Deej, You know my methods; employ them. I'm kicking this filthy habit until your teams can be convinced to quit stomping all over the product. I've got better things to do with my gaming hours (and writing hours) than to run widdershins around the Cosmodrome, opening loot caches that the Fallen don't even bother to protect, in hopes that something fun and not-stupid will appear. Better things such as? [spoiler][i]Kingdoms of Amalur.[/i] The first 60 minutes of that game literally (not figuratively) have more narrative depth to them than the entirety of my 120+ hours in Destiny. I'll go play that for a few weeks/months instead. It's just as pretty as Destiny, in its own way, and the mechanical and conceptual depth of KoA puts the Big D to shame. Plus, I can make my loot. [i] I just love loot, don't you?[/spoiler] [/i]That's right, DeeJ; [i]Fanboy Down[/i]. I finally took the Destiny disc out of my console, midway through leveling a second titan to 29. You've had my hardware tied up for over a month, on the strength of the gunplay, Titan mobility, visuals, and the soundtrack. And the hope that you'd make it grand at some point. I've had it with your toy. Why give up on your pretty little grind-by-design crackpipe of a product now? Because grinding another toon up to the cap is obligatory tedium, the servers are full of farm animals, and playing any more of it at this point makes no sense. The story missions aren't worth rehashing again even if there [i]were[/i] appropriate activity rewards for doing them, the crucible is unrewarding both materially and emotionally, the [url=http://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/76847338]VoG is a broken one-armed bandit[/url], and strikes are full of quitters because of your jacked up bounties. Patrol, the only thing I really enjoyed, has been utterly ignored since release, aside from depopulating it as a bandaid for the RNG loot fiasco, when you could have increased the replay value there exponentially with those same simple RNG-based tactics that your dev team seems to have such a hardon for. So much potential, so totally squandered. Just wait until the kids realize engram drops are more likely when you kill more than one critter with a single attack...all the caves are loot caves now...yay loot! Nothing gets harder, or changes, gains complexity, or reacts to our "discoveries" and "adventures". The damned walkers don't even have randomly shielded legs and spawn as ultras. Why would they, right? [b]They never walk anywhere, but everybody would laugh if you called them "Devil Sitters".[/b] There's no patrol hard mode, because easy mode is the same no matter how "powerful" you get. We stole the sum total of an alien races knowledge and got...well nothing. Then we looted the Archive; nadda. Discovered an ancient AI that runs planetary defense networks and quotes Madame Blavatksy... [i]Yeah, nice work kid, here's another gun.[/i] TDB is coming out soon, and you guys have "repackaged" the story into the exotic bounty format. Whatever that actually means, it doesn't sound like an improvement. It sounds like another incoherent stream of disjointed vignettes that bear no relation to the world in which our characters are supposed to be acting; much like the first 20 missions turned out to be. It sounds like you folks took our criticism of the story and treated it as criticism of your delivery technique. It sounds like (oh, how I hope I'm wrong about this) another opportunity to make PvE focused players muck around in your precious Crucible in order to make it take longer for them get where they (think they) want to be. Just so there's no confusion here: Delivery is a [b]tiny[/b] part of the problem. Cutscenes are fine, voiceover in loading screens and mid-action are also fine. We're rarely critiquing delivery methods. We're critiquing [b]substance[/b]. The story, such as it is, is contradictory, banal, and illogical. I'm not sure how or why your teams managed to make something so short and stupid-simple fit the action around it so poorly, and failed to connect it to the rest of the game so utterly. It doesn't fit the core game mechanics that you guys built to go along with it; it doesn't even stand on its own well enough to be read [i]with feeling[/i] by professional actors. In a single word, it's [b]amateurish[/b]. I say this as an amateur writer: I would be embarrassed to release the story your company tacked onto this game under my name. Did the writers even play the missions they were writing dialog for? Because...if they did, then I may finally have seen evidence on which one could build a decent argument against recreational marijuana; One mission does not flow to the next, in any sense other than the temporal. There is no reason FOR any of it to happen the way it happens, there are no motivations, no reason to care, no consequences for success or failure. But you know what the worst part is, for me? Worse than illogic, worse than simplistic after-school-special dialog, worse than a story with a bad beginning that lowers the bar with every chapter? Worse than a plot so awful that it appears to have required more effort to make it suck this comprehensively than it would have taken to write one that made sense? "Winning" doesn't [i]matter[/i]. Clear the Black Garden...yay. Kill Sepiks Prime...yay. Take territory for Dead Obit...yay. Nothing happens. The sense of progress is painfully artificial, and temporary. No territory is taken. No character is developed. No legends are made. No changes are wrought. No City is saved. [i]No Darkness was harmed in the making of this film.[/i] You've got the Strangers Rifle, but she has to leave in the middle of the party! Now what? She's off to fight Darth Vader with a Khvostov while I fight Sepiks Prime for the ninetieth time. Do it [i]again[/i]? For heavens sake man, [i]WHY BOTHER?[/i] It didn't change anything, we didn't learn anything, we didn't get any more powerful, we didn't save anything, the children are still frightened anyway, and the City still doesn't even believe we exist. That's what killed it for me in the end. I know there are some people there in the building with you who understand this already. Some people who care about stories more than they care about analytics, accounting, and time-to-kill. I hope you're one of them. I hope you make friends with the people that will be hired to pull this tragically bad narrative off the cutting room floor and make something beautiful out of it, and I hope they're bright young things with excellent skin and fantastic imaginations. I hope you fight for them and support them in those team meetings when they push for something more substantial than ket vectors and cryptic pronoun-sauce. Most of all, I hope they get a chance to tell a story that makes some -blam!-ing sense next time. I hope they get a recording budget and they can wipe the slate clean and rewrite those first 20 missions the way they should have been written in the first place. When the next hatchet man from accounting comes looking for somewhere inconsequential to prune the Bungie tree, and says that no one in the modern gaming market [i]really cares[/i] about [i]why[/i] we're murdering the same alien for the 32.767th time, I hope they have the integrity to gather up their scripts, form ranks, and collectively spit in his coffee while telling him to -blam!- off down the way towards the foosball tables. [b]Because it isn't science fiction when the fiction is missing. Gamifying the act of repeatedly shooting things in the face may be well trodden ground in a culture that uses violence as coin of the realm, but when there's no story to tell, no world to protect, no point to the endless orgy of death other than [i]"give me your purse, (alien) bitch"[/i], it's a pretty shitty way to make a living. It's quite fitting that the only artist in the Destiny universe is an old lady who can't remember that she's actually supposed to be [i]selling paint[/i].[/b] Here's your personal actionable points, DeeJ: Stand up for the new writers, put your foot down for the fans of the engine that hated the plot, don't let bar charts take the field in team meetings. Never forget story; "Why We Fight" needs to be the most compelling part of any work of conflict-entertainment that you expect to last longer than fifteen minutes, let alone for years of repeat business. Only Bungie could have made the engine and gussied it up the way you did...but my ten year old can pick apart the plot. Stand up for the people who can fix that. Stand up to people who think that a player who spends 100+ hours grinding mats to hit the endgame isn't worth listening to because they played on past some arbitrary limit and magically became your toadies instead of customers who have opinions that carry weight...[b][i]because you don't have a franchise if we don't care enough to hit the 100 hour mark and look forward to hitting 500.[/i][/b] Anyway, that's me, off to Amalur (and buying their DLC instead). I'll probably come back after the next update to see what you've convinced the dev team to care about. If the patch notes are incredibly informative and inspiring, I may even log in. For the forum folks reading this: Don't everybody rush to tell me how little I'll be missed over the next few weeks as I [i]don't[/i] grind out upgrade mats to improve guns that have irrelevant stats so that I can kill things that all take equalized damage anyway. I'm well aware of how quickly special snowflakes melt around here. This letter isn't really for you anyway. /puddle EDIT: Also, I like tacos.