Bungie and the no-win scenario

 

Sometimes it feels like Bungie has been the luckiest and unluckiest video game company for the exact same play they made- creating their timely split into their own twisted Kobayahsi Maru. Although, I guess maybe the five years of burning success so powerful it lead the rest of the industry off a cliff in pursuit could be considered an undeniable grace period. Maybe atrophy truly is the inevitable path of all and we shouldn't be surprised when the thing we love rots and fades to dust. Which can be evidenced by how many series and franchises run out of steam and become unbearable the more they stick around, whilst the graceful bow-outs remain beloved in our hearts and minds. Star Wars is a cringey joke and Avatar the Last Airbender is considered a timeless masterpiece. But I'm getting off track here.

On one hand, Bungie were responsible for one of the most influential First Person Shooter video game franchises of history. Twice. Halo proved to be the progenitor of many of the standards of online competitive shooters that are still sought after to this day, establishing an unforgettable protagonist and branding for their partner console developer for the foreseeable future. They rode that franchise for over a decade, ending with what many consider to be the pinnacle of the franchise as their last main line entry (Halo 3) and what I think is the pinnacle of the campaigns in their side-game release. (Halo Reach) Literally one exact entry before the franchise started going off a cliff with the rough-narrative of Halo 4, affixed with that terrible new faction that marked the beginning never ending spiral of Halo. So 'Lucky Bungie', right?

'Destiny' was Bungie's next port of call and it proved to be their smash hit slam dunk for years, until they decided to throw it to the wayside in order to drum up Destiny 2... which was an even bigger success story! It truly cannot be overstated how influential Bungie were during this period of their life, either. Destiny created the Live Service meta that we're all living under today- with the exception of the battle-pass standard that was borne from over exposure during the 'Fortnite' days. Bungie created the idea of the pseudo-MMO, which didn't over stuff itself with all the 'complex connective infrastructure' or 'social connection facilitating' of a proper MMO but leveraged the constant support and updates to keep an engaged audience coming back and feeding into the product through microtransaction purchases.

But now it seems that very same industry that Bungie helped kickstart is turning into such a minefield that it might have just blown up Bungie themselves. Just as we've seen from the studio after studio twisted into pathetic attempts to copy them, from Avengers to Suicide Squad, this really is an industry of 'all or nothing' that puts everyone on the edge of their jobs with each new release. We've seen companies scarred by their time trying to kick off a Live Service, and the lucky one's get to brush themselves off and slip into an entirely new project stained with only the failure of their time in the mud pit. Destiny, on the otherhand, might just have taken the spirit of Bungie with them if we read most gloomily into the newest developments.

I am talking of course about the several hundreds of layoffs that Bungie, a not-particular giant developer, suffered just very recently under the provision of Sony and all the chaos that has occurred in it's wake. Bungie has lost staff from every corner of their company, stripping economically from every team in a wind-down that couldn't come at a more un-opportune time considering they are, following the competition of Destiny 2's core narrative, moving on to at least two new games in the near to near-distant future. This really the time they should be bulking up, but whether at the insistence of Sony or internal pressure from Investors- Bungie is losing that which gives it that iconic identity- it's talented staff.

Much has come out in the time since- especially considering everyone has had their hands on their hips wandering why exactly this is happening in the wake of Destiny's latest update 'The Final Shape' which by all accounts was a slam-dunk finale for the franchise. Well, it would seem that 'The Final Shape' comes in the aftermath of 'Lightfall', which was the update for which I tried to get back into Destiny only to realise how hopelessly anti-newcomer it was and dropping the thing after a couple of days. (And I played Destiny 1 literally religiously back in the day- they screwed the on-boarding process beyond relief!) Lightfall was an absolute disaster that decimated public sentiment and although it sold, the lost value from it's reception ended up scarring Bungie further than we could have ever imagined.

Reports now say that no matter how well 'The Final Shape' performed, Bungie was due for serious cuts to it's staff anyway. In essence they only kept people around long enough to complete their work on the game before kicking them to the curb with the power of god- creating another horrendously bizarre visual of a seemingly successful product resulting in mass layoffs. (Thanks for starting that trend, Microsoft!) Now I'd say public sentiment is more shaky than it has ever been before, with people wandering if there is even a future for Destiny from this point forward- or if the game is going to enter a holding pattern of no expansions for the foreseeable future. And to be honest- doesn't that seem like exactly what they're planning? Keeping the team around just long enough to finish the narrative and then gutting them? Sounds like 'wrap up' behaviour to me!

Of course in this most volatile time it's easy to point fingers. Fingers at the fans for not supporting the game at a troubling time and instead jumping on the reactionary train, fingers at the executives for refusing to take paycuts in hopes of saving some of the layoffs because (I quote) "We're not that sort of company", (yikes!) and fingers at Sony for being the paymasters that should really be taking care of one of their biggest currently in-house studios instead of putting them to task like this- especially considering they simultaneously expect Bungie to be leading their online-gaming efforts for the foreseeable future. (Or does Sony really expect Concord to pop off? A game of such negative rizz I had to look up it's name? Fat chance there!) But at the end of the day, maybe we should point the finger at karma itself- for coming to reap what it's sown.

Is Destiny depreciating?

The Mountains fall.

You'll often here me talk about the unshakable titans of the gaming industry that are infallible and never wrong, especially when they're wrong. I'm talking about foundational institutions like Call of Duty, like Assassin's Creed, like Fifa- franchises that could roll up to your home and shoot your mother in the face and you'd still buy their next title because we're that conditioned to bow down before them- sad as that is. (Hell, I'm playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla currently despite having an absolutely miserable time slogging through that swig of pre-digested pig swill that was Odyssey.) Games like that don't live in the same world as ours. They don't show weakness, never bleed and will never die. For a time I considered Destiny to be one among their number, but it seems I spoke too quickly because from everything we're seeing Destiny is heading along the path of destruction- which very well could just be the spark of a new beginning- but it could also just be a death knell.

Destiny is an important game to the games industry, not just to Bungie who own it. Why? Because it's the single most successful thesis in favour of the 'Live Service' model of business which is the favourite keyword of every heavy-set games industry executive of the day. Destiny introduced the concept to a lot of us, popularised the 'always adding content, keep weekly player numbers' mind set and raked in a simply vile amount of capital doing so. They even lied and re-released the game again- pretending they didn't promise not to do exactly that when launching Destiny 1, and still managed to stay a juggernaut for the industry. Hell, until Cyberpunk rolled around Destiny was testers favourite benchmarking game, it still has a highly competitive 'first raid competition' community every time a new one drops- and some truly insane people out there make entire online communities deciphering the half-vomit fan fiction train wreck this franchise calls a plot. (Okay it's not... actually, the more I think about it- it actually is that bad. Yeah... Destiny lore blows.)

So you can imagine what an absolute shock to the system it was to learn that Destiny's Bungie just laid off 8% of it's workforce, about 100 people, in it's personal contribution to the worker firing frenzy that the tech sector is going on throughout 2023. 100 People? How? Isn't the game painfully successful? Doesn't Bungie have enough money to pay for the upkeep of it's many many staff, or at the very least have enough to not have to surprise lay-off people one day before they lose medical coverage so that the company can... seriously do they get anything out of doing that? Or is that just the sadistically inhuman flair for the revolting evil that lies at the hearts of every executive bleeding out for no reason? My question stands: what could be going on in the world of Destiny to justify the letting go of so many staff? Well- given the numbers Bungie pulls there actually is no justification whatsoever, but what would the executives put down as their reasoning when email their prep lawyers in case of any sudden 'wrongful termination' lawsuits? (They've already got one on the way.)

Well the last expansion apparently didn't do so hot. That sounds like a bit of a nothing burger to a company as big as Bungie: "One expansion wasn't well received, big whoop." But when you start to unpack the situation, and remember that Destiny is Bungie's only active game franchise, and that their next game Marathon has been pushed back to 2025 at the earliest and that Destiny is hard-designed to reject new comers to the franchise has roughly as possible so it's imperative they keep the players that they have. Then the concerns start to make a little more sense. If an multi-year developed expansion that was supposed to carry the game for at least 12 months ended up burning out the player base, then Bungie will fill every hit to their only income source being drained. The Executives might have to start diving into the Scrooge McDuck money vault in order to pay for the second Swedish Villa that houses their third family and the maid who is secretly also their fourth mistress. Nah, can't have that- gotta start axing people. It's the only way!

When taking a brief glance over the laid-off staff you'll notice another depressingly familiar trend- a lot of the people gone are exactly the kind of people management would be targeting, and exactly who you don't want gone from a franchise you're trying to revivify. So yes, we're seeing senior talent, the woman responsible for the Halo logo and... wait, no. There's no way! Michael Salvatori? The Michael Salvatori is gone? Okay, I need to preface this bit quickly. Through all my times with Destiny, during the worst of the worst when the original game forced me out of playing the online and held a gun to it's head with a £50 bribe fee- when I swore off the game and jeered at it's descent into mediocrity throughout the long life of two- there was one aspect of Destiny I could never so much as frown at. One gratis so unbelievably brilliant in it's conception, execution and, yes, composition- that I've kept both game's soundtrack on my phone for years now despite never playing them. It's the music, obviously. Destiny's music is cinematically sublime, deserving of a better game to serve alongside. And now it's gone. Vanquished. Caput. Because Michael Salvatori was it's composer.

And to be clear, as far as anyone can tell this isn't a situation of Michael volunteering retiring out of solidarity to his axed colleagues- during the one email exchange we've seen, Salvatori offered his heart to all those that had been let go 'As well'. All this happening whilst their next expansion, the Final Shape, has gone back into emergency development after the recent internal review process only 'whelmed' testers. Bungie staff are terrified that the next expansion is going to cement them down the path losing touch with their piggy banks- I mean fans- and yet they're in the midst of ripping out the heart of the franchise along the way. Staff who understand the game, artists who breathed life into the game, they probably would have sacked Lance Reddick if the man hadn't passed away first. (He'd probably be too expensive!)

After the Sony acquisition things were supposed to be different. Staff were promised that management would fight to make sure they all kept their jobs and that no one would be culled by the Sony scythe in some vapid attempt to assert dominance over the studio. And for what it's worth they were right, Sony never got the chance to start chopping off Studio heads because apparently this is all Bungie Management's doing alone! So all of that scummy 'cutting people off at the very last day before their health insurance coverage runs out' and 'scheduling job cutting meetings the very morning of the event so that no one could prepare'. Or how about 'Letting staff go so that they aren't entitled to options'. That was performed by people who knew their victims. They probably recognised the faces of those they were throwing in the gutter to step over, maybe even met their families, maybe even played enough mental gymnastics about in that warped vacant cage of twisted blackened steel they call the seat of their soul to call themselves their 'friends'. Yet this is how they treated them.

This is an increasingly common story in the games industry currently, even as profits are soaring to untold degrees, cost cutting measures are being made at the slightest set-back and it's getting enough to put everyone on edge as the illusion we call 'job security' is starting to show it's arse. And here's a little   secret: putting artists on edge is not the best way of getting great work out of them... okay, that's not entirely true, a little bit of pressure is exactly what they need: but making them constantly terrified that they're going to lose everything at any moment is certainly not a 'little bit of pressure'. We're heard the doomsayers call about the impending video game crash for a while now, but I don't think that's where we headed. I think we're headed for a slow dissolution of the AAA class as more and more devs peel away into indie studios or into more secure industries altogether, and the when the studios lose all the people they need to keep up their death march development pace and start eating their own tails in order to stay alive, those cold-blooded creepy crooks will have no one to blame but their own rat-ridden 'ideals'. 

Destiny 2 is a mess

What a disaster...

Once upon a time I was a true believer in the vision of Bungie's Destiny. What they sold it as, what they wanted to be, and how we as the players were meant to fit into that vision. A single video game updated over the space of a decade with new stories, expanding scope and systems and an ongoing narrative as we became 'legend'. Of course, then the team gaslit the entire world by releasing a sequel and pretending they never said the 'ten years' thing, but I had fallen out of love with Destiny long before that period. My heart was broken when they got a bit too greedy for their own good and locked me out of the multiplayer under a £50 DLC gate. It took nearly a decade of nursing that wound for me to finally get around to Destiny 2 and take a gander at what it was I was missing, and I came away totally astounded about what an honestly pathetically badly designed mess Destiny 2 is. For a AAA studio with the pedigree of Bungie they should be ashamed over what they call their 'flagship product'.

Let me start by harping on an old issue people have mentioned for quite a while- the utterly moronic way that Bungie choose to 'maintain' their content over the years. As a full throated live service Bungie was of course married to the idea of brief content infusions for events such as seasons or major world events. No great surprise there. Where Bungie pushed themselves beyond taste, however, was in employing that same tactic for core story content. Yes, log on to Destiny 2 for the first time today and be in wonder for the fact you cannot experience the main story of base Destiny 2. That tailor-made campaign about fighting to reclaim the Traveller? Yeah, you get to see it in a half-hearted recap montage, the actual missions themselves are no more. So what's in it's place? Remember the Destiny 1 intro? Slow and cumbersome as it is? Yeah, they copy-and-pasted that with some minor reworks to slide into the new story. Honestly just lazy.

What gets me is that this intro being recycled only really makes sense for someone fresh to the universe of Destiny altogether, as it tells the story of the Guardian being born. When I started Destiny 2 I was greeted to a greatest hits compilation of my achievements in the first game alongside the dates I did them which made me feel very old; essentially meaning Bungie had the means to recognise I was a returning player. But instead of playing a campaign designed to be for returning players, I had to replay my own birth again. See how off-putting that is? On the most basic level of immersion the team has stumbled and failed, and yes: I recognise that Bungie have promised not to remove content anymore with the same energy of a rampant alcoholic promising they won't drink and drive again after causing their second collision casualty- (They shouldn't have needed to be told in the first place) for some reason they refuse to restore what is already gone. What, do Bungie have a 'delete all files when done' policy? Actually, their standards have slipped so far, I wouldn't be surprised.

So Destiny 2 expects its players to be up-to-date with events- even if they're brand spanking new to the game in question. And how do they maintain this standard? What would be the laziest way possible? Well the laziest way would be massive screens of text, thankfully they don't stoop that low- instead we got verbal context dumps. Slideshows and lectures, spitting names and places and events at you with a rapidity that, guess what, makes it all sound like fantasy gibberish. I didn't just play Density 1, I studied that sucker! I got the third party app to read all the codex entries and watched lore videos speculating on why a certain banner was flying from a particular rampant on bloody Venus- I was in the lore trenches! And I can't follow these slide-show presentations for the life of me. What the heck is a totally fresh player supposed to think apart from "Uh oh, I'm not welcome here, am I?"

Destiny 2 borrows from a trend that a lot of modern games have championed, where the UI and presentation is so overstuffed that new players are quickly overwhelmed. And it's depressing to see this issue when Destiny 1 mastered a gorgeously minimalist UX with it's cursor-pointer map, linear progression quests and constrained Tower playspace. I imagine Destiny 2 must have started out like that too, but over the years they've added counters and menus and sub-menus and reminders and context bars and new vendors and new currencies and just so much stuff. Stuff piled ontop of stuff until the result is an ugly confusing mess. Better hope you were there to learn these additions one-by-one because if not... good luck!

But that's just the experience of people who play the base free-to-play package, what about the lunatics who decide they want to throw down some cold hard cash? What do they get for their sacrifice? Well I wanted to experience some of the campaigns, and so I made the fool's gambit of buying the DLC in a package deal, and maybe you shouldn't be selling a package deal for your game if you absolutely cannot figure out how to present that to the player. Whilst getting to grips with Destiny 2, figuring out the tutorial and realising that this game boasts an even looser grip on it's narrative than the first game had, I had to turn off and do something else after a while. And when I came back I was greeted to the most mind numbing design decision of all time.

You see, Destiny 2 didn't load me back up to the tutorial world I was cutting my teeth on. They threw me into Venus, in the starting mission of one of the expansions- after waterboarding me with a lore dump I only realised 2 minutes in was essentially spoiling all major narrative events that had happened before that canonical point. Confused, I exited out the game and loaded back in. What did I get? Another intro cutscene for a different expansion and I was thrown into that campaign. There's no choice, each expansion is forced upon the player before they've had any chance to figure out the basics of the game so that they have no chance to naturally experience the world, get to know the story and their place within it a little bit, and then naturally move onto the new content. Destiny 2 just dumps every possible rule of cohesive and non-intrusive design out of the window.

And I know the reason why. That constant content grind where every single update needs to be immediately followed up with something shiny and new- typically something that glitters on the item store to make a quick buck. All of Bungie's effort is sunk into trying to keep concurrent players buying and spending their time glued to Destiny, they couldn't even spare the brain power to concieve of what a new player has to go through. That layer of new gamer unfriendlyness is a huge barrier to the continued growth of a franchise that is Bungie's only gratis at this point in time, and by the time Destiny 3 rolls around I wonder if they'll still retain the knowledge for being welcoming to new customers. The state of Destiny 2, how it presents itself and what it has become, is a disgrace to a once legendary studio that seems to have shed all it's once glistening talent. I miss the Halo Bungie, man... 

Why are Live services so often bad?

 So many swings and so few hits

Me and Bungie are no long lost lovers passing in the night sharing whispers of a once sweet sojourn. Maybe once I had something resembling an affection for that studio and their talents, but the greed sullied that right and good, cut me out of the picture deftly and left me cold to all affections. As such, I ain't much one for giving Destiny the time of the day, knowing the temperament of those who run it. Such experience I learned from my time playing Destiny 1, and the hundreds of hours (and money) I put into it and it's DLCs, only for the game to then release a DLC that was the price of a whole new game and tell that if I couldn't afford that blood price I would be no longer allowed to play the competitive online I had enjoyed endlessly for month before. This was a game I had sunk triple digits into, and that was the way they treated me as a customer. Needless to say I commended them for their savvy businessmanship and parted ways without looking back. But that doesn't mean I don't have ears to hear the ways they wander today.

Destiny 2 has been out for a while now, and despite doing the exact same rugpull I just described again, Bungie have mostly kept a much more positive relationship with their audience this time around, or at least they have ever since Bungie split from Activison for the good of the game. (And even then, it only lasted for a little while) But all of those that defended each avaricious turn of Destiny as the veiny slithery mandibles of Activision interference were in for a rude awakening when, lo and behold, we're still getting highly questionable and downright extortionate turns for this game bubbling out of the Arrakis sands every now and then. In fact it seems like every other day Destiny players are raising arms about some shader pricings here, some engram reward locking there or just a bizarre pricing system that's unnecessarily confusing for upcoming content. It at least marks the thrashing of a very living beast, because fans still care enough to let their voices be heard when something doesn't work out, but one has to wonder when will the conflicts stop and the game just be good?

Marvel's Avengers has also had a rough go of things, but considering they've never even had a decent fraction of Destiny 2's playerbase, their slip-ups tend to stand out a lot more. (At the very least Destiny 2 controversies are bumped down search results within a week when the next XUR appearance drops) It seems such a shame because the initial promise was so exciting, but everything just seemed to go down hill once the developers announced it was a Live service. (I'm not kidding, it's been almost exclusively bad news since then.) A buggy launch, questionable cosmetic pricings, lack of content, constant content delays, hugely suspicious 'fixes' and, recently, probably the biggest betrayal of trust that one can possibly do when it comes to marketing a game; they lied about their pricing structure which they said wouldn't ever be pay-to-win. For a month it was.

It's actually all rather incredible how foreseeable this anime betrayal was, from railroad tracks laid months in advance, and I'll try a quick summary for salient points. Basically, Avengers was patched to make the early game levelling slower because the team argued that early gameplay was confusing to new players who were levelling too quickly and getting too many skill points. People who had actually played the game called this out as stupid, because the early game is Avengers' weakest element, but the team held strong. That was, until a free weekend bought some attention to the game months later, after which the team decided to drop the ability to purchase power boosters that sped up levelling. (Selling the fix to the problem you artificially created? That's pretty scummy.) The team were, rightfully, called out for this and after a month of silence (they really did think they could just ride out the controversy) they relented and pulled back the ability to spend real money on it. (Although the boosters are still in the game, because they refuse to just patch the game back to normal.)

Those are just two live services I picked out, but they are good sample. One is perhaps the most successful Live service of all time, (baring Fortnite) progeny of the title that wrote the book on this sort of game, and the other is one of the most recent examples of a game that took everything this little sub genre had to other and callously smashed it together into a, and let's be charitable, abject mess. Destiny 2 is rather well regarded by it's fans, Avengers less so, but both are hitting a wall of distinct diminishing interest. Despite being live services, titles that should be the purest example of a 'forever game', both are burning up and out as people are growing sick after several long years of friction or just a few really bad ones. When asking why it is that Live services are so reviled, and now fading from popularity, I really don't think this comes down to growing bored, but a genuine disconnect this sort of game demands between the player, the developers and the game.

I say this because, in order to make a live service a live service, you need to keep it updated. That's like, the modus operandi of live services. They are games who are 'alive' for the frequency at which new content is added, old events are recycled out, and the ecosystem of the world always provides new experiences year in, year out. But constant development is not a cheap process, and keeping developers on the pay roll demands that these games offset costs consistently. That equation, right there, means that these games need to have some sort of revenue generation to them, whether directly or otherwise, which places it apart from conventional games that just need to attract a decent number of people for that one time purchase. (At least. Ubisoft tends to seek those recurrent revenue streams too) Whatsmore, whether through reasonable deduction or lack of subtlety, this off-kilter relationship is well known to the public, which creates an air of mistrust as we all know that these games are trying to milk us of our money to some degree and every subsequent action is painted by that expectation. 

Suspicion makes the rope that companies have to play with a lot shorter and allows the public to pull it a lot more taut when they feel aggrieved. Simple mistakes become twisted nefarious plots against the good of your playerbase, and I'm guilty of this heightened tension too. To this very day I find myself stopping to ask whether or not that early back-handed special event from Apex Legends was meant to funnel MTX sales like it was perfectly geared to, or if that was a genuine collision of poor ideas and witless decisions. (Whatever the case, I haven't played the game since) Thus I wouldn't say that live services are innately worse than other types of games, even taking into account the general rush-to-service feel that most of these games launch with, but instead that impression is solidified by the inherently rocky relationships these games foster by their very nature. 

But whether or not the general disdain towards live service titles is earned or not, at it's core we can't deny that these sorts of games butt into each other so much more than other sorts of games simply for the greedy way they try to eat up all free time to secure those all-important engagement hours. And that unsustainable shade alone marks a key reason why I, at least, can't bring myself around to supporting these sorts of games. Besides, that very relationship of customer/player balance is true too of MMO's, and for the most part those types of games manage a much better accord with the public. (Provided that the MMO in question is at least somewhat successful.) With any luck the very audible groans that every company hears whenever they announce their latest live outing will finally get the message across that these doomed outings aren't even popular. (Then who knows; maybe we'll start getting more genuinely great games again. Like that Deus Ex sequel I've needed forever now.)

The immortal game as a service

The end is never the end is never the end.

Do you remember how, when the credits rolled, games used to end? Me neither. That's because we live in the age of 'games as a service', wherein the end is never the end. I recall being suckered in by this promise back in the days of Destiny and the, now infamous, ten-year plan. Everyone I knew was thinking the same thing; "Wow, a ten year game? Constantly updated with regular new content? That's a game we could play forever!" Of course, then the release came and we realized that we had been duped. Instead of giving us all a full game and growing it into something special over a decade, they gave us a bare bones, pretty, mess and expected us to stick around as they made it into something that vaguely resembled a finished product. Before they even managed that, they gave up and announced 'Destiny 2', whilst simultaneously backtracking on the whole 'Ten-year plan'. (Bungie claimed that was referring to a licensing deal but they went independent earlier this year so I guess that was a lie too.) That is 'games as a service' in a nutshell.

Back when it used to be a feature on Steam dubbed 'Early access', everyone gawked at the idea of paying for an unfinished game that was often never completed. These days, that seems to be every other AAA release, and we eat it up. Creators and publishers have learnt the power of promises and have utilized it to great effect in recent years. Look at recent heavy hitters and you'll spot how they all come attached with a roadmap: a list of vague promises for features that may or may not pan out. Sure, sometimes the roadmap works out, but sometimes it just ends up becoming a shield against all those who point out how unfinished the 'release' product is. "Oh, of course we haven't added this basic feature, that's not due until summer according to the roadmap." This way, gaming companies get to keep exploiting their player base as beta testers for games so incomplete they some even start life as barely functional messes. Just look at Bethesda's Fallout 76.

Last year saw the release of Fallout 76 to lukewarm anticipation. Many were dubious about Bethesda's first online outing and saw the whole endeavour as a recipe for disaster. Even I, optimist that I was, had some doubts when Todd Howard stood up and paraded that fact that Fallout 76 would have no human characters save for those manned by other players. I had already seen the Fallout franchise veer away from establishing great, memorable characters and this seemed like a pretty definitive nail in the coffin. But I bit my lip and decided to wait and see, Bethesda knew what they were doing right? (Cue the sad trombone.)

On November 14th, players were greeted to a buggy wasteland that was barren for all the wrong reasons. The combat was laggy, the visuals were bugged (and dated), the servers went down more then a whack-a-mole; everything screamed of rushed-to-market. It is well known how no developer ever really feel like their game has ever 'gone gold', but Fallout 76 didn't even feel like it left beta. Things were so bad that 'Bethesda.net' as a whole suffered huge blackout periods for the next few months. The entire infrastructure was falling apart because no one at Bethesda got the opportunity to appropriately stress test before the public were launched at the product.

Nearly a year later, the game is in a much better place. Most of the bugs have been patched, the servers have a little bit more staying power and the product is almost starting to resemble a finished game. But, somehow, we're still not there yet. For their part, Bethesda have mostly committed themselves to fixing the problems of the game but things should never have been this bad to start with. Surely, it would be easier to fix the game without players on the servers 24/7. (Then again, I'm no technician. Maybe it's easy to fix the plumbing while the whole apartment is bathing.) Everyone still wants to know: what happened. Luckily for us, we have some idea.

Gamespot conducted an Interview with Todd Howard wherein he explained things from his end. He told the story of how they approached the launch and how the game looked shoddy but decided to release anyway. They had no idea of how bad things would be, but remained committed in their plans to fix it in medias res. (Cue the clip of Bill O'Reilly. "I'll do it live!") One thing that Todd Howard said really stuck in my mind and the minds of many of his critics. "It's not about how a game launches, it's what it becomes." Now, I understand what he is trying to convey here: The fact that they won't give on the game is a testament worth commending, but even he has to see how poorly he worded that. It sounds utterly dismissive to mess they charged £60 for. Just so long as they slap down a roadmap and follow it through, things will work out at the end of the day. It is the embodiment of the 'Games as a service' culture. And just because it seems to be working out for Fallout 76 does not mean it works out for everybody.

Once upon a time I used to cherish Bioware. Everyone did. They were the paragons (ignore the pun) of well-written narratives and epic drama. Their two darling franchises: Mass Effect and Dragon Age were legendary, but even their licensed works like Baldur's Gate and 'Knights of The Old Republic' garnered mass praise and acclaim. Then 'Mass Effect: Andromeda' happened, and everyone starting seeing the chinks in Bioware's armour. That is likely why most people had approached with raised eyebrows when they heard about Bioware's new online-only RPG: Anthem. It didn't help that all we heard on the game was vague pretentious remarks on how this was "A type of game you've never seen before", or how this would be the "Bob Dylan of Video Games." (Whatever the heck that means.) So it's safe to say no one was really over the moon for this project when it released in February this year, but even we couldn't have expected what we received.

Anthem was some how even more rough then Fallout 76. Yes, the game certainly launched in a compromised state, with bugs and crashes absolutely everywhere; but the real problem was the fact that some of the core gameplay and story elements didn't even seem fully thought through. The main story was short and unimpressive. The endgame was practically non-existent. One mission literally time-gated players (Like a mobile game) in order to inflate the story's length. The story was disjointed and sometimes literally made no sense. Loot had randomly rolled stats with no weapon specific identifiers, that means you could find yourself with an assault rifle that would boost the attack damage of your shotgun; Or a flamethrower that multiplied your damage by 0%. (That one actually calculates, by the by, meaning that weapon literally outputs zero damage.) Then there were the constant minute-long loading screens. Player would have to sit through 2 to get from the hub to the openworld. 3 if you also wanted to do a world quest. All Anthem had going for it was the promise of a roadmap, but even that fell apart.

After Anthem missed a few roadmap deadlines it became clear that Bioware weren't going to make the game changing content they promised. Soon they had to push a lot of the promising features back, including their impressive sounding 'Cataclysm' event. People had become several stages past antsy and began to rally against Bioware with every change they made. Every time Bioware messed with drop rates, or released a £30 skin or delayed another launch, people just up and left the community. Things came to ahead when Bioware finally revealed details about the 'Cataclysm', only to reveal is was a new, small, tropical area with a bluish filter applied and a time attack mode chucked in. The bubble burst. For the first time people who stuck with the game through all of it faults saw, plain as day, that Bioware had nothing for this game. No secret comeback plan. Nothing. And they were sorely disappointed.

Yet again we have context for what happened with this game. Apparently, Bioware had little to no direction for the game throughout most of it's 7 year development cycle. They didn't even have a name until just before the E3 reveal, having referred to it as 'Project Dylan' during the planning stages. Most of the brain power was going towards visualizing 'Project Joplin' (The soon-to-be-cancelled Dragon Age 4) and no one had any clue what this game would even look like when they finally got around to making it. Eventually, EA got sick of paying for a game they hadn't received yet and demanded results. A few months of scrounging later and we got the pretty facade that Bioware showed off at E3 2018. Before then, most of the crew didn't even know that the game would be a looter shooter, having been sold on the idea of an exploration based game behind closed doors. The next seven months were dedicated to building a game from the ground up, on a crappy engine, to somewhat resemble the pretty little lie that corporate had tried, and failed, to sell the gaming world on during EA's conference. With that in mind, it is impressive that Bioware put together a product with a functional executable. (Although there was that issue about the game allegedly bricking PS4's. So if that's true, then they didn't even manage the exe.) Yet again consumers were handed an unfinished 'game-as-a-service' and told it would be finished later. Although some studios don't even give players that much; point in case, Treyarch with Black Ops 4.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 caused a lot of upset when it first announced with no single player. Especially after starting the presentation with a highlight reel of all the memorable story beats from previous campaigns. (Not sure what they were going for there.) Gamers couldn't help but sigh and go "Haven't we been through this before?" "Didn't Ea already spout all of that 'single player games are dead' rhetoric which lead the out pour of dissent from gamers. Even leading to Bethesda initiating their #saveplayerone slogan." (Although, Bethesda then released Fallout 76 the next year so I guess no one's words have weight anymore.) Activision seemed determined to tell us all exactly what we want, and it wasn't a single player campaign, it was a battle royale mode called Blackout. Cue the groans.

All Treyarch had to offer fans were multiplayer modes and another zombie level. No promises down the line of something special, just the absolute bare minimum of a Call of Duty game. Many shook their heads in the knowledge that the casual crowd would still likely carry this game to success, their only consolation would be another darn battle royale mode. At least it was decent. When Blackout first landed, people were surprised to find that it seemed to work surprisingly well. The map was a hodgepodge mess but the gunplay was good and the mechanics seemed solid. It was an adult battle royale mode that was a heck of a lot more polished than PUBG. It would be a long time before any talented studio could make a decent competitor that would even come close to- Oh, then Respawn came and dropped Apex Legends. A game that was superior to Blackout in every way and free. People forgot about Blackout pretty fast.

Why did the Black Ops 4 team think that the game would have the typical year-long staying power with such a meager offering? Well the reason is two-fold; first, the Call of Duty name recognition; and Secondly, Other 'games-as-a-service' could get with it, why not them? Okay, there's a little more to it then that. There was originally supposed to be a campaign but an Activision schedule update cut down Treyarch's development time substantially and as a result, the team failed to establish a solid idea for the game in time. (They had this one really awful idea about a competitive multiplayer campaign, so you can see that they weren't exactly at their A-game.) But in the end it was braggadocios bravado, alongside a little bit of 'keeping up appearances', that fueled Activison to decide not to delay a game that obviously needed it.

So here we ended up with a game lacking a campaign, vanguarded by a tacked on battle royale that became obsolete before the summer. Black Ops 4 still had it's aggressive microtransaction strategy to fall back on but without the crowds to lap it all up it just wasn't the same. The game did well enough to outperform it's 2015 predecessor but not well enough to prevent Activison from laying off 8% of it's workforce. (Wait what? Activison have said that they expected significant growth from this entry that proved elusive but sacking 700 people seems a bit harsh.) Maybe things might have been different if they had launched a completed game, it's hard to say. Just as it's hard to predict what might have been with any of these 'games as a service' products.

Ever since the term first crept into games marketer's lexicons, it seems to have become the calling card for botched releases. Several times now we have seen games that should have been great, that should have blown everyone away, end up butchered with the promise that it will be fixed later. It was the same case with games back when 'Steam early access' first became popular, only this time the big names are the ones taking the risk. AAA companies seem hellbent on devaluing their own product with these disasters with no forethought on what might be the consequence. Then they act surprised when they are told how they have no more goodwill left with the gaming community. I feel like a bit of a curmudgeon for implying that games should go back to the way they used to be, but on this matter I think I have a point. 'Games as a service' has proved to be at best a failure and at worst a scam, and it's about time we buried this practice before it becomes synonymous with games themselves.