What's your opinion on Bungie removing content?

It's a strange concept, it gives the overall impression there is a high water mark to what Bungie can support effectively, which is something I'd be likely to remember in future games decisions when purchasing from them. Not a quality of content decision, but just pure support of already created assets.

I suspect it also has much to do with artificially creating freshness and scarcity within the ecosystem they control. To me this is the same argument made against companies that create DLC before the release of the game and hold it back to sell it later but in reverse.

Both options are real bad looks. I'm sure they have some metrics that led them to this conclusion, possibly also that players aren't engaging with certain content on a daily rate? As someone who enjoyed the single player campaign more than any other part of the game, and felt like the incessant reuse of maps was egregious but necessary evil, it paints a bleak picture on what/who Bungie is prioritizing.

As someone who has been pretty into MMOs in the past, I find this excuse to be laughable. The fact that the "vault" stuff will include expansion content that people paid for is frankly insulting.

Also what about D2s process makes this such a dire problem? I understand it isn’t really an MMO so the comparison only goes so far but this not a problem any of the big MMOs ever have.

I wouldn't be surprised if EU consumers will be entitled to a refund for the content purchased that they are removing & Aussie consumers almost certainly would.

I expect this is going to backfire legally & financially for them in some territories.

I honestly can see both sides here but as someone who actually loves the lore of World of Warcraft and the feel of it being an actual world that is evolving – this is everything I ever hoped for. This made me want to play Destiny 2. In the long run I really do believe that this will make the game better in anyway. I rather run around in a world that feels alive and true to how the story is shaping up then have parts of the game that never gets visited and just feels totally out of place.

You've got a studio who, by their own admission even, have failed to keep seasonal content entertaining or relevant for the long periods in between these fall expansion releases. It was an issue with their "DLC model" in year one, was an issue with at least some of the seasons last year, and again through most of this year.

Now these same people are going to take away content, claim it's going to get somehow revised behind the scenes for later unvaulting... AND somehow make seasons better at the same time?

They're adding more work for themselves, when they were already failing to manage at the level they've been at, while also limiting what's available to the players. I honestly can't see how that's going to work out for them.

It still rubs me somewhat the wrong way that they're looking at their stats to figure out what people like and dislike. Perhaps it makes sense for Destiny where the story is not the main reason why people play it , but i still feel like there are loads of games where i spend 70% of my time in the first few big environments , but the ending or a few particular quests are what sticks with me, even if it only takes an hour or two to get through that stuff. Stats-wise, you might not realize that i enjoyed those 2 hours way more than the first 10 hours i spent in the initial area's.

Like i imagine if you took a snapshot of Diablo 2 a year after release, you'd still find 60% of the playerbase hanging around in the first 2 acts. Does that indicate that those 2 area's contain the most fun content or is it just the logical result of how people flow through a game?

Destiny always came off as a disjointed experience, so sure, why not? I can't see this as anything other than a positive change.

I just want to play relevant content. If cycling out older content is what needs to happen then so be it.

Destiny 2 has finally lost me. I've played hundreds and hundreds of hours of Destiny 2 and almost as much of original Destiny, but the last two seasons passes are the first dlc content I haven't purchased.

I'll probably sound like a broken record for everyone else that's fallen off the game, but I'm just tired of doing the same thing over and over again. I feel the game really neutered itself from the start. The games limited scope of customization mainly from subclasses, but also armor and even weapons to some point along with doing mostly the same activities just makes it feel boring now and that's a killer for me. I honestly feel they do need to do a Destiny 3 so things can actually feel fresh, but I just don't think they can do that in 2 anymore. Also if you leave for an extended time then try to come back the game seems to make it hard to fit back in.

Then going from big dlcs, to sessions, throw in battle passes, honestly just the flow of content has been kinda all over and I wish it was more consistent. And now I've heard they are ditching skill based match making for PvP which I find the stupidest thing, but the majority of people that complain about that are really good players who are angry they can't stomp more often, but man I know people get really testy about skill based matching making.

Lastly just a stupid nitpick, but god the freaking naming of resources and upgrade materials has just gotten so up it's own but I feel with how dramatic they try to make them all sound, but that's just a dumb thing that annoys me.

Im basically in the same boat as a lot of people, where i like the way the game plays, and i like the art style, but everything else in Destiny has been a very mixed bag of things that i hate that i was willing to put up with. And one of the main problems i had was that you basically needed the newest expansion for anything to be relevant in the game. And i thought they where working on fixing that when they made the base game and two expansions F2P and where selling new DLC as standalone, only to rip all the base game/F2P content out leaving basically the paid content, so same old shit.

I was waiting for a sale and some free time to pick up the expansions, but given the fact that basically everything i had already purchased is being taken away im sure as hell not going to toss any more money at this game. Bungie has always taken one step forward, two steps back when it comes to changes to Destiny in my book. I might hop on for a little bit and play with some Giant Bomb duders, but after they do this im probably uninstalling this game and walking away for good. Ill just hop on any of the other fairly great shooters out there with less baggage. Which is a shame because there was something about Destiny i really enjoyed, its just not worth the hassle and money Bungie are asking.

People just don't understand and just want another "number" on the box (Like they said). I understand this idea and support it. Some people just like seeing the next "numbered" game.

Bungie needs to decide who they're making the game for. There are people who have 5000+ hours who never quit playing, people who played a lot but quit along the way, and new people. You can't make a game for everyone, and when you try to, you just end up pissing everyone off.

A sidebar example:

Was thinking of World of Warcraft as an example of content increasing in scope and size, but another thought struck at the same time:

Blizzard does not update their old content to any real degree as I can recall. A vast swath of it is left to wither away in historical record as something nobody bothers with anymore. When a new expansion hits, "the Expansion Formerly Known as Current" is almost completely abandoned. So their issue isn't keeping a growing amount of content up-to-date, because they simply leave it behind.

We aren't really missing the content from Vanilla Destiny 2. I understand why they need to gut it. I wish they would build on top of it. Destiny 2 suffered from being as wide as an ocean, but deep as a puddle. Why build all these beautiful set pieces and worlds without doing anything to it? Why not have some story justification that the Leviathan tried to swallow all these planets and blew up because of it? And then have the Sundial reintroduce the Leviathan raids and raid lairs.

Bungie needs to have fun blowing up their worlds. If they can reintroduce Destiny 1 content, they can surely be creative and blow up Destiny 2 content as well.

At the end of the day, I'm not gonna miss Mercury being absolutely subpar. Titan was a bummer too. Mars had some fun Escalation Protocol stuff, but the story missions were already gutted. If they are going to sunset weapons then there isn't really a need to grind out for the Ikelo Shotgun on Mars.

I think a lot of the people who are against this are PC players on SSD's who just don't understand how awful the growth of Destiny 2 has been on Console players, especially those on PS4 which represents the largest group of the Destiny playerbase. Every patch on PS4 takes no joke hours to copy (I can download 4-5 full 30-50 GB games before a Destiny 2 patch loads). You will spend roughly 5 minutes just to get the game to load to the character selection screeen. It even takes 20-30 seconds for your menu items to populate now, and you can wait over a minute for a Crucible match to even try to find other people (and that's with removed SBMM now). It's kind of ballooned into a really awful experience just to play now. So for me, the removal of content is a great thing in that regard.

I do however wish Bungie would have done a better job explaining what is and isn't a part of the new DCV changes. The mention of Leviathan leaving seems strange, and also the announcement that only 3 Raids will exist, 1 of which will be the new Raid. The reason it's confusing to me is because they are keeping Nessus, which is the location for the Leviathan ship. My thought about keeping EDZ and Nessus, is that they cannot fully remove D2's base campaign, especially since that is how you unlock classes, it just wouldn't work. This means they are likely just cutting out certain story missions, and leaving much of what happens in the EDZ/Nessus parts of the story in. With the Cosmodrome D1 mission already being the start for New Light players, they will expand on the intro for New Light players and likely merge that into the new D2 base story. So as much as it sucks for players who purchased D2 almost 3 years ago, that content is already now free, and that is the content that is being removed and adjusted. I don't really think anyone will be sad to see the removal of the planets Titan, Io, Mercury, and Mars, or the removal of the Curse & Warmind stories. What will be missed is the Leviathan, Eater of Worlds, Spire of Stars, Scourge of the Past, Crown of Sorrows, and 7/17 Strikes (one of which I still haven't played since it just launched with Shadowkeep, Festering Core). And the players most impacted by this will be the New Light playerbase, for whom it doesn't seem like much of the game will be left to play. This would lead me to conclude that it's extremely likely that all Forsaken content will be added to New Light for free upon the release of Beyond Light. Which would setup a pretty easy to understand precedent for how/when content will go to New Light players, which is exactly 2 years after release. So my best advice for now for people who want to jump into Destiny, is to not purchase Forsaken anymore.

This idea that content will only live on in Destiny for 3 years seems very plausible to me, whereby after that 3 years, 1 of which is free to everyone, it goes into the DCV. If that is how they plan on Destiny 2 going forward, I don't know that this is all that big of an issue as long as they are able to recreate content from the DCV as New Light free to play content, very likely to bolster their lackluster free seasonal events. I really hope they don't try to resale DCV content, as that is really messed up, but all indications as far as I can tell are to use the DCV to make it easier to create free pipeline content, which I'm all for. I honestly think this is another one of those situations where Bungie has good intentions, and absolutely terrible messaging about those intentions.

I paid AUS$99 for Forsaken, Shadowkeep and 4 season passes (3 and half really) in Nov 2019. I have played for 1135 hours as of the 14th of June and will play for probably another 500 hours before I have to put any more money into the game (Sep 2020). So I have no complaints as to whether I have got my monies worth out of the game, it speaks for itself. I am also a member of a clan and play with a friend too.

Nearly everything everyone says has some validity to it :)) The game is huge, Bungie have had to make some decisions, these decisions based on what people "actually" play the game for, will be considered awful and divisive by some and hailed or whatever by others. Myself I think if they take content out and improve it and then cycle it back in and then cycle other content out and improve it, I will be happy with Bungie's decisions.

I will comment further on this in late September 2020. Hopefully it will be all good :)

This game has become a disjointed mess. I hadn't played it in about a year (a few months after Forsaken). I loaded it up recently and with the systems on top of systems I felt like I was just doing homework, which is why I stopped playing the game in the first place. I went a head and just uninstalled it, gotta find something else for my PVP FPS fix though.

After thinking about it for a week: This still doesn't look good on paper, but I think I have an understanding of why this is a thing.

I'll give props to Bungie for being ambitious and seemingly trying to turn Destiny 2 into what their initial concepts were with the original Destiny, in that they trying to make it into a big long-form project or platform of which they can build upon and support for the ten years that they planned to run with Destiny as a brand. But it seems like they're biting off more than they can chew, because of how the game has ballooned in size, splitting off from Activision, trying to keep all four platforms up to date, and managing in influx of people who got in when the base game went free to play.

So, the way I see it, they've kinda put themselves in a difficult place where rotating paid content is their best solution at the moment, which is understandable if you look at the situation in most of it's entirety. But it's going to be one of those things that has to be executed with the most amount of precision and care so that those who play the game religiously don't feel taken advantage of. I'd personally be okay with them swapping expansions on a time table that's measured in weeks, not months or "seasons". That'll keep me caring about the game at the end of the day.

For anyone that has already exhausted those old destinations by playing each of them for hundreds of hours, I can understand that this isn't a big deal. You're tired of those locations and don't really mind them going away so that you don't need to grind there anymore. I understand that perspective.

For more casual players, and perhaps for those that used to believe in Bungie's promises of them building a platform out of this game that was a persistent universe, these actions feel a bit like a betrayal.

I abolutely agree that many of those old launch period D2 destinations already felt wafer-thin in terms of content when they were new, and Bungie has failed spectacularly to flesh them out in meaningful ways - instead just opting for adding new destinations in each of the expansions. I'd argue that in a game that such a large emphasis on grinding, a larger variety of locations is better than less.

This prompts a much larger discussion on what the nature of 'games as a service' is and what expectations players of such games should have. If I purchase a 'live service' game at launch (before it goes F2P), am I in the wrong to expect to have access to all of the game's content for the life of the game? Or should there be an understanding that the developer could pull some of that stuff away at any time, under the guise of "this is getting too hard for us to maintain" or something similar?

Just caught up to the episode of The Giant Bombcast where they bring this up. I'm a pretty long term vet of the Destiny franchise and I agree with people that say it's both reasonable and totally f'ed up. Wouldn't want to make this decision myself that's for sure. Then I saw this...

@jeff

...somebody out there recreated Mars via Garry's Mod so at least our head duder can shoot bicycle cannons while running around reminiscing!

I know this is a fairly old thread, but it just occurred to me they were pitching the first Destiny as a "ten year game," and they had to leave it behind after like, three years because the engine was so clunky and ill-suited to their plans. So they made a new engine, which has now essentially run into the same problem in a different form.

For people planning ten years ahead, they're terrible at planning ahead.

I'd like to see this problem addressed in a way that doesn't abandon large swaths of the story. Perhaps some option to download and play old campaign content in a standalone way-- even if it's only the story missions sequestered from the core progression-- then delete it when you're done. Maybe you use predetermined "loaner" equipment and get a predetermined reward at the end, to reduce the amount of retroactive balancing that needs to be done.

Hell, maybe it even downloads and launches legacy campaigns as a separate "game," removed from the live service entirely. In that way, they could bring even Destiny 1 story content forward in an archival capacity. Not that it was all that great, but... I would argue it deserves to exist.

Obviously, it all goes well beyond Destiny.

Disturbingly, from video and music streaming to games, the service-based world of entertainment seems to be becoming as much about denying you access to things as it is allowing access to them. This will massively accelerate the more that physical alternatives are removed from the landscape.

In a rational society with rational IP laws, all media of all types would be archived by the government and made freely available once it is no longer provided by the company that made it, or enough years have passed (which is to say, like, five).

We thought the internet would make everything available to everyone, forever. Instead, I'm beginning to feel like large swaths of our cultural output are going end up missing from history.

People will ask, "what was it like for people living in the stupidest time in history?" and historians will be like "we don't know."

Here i thought this game cant get any worse and the just... Never imagined ever that the game would devolve to such a state. I'm really struggling to find the words... At least destiny 2 carries make it bearable. I suggest you do the same, if anyone's interested, I'll drop link

I'm interested in seeing if they can do this well. I haven't really played Destiny 2 since Curse of Osiris -- I had to stop playing video games around that time (adding a child to your family will do that) and, since then, every time I try to jump back in, I get intimidated by all the changes, by both scope and scale.

I'm curious as to whether the content removal makes me more likely to play ("Oh hey, this is actually something I can deal with without having to start over again") or less likely to play ("Oh hey, the few familiar things I had with the game are now completely gone.")

Constantly adding content is a problem if you can't keep up with a game - there are about a half-dozen games that I stopped playing for various reasons that I would love to pick up again for at least another 20-30 hours, but so much has changed since I stopped that I would essentially be starting over again from zero. That's not much fun, especially if you had already put in dozens of hours and don't want to deal with the grind again.

Bungie is all about fooling players,and the game isnt fun anymore.

Bungie has lost it, dismissing old players to get new ones...thats what happens when you selll X+Y and then delete X and hope the people will take that in the ass without saying nothing, well, i'm done with bungie, im not buying anything else from bungie , like i did to blizzard in 2000. both are on my Blacklist.