Why the -blam!- do you guys even care?

With the recent court records from the O'Donnell suit and the Kotaku article using anonymous interviews from current and former Bungie employees there is little doubt that everything up to this point has been the result of an executive hack job by Bungie. Activision wanted a Teen rating to broaden sales, Bungie hacked up and dumbed down the original story to get it. This soulless pile of scraps is what remains. The Taken King was only marginally better but still simply provided narrative for the specific missions and very little to the overall direction of the story itself. I've been playing this game, a lot. It's fun. But it can't compete with a fun game that also has a cohesive narrative with solid character development. The winter game releases are going to draw a lot of players from Destiny. Nothing will kill this huge crack rock however, it's already created gambling addictions in too many tweens.

I will agree that vanilla, even with the two expansions, felt hollow in terms of plot and features. HoW gave us a lot of quality of life improvements and TTK addressed numerous concerns that players had I year one. But even now, the game is floating in a weird place where it is lacking features from both MMOs and FPS games, while it tries to be both. The Taken King was originally supposed to be in the vanilla game, but it was "cut" prior to the dreadnought even being developed. Going on the assumed reliability of the Kotaku article, there was a complete story arc and Destiny would have played out like any other FPS game. Just a linear story with mission after mission taking you through the base plot in 4-6 hours. One thing that people seem to fail to understand is what "cut" actually means. In some cases, things are cut during the initial brainstorming, some things are cut during/after story boarding, somethings are cut after some actual development and some things are cut after they are almost done. Destiny was a mixture of those. The locations in TDB and some in HoW were complete, but were never populated with enemies and lacked scripted encounters. Level design is a large part of building a game, but just because a small area inside King's Watch (or other areas) was completed, doesn't mean it was ready for players. In the case of YouTubers like Bdobbins, he would have us believe that the game was 100% finished in 2013, the dreadnought has been locked away this whole time and Bungie has done nothing more than slowly feed us parts of a long completed game, which just isn't the case at all. With data mining, we were able to see a lot of what the original destiny was going to include. There were additional factions, missions involving the Awoken which were similar to what we got in HoW, some of the TDB content and more that we never saw or even glitched into. The best evidence that anyone has is that data mined information. Those areas were glitched into and they were bare and unfinished. It's pretty clear that the level design was finished for the most part and that the basic concepts and some faction weapons were all in the game but cut from the final version and left as placeholders. This isn't to say that there wasn't a huge setback with the redirection of the game. Tossing a story that was already being worked into the game was a big hurdle to throw into a game that was nearing completion. Again, going by the Kotaku article, they were forced to take existing content that was originally designed as part of the original story and reconnect the dots to make it cohesive, while allowing the players more choice. Essentially we still had a new main story revolving around portions of the old story. Many missions were cut (both finished and unfinished) and other missions were reworked into side quests. The question still remains, how bad was the supercut that Jones and the rest of the higher ups decided to axe the whole thing. I mean, it sounded like a weird mix of Oblivion and Star Wars with a bit of Halo for good measure. At least the Oblivion part is something you can still "feel" as you play the game, just call the traveler the "Tet." Perhaps that may have been part of why they scrapped the story, as to avoid glaring similarities between Destiny and a movie coming out that same year. You mentioned the DLC being already on the disc. That is another long running assumption by the community. Yes, a lot of the data from the scrapped 2013 version of the game was still on the disc. This included those areas people were able to glitch into. The Crota's End raid, PoE and the Dreadnought and all the revamped gear, cut scenes and voice overs were absolutely not in the game on September 9th. We got a 2.4GB download a week before TDB which included the new content and additional world events (blades of Crota). We got similar large downloads before HoW and TTK. So we have absolutely gotten more than what was "on the disc." Another thing people seem to forget is that the 2012 PowerPoint slide already showed that TTK was set for a 2015 release. So it makes me wonder if they didn't shut down the original story and push the release back long before they rejected the Staten's supercut. If that's the case, there may have been more turmoil at Bungie than anyone really knows about outside the company. I can imagine Staten running around using his clout to keep his vision alive long after it was already cancelled. The supercut may have been a last ditch effort to persuade the execs to stick with the original story. If that's the case... We may have two (halo) "founders" as the root cause of Destiny's woes. While Jones was pushing for a more open world shooter type of game, Marty and Joe wanted another Halo-like FPS game with some kind of shoehorned MMO-like endgame (that was developed by Luke Smith). Granted, that theory is just as far out as any of them, but given all the bad blood floating around, it wouldn't surprise me if there was an internal power struggle over which way the game went. Bungie has also straight up admitted over the past year that they didn't know what they were doing when it came to the RPG side of things. Despite being across the corporate aisle from Blizzard, they failed to get/heed advice that would have saved Destiny from many of it's foibles. If you want to get into a larger tinfoil hat conspiracy. Imagine for a moment if you will, that Activision kept preventing Bungie from making a product that would directly compete with CoD or WoW, as both are a significant cash cow for them. That would explain a lack of focus on competitive multiplayer and keeping a bare bones approach to the "PVE" side of the game. That said, Destiny is a very nice window dressing and functions as a casual MOFPSRPG (note: not massive). Looking at it from that front, over the past year, we've been paying somewhere around $7/mo for an MMO-lite experience on a console. That's not bad really, when you consider Final Fantasy is still $15/mo and ESO basically still has a sub fee if you want the most out of the game. Granted, both of those games are proper MMOs, so they should cost more. But is Destiny worth a little less than half of either of those? I think so, but that's just me. On your edits. Bdobbins isn't lying per se, but he continues to create the same video over and over again with updated information. That information being bits and pieces of things that are often pretty thin conclusions. He also adamantly affirms that we are being served the worst form of cut content, which simply isn't true. That guy needs to go try out Skylanders or that Disney game before he starts talking about hardcore scams. TTK is the best thing that has happened to Destiny so far. It's not perfect, but it's such a huge step in the right direction. The fact that he and other negatively focused youtubers are calling TTK a rip-off is mind boggling. For us paid beta testers of year one, sure it's iffy. But if you were new to Destiny with TTK, the $60 price tag for Vanilla, TDB, HoW and TTK is an outright bargain. Destiny 2 needs to make some major headway on several fronts. The Kotaku article did mention one terrible thing, the development tools. If they had to recompile after moving an object in game, then that would seriously hamper level development. I can only hope that the scripting tools are better than the level design tools... But if they don't improve the tools and/or the engine, we will be looking at another game with small zones and weird networking. Edit: typos (there's probably still plenty, wrote this on my phone amid distractions)

I won't defend Bungie for cutting content, but there comes a time when people need to get over it and move on. Bungie doesn't need to "admit" to anything when most of the community knows and doesn't really care. Most people want them to admit it for some type of closure or to be able to say "I told ya so!" Like I said, I don't like the idea of cut content... And I won't defend Bungie for doing it... However, I have 500+ hours in this game, I think, so I got my money's worth. Only a few other games have made me want to spend that much time on them... So I've had had my fun and can't complain.

During years of development issues arise, whether it's hardware limitations, time limitations, loss of employees, lack of resources, the nature of spaghetti coding,the list keeps going. Not to mention hard deadlines and having pressure to hit that date no matter what it takes. Sometimes things are left behind on the cutting room floor. We used to have to wait for a sequel to get this content, but now with technology where it's at, we can have it added to a seemingly finished product. This seems like a win for everyone, but there will always be those people who feel that they deserved more. If this is your stance then my advice to you is to wait on purchasing a game from now on. They will always be adding things through DLC and if you wait you can get the entire experience for one price. Being an early adopter will always have this same outcome. So the question is: Do you want to a part of an evolving series, or just wait until it's been fleshed out completely and enjoy it then? There is no right or wrong answer. The choice is yours, and yours alone, but stamping your feet around like you know everything about the process that brought the game to light is just plain silly. I hope you find something you enjoy rather than hanging out in a community for a game you seem not enjoy.