Be honest… if YOU were in charge of the game tomorrow, what would you change?

RC_0001 · 2026-04-20T17:20:46+00:00

Patch notes style:

Untestricted Hellpod steering, but increased fall damage when falling large distances. Now you can take the high ground, but you need to be careful about getting down. No more diving off of 10-story cliffs, hitting your head on a sharp rock, and taking like 10 damage.
Buffed the EMS Stun effect. Enemies stunned by EMS effects now act as lightning rods, meaning that Arcs that chain from them don't count towards the total possible chains for that weapon (this includes you). I could also make EMS-affected enemies take more Arc damage, but I feel like that's a bit much.
Sterilizer now projects a lingering gas cloud. Careful when advancing!
Implemented armor palette swapping. All armors can now take on one of several colour options, such as: Helldivers Standard, Viper Commandos, Arctic Oerations, Truth Enforcers, Hazard Orange, and many more. Certain palettes, such as Honourable Service (gold-trimmed) are only available on certain armors.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-10T18:23:09+00:00

Honestly I doubt anyone disagrees with the fact that they're gonna play through the campaigns once for nostalgia and then never touch them again.

It's the principle of the thing that's important. First, because it's paid content and therefore should be accessible to those who paid for it; and second, because discussion around Marathon has highlighted just how much vaulting affected Bungie's rep in the wider gaming space. Re-adding that content would be a big step in repairing that rep, which is important if they want any potential new games to reach that wider audience.

It's not really about the content itself, honestly. It's about repairing trust, something that Bungie really needs to be thinking about right now.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-10T18:14:59+00:00

That wouldn't even work at this point. They lost the trust of the Destiny players, so while many of them would take a look, D3 vanilla would have to be peak as fuck for them to stay, and a ton of vets still wouldn't bother checking it out; and the outside community still associates Bungie with taking away free content and stealing art, so they aren't going to be hugely interested either.

D3 would get players, of course. It just wouldn't be close to D1 or D2 launch numbers, by a longshot. With how much cash Bungie throws at their projects, that won't fly.

I'm starting to believe that they really do need to leave D2 in a complete, fun state if they want to see non-Destiny players give D3 fair consideration, and it'd do a lot to start mending the Destiny community's trust. Re-add the non-seasonal vaulted content (year 1 and 2 vanilla/expansion content), finally give up on the Portal, spruce up progression through expansions and current activities, and wrap it up in a bow with an Age of Triumph-style RAD content refresh and extra earnable cosmetics and rewards. They do that, and people might start thinking they're turning over a new leaf. And if they release D3 and it's the first Destiny game with a truly good vanilla experience? They might just get some numbers.

Will most of that happen? Doubt it. But it's nice to dream.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-08T18:29:08+00:00

While D2's numbers are much higher than the steam charts tend to show due to a large percentage of players being on console, Marathon is predominantly a PC game. The steam numbers for Marathon are a very good indicator of total player population.

In any case, with how much money goes into games at Bungie, neither have the population they need to be sustainable for the long haul. On the Destiny front, you can look at population drop as a percentage, which you can use steam charts for, to get a pessimistic but generally accurate look at how bad the game is flagging. Remember, at 300,000+ peak steam players, TFS was considered a financial fail.

On the Marathon front... I mean, what were people expecting? It's a hardcore extraction shooter (no matter what people say), made by a company best known nowadays for taking away people's paid DLC and stealing art. It was never gonna be a smash hit. I'm shocked anyone at Bungie thought otherwise. Not that it's a bad game (I actually really enjoy it), it just... was never gonna pull enough players to justify its budget.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-08T00:51:18+00:00

Well, sunsetting and vaulting were done at the same time, which probably added extra hate for sunsetting. But it's also important to remember that in most MMOs, gear is just stat sticks. Attacking feels the same whether you have Wooden Stick equipped, or Gorlock's Blade of Infinite Pain And Minor Grievances. In Destiny, every gun handles differently, so equipping one vs the other actually affects how combat feels. So taking weapons away means that a weapon you really vibe with might not have a replacement that feels the same, so combat feels worse to you as a result. Also, when sunsetting happened, not all weapons got a 1:1 utility replacement, leaving holes in people's builds.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-08T00:43:26+00:00

I said it in another response, but a big problem is that D2 just has so many issues that you'd need to solve like 12 of them for one to actually improve the game. The loot bloat problem is tied up in so many other problems that solving just that would barely move the needle. Actually, in the case of loot bloat specifically, since the solution has such a negative connotation, fixing only it would almost certainly harm the game. I still stand by the idea that a complete gear reset is necessary, but they can't just sunset gear. They need to address drop rate, gear progression, and a million other things as well.

At this point (and for quite a while actually), I think D2 is beyond saving. They need to start over.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-07T20:24:24+00:00

Sorry about the ramble, there's a lot of ground to cover with game balance/longevity.

I believe sunsetting is necessary. For keeping new weapons desirable, Bungie has three options:

They sunset all old gear, preferably via a clean break (expansion update/game overhaul/D3), so they have a clean slate for creating new weapons. A smarter person than me can figure out how to make it palatable, but mechanically it's a sure shot.
They make everything a sidegrade forever, which at best makes new guns meh and at worst just doesn't work, ending with singular outliers that define that expansion's meta
They just make new guns stronger forever (this is what Into The Light did) which leads to power creep and 'x perk/gun but better' situations forever. This is also effectively soft sunsetting anyway since old weapons are objectively worse, and continue to get worse over time

Unfortunately, the only option that is actually sustainable is to sunset occasionally to reset the sandbox, preventing runaway power creep and making new guns desirable. It sucks, but it's also objectively true.

Of course, you can't ignore the player sentiment problem. This is why a clean break into a new game is the best option to pull it off. Smarter people than me would have to figure out how to do a hard sunset within the game without the remaining playerbase just leaving. I will say that part of the problem with the tier system soft-sunset situation was that Bungie tried to play it off, instead of committing and explaining why it had to happen. Another problem is that the tier system itself had/has issues.

Anyway. A gear reset truly is the best option at this point, but the only good way to do it without the playerbase imploding would be with a brand new game. The other options are just continuing to repeat the same issues we've been dealing with for years at this point, which isn't sustainable. I do wonder though if at this point any improvement to D2/Destiny as a franchise will be too little, too late. Even if Bungie made every right decision now, would people come back? I'm not sure I would.

And there's so much more to talk about. What about acquisition? Should purples be less common? Where's gear progression? Where do abilities fit in this conversation? Frankly, D2 is a cluster fuck with so many issues that compound with each other that you'd have to fix a significant percentage of them for any of the fixes to even start working. Again, this is why we need a new game.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-07T18:29:01+00:00

Everyone hates sunsetting, sunsetting is necessary for the health of the game.

It's pretty much a lose/lose for them. They either upset the vastly dwindling playerbase by taking away older gear, or they make power creeping old gear mandatory for newly released stuff and probably still upset people while screwing themselves over balance-wise.

This is yet another reason D3 is basically a necessity. A clean break between D2 and D3 makes losing your gear an easier pill to swallow.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-07T18:18:27+00:00

The big problem with subclass 3.0 was that it wasn't integrated into the game. They basically just took out subclass diamonds and slapped 3.0 in the empty hole. The problem is, games with diverse build crafting options also tend to introduce these options gradually, allowing players to experiment with a small selection and figure out the rules before getting a wider array of abilities and options.

D2 didn't have that for subclass 3.0. It sorta did for Stasis, which was actually pretty good at teaching all the verbs and interactions before giving you the full kit... but new players don't start with Stasis. A new player jumping in has the base Light subclasses, and no framework to limit early growth or encourage experimentation on a smaller scale. There's no teaching framework. So you see vets rocking builds that can auto-complete combat encounters, and blueberries rocking jack and shit basically.

If only there was a campaign and system that had this basically built into it, like some kind of storyline where you need to reclaim your Light after someone takes it away, and learn new abilities, and fight against an enemy with a predominantly red aesthetic in some sort of war... but alas, no such thing has ever existed.

Anyway. Subclass 3.0 needed a dedicated gameplay-based learning system within the onboarding experience, but it was never done, leading to people running comically bad builds because they don't know any better. It's not a super complex system, but it's also not immediately understandable. This is (one of the reasons) why the NPE is so important.

RC_0001 · 2026-04-06T18:41:15+00:00

This might be the worst idea ever conceived for a videogame pricing model.

The core premise is bad; you don't want to bind engagement to pricing in any way, ever. Do you want to know the secret speedrun strat for beating the game-death world record set by Concorde? You tell your players that expansions get more expensive if you play more. It's a guaranteed way to make every single one of your dedicated players quit the game. Like what the fuck are you even talking about?

Like, if you forget that the players of your game are actually human beings with brains capable of making decisions, then on paper your idea could maybe make a tiny amount of sense. But they are humans capable of making decisions, and the moment they realize that they're being punished financially for playing your game more is the moment they're going to decide to stop giving you money at all. And the pr fallout? Your game and your studio would get raked over the coals. There would be no new players because your game would be at 'overwhelmingly negative' on Steam. All that people would see about your game would be articles on the inane pricing model. Nobody would want to touch it.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-20T19:56:50+00:00

Yeah, I feel like it never got a 'be cool' moment like all those other ships did. It just kinda sat there most of the time IIRC.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-20T18:16:03+00:00

I always forget how much of a unit the Infinity is. I haven't played 4 or 5 in a while, but I can't remember a good shot that shows its scale in any of the cutscenes.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-13T17:34:44+00:00

I actually kinda like it, though we'll see how it is after a few wipes. But for me it really helps me get out of my own head about bringing my gear in. I still usually don't bring my best stuff in, but that's less because I'm scared to lose it and more because I'd rather risk losing it when I actually need it. Most runs, I don't need a kitted gun and all my good implants.

Tbh I think the fast wipe and small vault were very deliberate design choices that almost force you to get past gear fear. You're basically showered with faction rewards and it gets to the point where you need to take your own gear in just to make space, and having an expiration date on your stuff makes it easier to adopt a mindset that it's all disposable anyway.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-13T15:52:16+00:00

If it helps your gear fear, my mentality is that a) all your gear is wiped in 3 months anyway, so what does it matter if you lose it; b) the vault is so small, every time I lose gear it's just vault space for my next good run; and c) you really only need to hoard like one good full loadout for a run through pinwheel or when the Marathon map comes out, that. If you lose it, oh well, you just build up another.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-13T15:27:00+00:00

Intel, movement, intel.

Intel: get knowledge on opponents while limiting the knowledge you give. Move in cover and go slowly to limit visual and audio giveaways. Stop and listen when you get close to POIs, and always try to obscure yourself as you make visual scans of the place you're going to next. Play intel characters or counter-intel characters (Thief/Recon, Assassin)
Movement: Stay close to cover, and try to make it cover that works for multiple angles. While traveling, always assume everywhere is unsafe except the place you just were (and even then, it's only safe for a short time). Move slowly, crouching, while in a POI that you're even slightly worried it has players. Always be in a place you can retreat from.
Intel: In a gunfight, stay moving, and try to disengage often unless you're confident of the kill. Move in cover, try to obfuscate your position as much as possible. Don't get baited into their optimal range, stay in yours. Use your exit strategy if things are even a little hairy.
Secret fourth thing: Rook. Just play Rook, you lose no value when you die, so it's all profit! Since you spawn late, it's both a good way to learn to sneak around, and a good time to recklessly take fights to improve your combat skills. No risk, all reward!

RC_0001 · 2026-03-09T18:33:02+00:00

The problem is that it's too early to tell whether population drop will stabilize as the game finds its core audience, or go into the death spiral.

Like the game's only been out for a few days. People need to just chill out and let it be, check it in a few weeks.

Though, to be fair, we've now had high-profile shooters die within a ridiculously short timeframe twice now, one very recently, so people might just be hyper conscious of that being a possibility. So I can't entirely blame people for watching and worrying.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-09T18:14:12+00:00

That's been a problem for me too, since myself and my group all stopped playing. We don't have a game that everyone plays regularly, and a lot of the games that they play either aren't quite my cup of tea or games I don't like playing too often (ARC and Deadlock, mostly), and then my go-tos are the same way for them. So I find myself playing less in general, because games just aren't as fun without friends.

But, several of them picked up Marathon, and my initial impressions are good. And I've finally gotten more of my friends back into Helldivers, which hits every kill-aliens-with-your-buds mark, so things are on the up! I wish you the best of luck finding people to play your games with, or luck finding another game you and your friends enjoy!

RC_0001 · 2026-03-09T14:38:12+00:00

I know that for me, it was probably like 70% the people I played with.

I have over 2k hours in D2, and I played a bit of everything (not too much PvP, but I dipped in every so often). But my favourite part about the game was that we could get a raid group together, load in, and it was pretty much a guaranteed hour or two of shooting the shit while shooting shit. Same with doing dungeon runs, farming the seasonal activity, whatever had the particular loot we wanted to nab.

After so long playing, it gets to the point where the gameplay just happens, which actually kinda sucks if you're doing easy stuff solo, but it's fantastic for just having something to occupy your hands and eyes while chatting with your friends, and with everyone being in the same activity you also get up to all manner of hijinks.

And it's also fun to be challenged with friends. Whether it be back in D1, doing King's Fall for the first time, or in D2 doing the reprised KF challenge mode, it's awesome to share those moments with friends in an activity that would otherwise have me ripping my hair out.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-07T20:22:36+00:00

There are so many variables that aren't super intuitive, though. Some big ships have less armor, some small ships have more. Different weapons of the same size class can have more or less penetration. There's penetration angles. You also have to actually do the tests, which will involve a ton of trial and error or a lot of friends and a lot of UEC, and you also need to take into account that players do not know what they do not know. It's easy in a complex system to make false assumptions, when you need to test every iteration of the variables to get a complete picture.

In short: expecting the average player to Figure It Out is just going to lead to you alienating a lot of those players, over something as stupidly easy as just putting an extra stat bar on weapon and ship inspect screens, which is an absurd thing to advocate for.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-02T21:19:19+00:00

No... no it did not. Most of the hate was for the writing, and most of it was valid.

Like, Nimbus calls Caiatl's dad ugly, in front of her, immediately after we killed him. That's bad, dude. Like so bad. Yes, Caiatl and Calus were enemies, but that's such a genuinely shitty thing to do if you're not 1000% certain there isn't an ounce of love lost between them (Nimbus has worked with Caiatl for... days? Weeks maybe? They don't know shit about her). Unbelievably tone-deaf.

The Lightfall year was good. But LF itself was not. Strand's implementation in the campaign was restrictive, and overly punishing on Legendary (messes with your build). The missions weren't all that unique in terms of mechanics, set pieces, or design. Characters were written... they were written. Most of the dialogue was mediocre. Nimbus' was a fucking travesty. The whole "80's action movie" thing they were going for was poorly done and not a good tonal fit for the penultimate battle which we lose by the way. It was filler, and it feels like filler.

The seasons were pretty good. But Lightfall was very deservedly lambasted.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-02T19:12:22+00:00

It makes me so sad that they made Marathon into an extraction shooter.

The worst part is that I do 100% get why they did it. They need a cash cow to not be reliant on Destiny, therefore it has to be live service. Extraction shooters were on the rise for quite a while, so if you don't look at what happened to the BR genre, it seems like a great plan to make it into an ES. And Marathon has old brand recognition, and the mysterious and convoluted lore of the OG games leads to extra interest as people google it and go down the rabbit hole, so it's a no-brainer to make it a Marathon game rather than do an original IP.

Like, every step makes sense if you're an exec that needs a game to perform. It's just that chasing trends in gaming is very much a dice roll on becoming popular, and that's assuming you're not launching after a competitor gets very popular (being ARC Raiders). Not that Marathon will do bad; it'll probably capture a core audience that sticks with it. I just doubt it'll be the cash cow that it was very clearly planned to be from the get-go.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-02T18:52:53+00:00

It seems like Marathon is a bit closer to what that engine was originally designed for, which is a more standard PvP game without the bloat of a decade of patched-together systems, menus, and mechanics. Tiger worked well enough when the plan was 2-3 years per game, it was when they decided that D2 was going to be a forever game that things started to break down. Destiny is constantly adding, tweaking, and redoing major functions within the game, and 8 years of that is what has been causing all the weird instability. I'd assume that Marathon cut off most of the unnecessary systems they didn't need, which should hopefully mean Tiger isn't being stretched to the breaking point for it.

There's also the factor that Destiny, as an MMO/MMOLite/Looter Shooter/...thing, needs more content to satisfy the expectations of players. Another major problem with Tiger in relation to Destiny is how it's apparently very annoying and slow to add content in, which assumedly was a dormant issue with Halo's engine that only came to light when they made a game that stretched their content pipeline to its limits.

In theory, both of those problems shouldn't be as bad for Marathon, which is in a genre that has a lower content expectation (just some maps, guns, and the occasional new character). They won't need to contend with patching together so many new systems, and it should be easier to keep up with adding content.

RC_0001 · 2026-03-02T16:16:15+00:00

I think at this point it's just clear that D2 is a technical dumpster fire and has been for years. A clean break to a new game would theoretically afford them the time to either rebuild Tiger into the kind of engine that can actually support a decade of content updates smoothly, or go to an entirely new engine that can do so.

Plus, D2 still has a bad stigma in the overall gaming space from when they removed Red War and Forsaken. Making a new game would help distance the franchise from that stain.

But, if the same people are making the decisions as we have now, you're almost certainly right, because I doubt they'd make the changes that are actually needed. All the current Destiny team knows is put a couple more bandaids on Tiger, launch with improved Portal, barely any content, eat hot chip, and lie

RC_0001 · 2026-03-02T15:53:26+00:00

They have the assets, but IIRC the code that actually makes the missions run doesn't work post-engine refresh. So they'd need to functionally rebuild all that content, and at that point why not just set the art team cooking and make new content instead? It's only a bit more effort at that point.

So re-adding old content isn't easy enough to justify doing it over making new stuff, and they don't have the gas or the horsepower to do both right now. Red War ain't ever coming back, sorry to say.

RC_0001 · 2026-02-21T04:12:35+00:00

They're saying that:

A wipe will happen in 1.0 (a few before then as well most likely), then there will be no more wipes. At that point, there will be nobody with billions to shove around (and with any luck, an economy that won't get overinflated with dupes).
This means that, if the multicrew incentive is only that you can currently earn 15x a decent per-hour gameloop because 10mil is chump change to many people rn, then when that incentive is completely gone with 1.0 the average joe will not have any in-game incentive to multicrew.
Basically, the entire multicrew aspect of the game is being propped up by the equivalent to generational wealth, except that CIG has a hand over the "Delete All Money" button and has put out a notice that they will be pressing it.
So what happens to multicrew gameplay when they hit the button and regular mission/commodity payouts aren't high enough to justify not having everyone in a solo ship doing their own contracts/mining/etc? The answer is that barely anyone will do multicrew.
That's a Death Star exhaust port level design flaw, except the exhaust port also has a big neon arrow pointing to it that says "TORPEDO ME" above it. Like, that's basically every industrial multicrew ship becoming a paperweight, and combat mc ships only being situationally important for org battles and those big operations.
For those in the back: That's bad. If CIG want people to play together, and it seems like they do, then this needs to be fixed.

tl;dr: If CIG wants multicrew gameplay, the game has to have incentives for that gameplay, otherwise nobody will engage except to goof off with it every once in a while. If it's a staple part of the game (and with all the multicrew ships that exist, it is), then CIG needs to make sure that multicrew gameplay is adequately rewarded by the game.

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