every other thread. [b]We get it. You aren't happy. Bungie gets it too. Enough already. [/b] This is their first foray into this type of game. Cut them a little slack and give them more than 3 weeks to figure it out. When a game like this goes live from a dev that has never done it before, a million things can become apparent that aren't when the game is in development.[/quote]