The game’s direction has been the most consistent in history these last three years. But the tuning of Lightfall was both a game design and a public relations mistake. Without going into too much detail, Bungie (every once in a while) loses sight of the game’s core identity and the power-fantasy (core experience) it is built around. When this happens Bungie goes off on a tangent. Stops paying attention to what the average player wants from the game…and the winds up doing something foolish. Because they start to see the game as their creative playground, rather than entertainment for their customers. I call these times, “We’re Bungie And We Know Best!” Lightfall was one of these ego-driven mis-steps. Fortunately, these miscues seem to be occurring less often, and Bungie seems to admit to them and walk them back faster than in years past. What was refreshing to see was—-given all the negative feedback about how Lightfall felt to play—-Bungie made no effort to defend it. They just accepted the feedback at face value and quickly started getting rid of the disliked changes. Four years ago? That Bungie would have released a TWAB where the devs came out and tried to defend the changes, and explained how they were an important part of their “design philosophy”. In one TWAB, they actually renamed an in-game object as if we only objected to what was being done with it because we somehow didn’t understand it. We understood it just fine. We didn’t like it because it was breaking the game, and making it unenjoyable to play. Hopefully those days at Bungie are gone for good.