Bungie lays off 220 people, will set up spin-off studio

SSTF@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 135 points –
Bungie lays off 220 people, will set up spin-off studio within Son
wolfsgamingblog.com
23

Fuck bungie. I paid for destiny 2 and the first dlc or so, and they literally removed that content and didnt compensate anyone for it. If you're okay with behavior like that, fuck you too. They're forever anathema to me.

I do not understand why anyone bought Destiny 2, The first game was so uneven and hard to define, was it a MMO or a loot shooter or what, and then they came out with another game without fixing the first one, why would you expect it to be any better?

My general rule of thumb when it comes to this is that if they say "due to rising costs" within the first few sentences it usually means "not enough money for the important people."

I've seen indie devs make more functional and graphically intensive games on a shoe string budget. And then go around and sell it for less than $60.

Plenty of amazing small studios make great games for a budget of a couple packs of mtn dew and some cheese whiz crackers

I think it would be easier for indie devs to keep cost down. They have fewer devs and artists on payroll. The issue with triple A games is that they're super expensive to produce, and small teams can output excellent work as well.

Let's be real though, they are only so expensive to produce because they have the notion that bigger and more expensive means better. Just look at what happened with Starfield. You can't tell me that game wouldn't be immensely better if there were just like 8 or even less planets. You don't need to make things as massive and expensive as possible to make a successful game. You just need to have a good idea with a good execution. I'll play a game like Deep Rock Galactic or RimWorld over and over again, but I got bored of Destiny within a year or so. Heck, I've probably put more hours into the Halo games over my life than I ever will in Destiny.

I keep thinking people are going to make my dream game and then they make it too big and then it doesn't work.

I just want a space game set in a single solar system planets with multiple locations that I can fly around do stuff in. Basically just make the Expanse into game.

But they are always trying to make it the whole sodding universe, and then inevitably say you have FTL, because otherwise it would be boring, and then it turns out that it's just a bunch of cutscenes playing between various levels and it isn't a whole cohesive environment at all.

Even Elite Dangerous is guilty of this, although they are much better at hiding it.

Wow. We’ve come full circle. Wouldn’t it be ironic if Marathon is not released for the Mac.

e: I think it was about 30 years ago when I first played Marathon on an Apple Macintosh Performa 450.

Maybe about 25ish years since I watched Bungie demo the “Mac” game called Halo with Steve Jobs.

Whatever they're making now isn't even Marathon. Some random game with the same name and a few references, but its a crappy live service looter shooter like Tarkov or whatever. I love Marathon, but this imposter deserves a fat L.

Imagine having that entire lore to work with and you make a shitty “The Finals” with it.

Bungie lost their way the moment Microsoft pulled gaming away from Mac.

Nah, the Bungie developed Halo games were great. Literally ruled the world. Bungie lost their way when they started mistreating their own major employees (the reason the number 7 is so prevalent in Bungie stuff). Poisoned the watering hole.

Joe Staten wrote out this whole world and plan for Destiny 1 and then Jason Jones scrapped it and Frankensteined it with his friends fantasy thing. And he locked Joe Staten out of the conversations about Destiny 1 after that. Joe Staten had written the Dreadnaught (which ended up in the Taken King expansion) as the end game area of the base game. That and what they did to Marty, you don't do that without some serious internal problems.

And that all happened under Microsoft?

No, that happened under Activision, once Destiny moved beyond just simple story beats and started getting into a more detailed development cycle.

The finals isn’t even a looter shooter though, it’s an arena shooter.

The finals is pretty damn fun though I will say.

I’ll also say I wanted marathon to work, any good competition to tarkov is welcome because I’m not fucking supporting Nikita and his idiotic practices anymore. He got EOD money from me in 2016/17, hope he made good use of it

The finals is pretty damn fun though I will say.

the finals is AMAZING. I picked it back up this season, every complaint I had with the beta and first season was fixed. it's just so damn fun to play with friends, I can't praise it enough

There are few things more fun than launching the acetylene tanks at everything and everyone at every opportunity

They aren't making a shitty finals. Last I heard they originally wanted to make a tarkov style extraction shooter, but when they got Tarkov creators to play it and call it shit they pivoted into some kind of a tarkov/overwatch mix of hero based extraction shooter or something like that.

That's when I stopped paying attention as it's most likely in development hell.

Hey so our main studio is floundering, lets make another one!

Know a guy who is a project manager at bungie. Seems to be constantly doing everything but actually working. Highly paid and when I ask him what he does, he can’t quantify his work. Can’t seem to figure out why their games are always coming out shit nowadays……/s

Sounds like a lot of corporate project managers

I was in a meeting yesterday where one of our corporate managers admitted he doesn't actually know what his job is supposed to be.

But realistically is that his fault, or the companies?

Understandable. They haven't made a good game since Halo Reach.

Haven't they ONLY made Destiny since Reach?