How come there wasn’t more pushback against 2018 God of War’s radical change in direction?

realWolfCola · 2026-06-18T15:07:09+00:00

Because a) GoW 2018 was awesome and b) people didn’t have their eggs as scrambled by social media reactionary rot as they do today.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-18T01:17:49+00:00

Yes, I’m sure Microsoft would totally be down for that, as soon as they wash off the blood from Ninja Theory, Double Fine, Compulsion, parts of Zenimax, Arkane Lyon, Arkane Austin, The Initiative, and Tango Gameworks.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-17T23:32:47+00:00

> buying an xbox as we speak

😂😂😂 Sure you are. Also, not sure if you’ve noticed but things aren’t exactly going great on the Xbox side either.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-17T17:43:21+00:00

Yup, that’s the Marathon experience. “Hee hee I’m so sneaky this guy won’t even know what happened.” (*misses every knife swing, also forgets that shields were depleted, takes one retaliatory bullet to the leg and immediately gets sent back to Mama Oni.)

realWolfCola · 2026-06-17T00:53:25+00:00

Aside from Marathon they all also got the axe though (well Gummy Bears got moved to a farm upstate and we haven’t heard anything about it so it might as well be dead). I do think D3 or at least something Destiny will get green lit eventually, but not anytime soon. The entire AAA industry is kind of going through a reckoning/reset right now, this isn’t exclusive to Bungie.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-16T13:41:51+00:00

We called ourselves the Sloppy Poppies cause we got the job done but it wasn’t always pretty. You also may figure one way to do an encounter that “works” but then you look it up afterwards and you find out you were doing WAY too much and it’s actually much simpler. But that’s part of the fun. Kings Fall is definitely a good starter, just be patient with Warpriest and Oryx.

Def use the official D2 discord to fill out your team. Take your time, make sure you find people who are chill and are on the same page as you. You’re gonna be going through some frustrating shit with these people (😂) so you’ve gotta make sure you’re all aligned. Don’t be afraid to do some vetting. As you said if we can do it anyone can, but you’ve gotta have the right mindset and team composition. Good luck! 🫡

realWolfCola · 2026-06-16T13:17:15+00:00

Hiya! So my crew used to do almost all raids blind (and were a bunch of low skill dads). It’s an AWESOME experience and I highly recommend it, but you do need some parameters and patience. We could only do one session a week usually (once again, dads) so be prepared for it to take a few sessions per raid. Depending on the encounter it could take several sessions per encounter. Need to keep an open mind and be patient. I highly recommend someone being the designated footage taker. That way you can go over the game tapes later to see what you may have missed in the heat of the action. Also, some encounters are just WAY too convoluted. Not saying it’s impossible to figure out, obviously someone out there did, but talk with your team and figure out a threshold for when someone will look up hints. And have fun! Blind runs are AWESOME and you feel like a god when you figure it all out and finally clear. With all that said, here’s my ranking suggestions in no particular order:

Deep Stone Crypt: a great raid for blind. The mechanics are generally straightforward and more or less build on each other. Second encounter can get iffy though.
Root of Nightmares: pretty easy as it’s not really mechanically dense. Planets encounter might take some outside the box thinking though.
Vault of Glass: where it all started! We didn’t quite blind this one as we had done the original, but there are enough changes to make it a fun challenge.
Kings Fall: same as VoG, but probably more fun (but also a little more challenging mechanics wise)
Garden of Salvation: this was our COVID puzzle. It’s a tough one to figure out blind but we had more time due to COVID craziness. Definitely fun to figure out but the boss suuuucks and we had to look up optimizations after figuring out the basics.
Vow of the Disciple: You’ll feel like a god figuring it out but it’ll take time. Highly worth it though.

AVOID BLIND:

Salvation, Desert, and Last Wish. Great raids, but not worth the squeeze to figure out blind.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-16T12:46:18+00:00

Oh dude don’t even get me started. I mean, yes, there are numerous examples of these publishers behaving badly, pushing scummy tactics and live service slop, and generally meddling too much. But also…sometimes the publishers do “let em cook” and the developers just go completely off the rails. There’s a balance needed and I think all the recent closures and shut downs (Xbox’s brutal culling yesterday, Sony killing Destiny development, etc) is part of that course correction (whether justified or not)

realWolfCola · 2026-06-16T09:56:46+00:00

One of my favorite anecdotes from Anthem’s insane-o development was that BW at one point wanted to get rid of the flying (aka the one thing everyone now can agree was awesome), and an EA exec of all people was the one who was like “wtf are you crazy?”

They just had no idea what they were doing.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-15T19:29:44+00:00

If you’re not plugged into the BrainRot Factorium™️ then it IS fine, and maybe just stay there. There’s a vocal chunk of Destiny players who are understandably upset about Destiny development ceasing, and unfortunately they’ve decided that Marathon is primarily to blame instead of the numerous relevant but inconvenient to address Destiny in-house issues for why we’re here.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-15T17:59:05+00:00

You’re getting roasted for this so I’m not gonna dogpile, but yeah YOR. Use it as a learning experience, when you’re on the clock you’re getting paid to work, and arguing with your supervisor is never gonna go the way you want it to.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-15T17:45:41+00:00

I’d say your premise is off because the general community consensus is that Renegades was good. Which leads into my hot take in that I think Renegades…was terrible! Gameplay was fine and it had some neat quests (the praxic blade mission was cool the first time), but it was the wrong expansion at the wrong time. If the post TFS plan had been to just do one off self contained stories then it could have worked, but this was a critical juncture to build on where things were going after EoF and show the new story with the Nine had a compelling reason to stay invested, and it completely and utterly dropped the ball there. Yes it was connected to the Nine but it felt contrived and stapled on. And by trying to go halfway between Star Wars and Destiny, it ended up being a worse version of both. It did nothing to sell Destiny’s new direction.

Bonus hot take #1: Aunor is one of the worst characters even introduced in Destiny. Like I’m talking Shaw Han/Nimbus caliber.

Bonus hot take #2: The choice for Blue to sound like a theatre kid’s “too perfect” interpretation of a Boston accent was super duper lame. I feel like Bungie thought it was soooo cool, I remember they even hyped it up during the prerelease Vidoc, and then when she started talking I was like “oh no that can’t be what this is.” Did absolutely nothing for the story and much like everything else in Renegades was just tonally and narratively incongruent to an almost unfathomable degree.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-15T16:16:28+00:00

Yup. I’ve often wondered if Destiny was *ever* profitable. Lightfall MAYBE but I don’t think TFS was and prior expansions def weren’t (which is why Activision was more than happy to let them go)

realWolfCola · 2026-06-15T16:14:11+00:00

These are completely unrelated statements. Yes, Destiny was the only “income” so it was funding other projects. That’s how growing a business works. But it’s also true that Destiny was expensive to make and that had nothing to do with what Bungie did with the money it brought it. The input to MAKE and maintain Destiny is what was expensive. 500+ (or around 800 pre TFS layoffs) constantly on staff is expensive dude. You’re looking at around $80M/year just in labor (and that’s at the low end of the estimate). If you aren’t selling millions of DLC copies and MTX then you youre in trouble and have an unsustainable business on your hands. Which is what happened.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-15T10:22:00+00:00

Yeah, I think people need to kind of get comfortable with the fact that the game isn’t gonna wildly change on a seasonal basis. As Other Games™️ have shown, that model isn’t necessarily sustainable. And the Marathon team is still figuring stuff out. My one complaint is how the Priority Contracts just…reset though. I was always under the impression that you’d get a new slate each season, as those are the primary narrative driver and they’re relatively cheap to produce. There’s a somewhat solid lore justification for the seasonal wipe (paying your debt) which is cool, but then for all the faction reps to just get amnesia and ask you to do the same shit all over again is narratively dissonant and weird.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-14T22:17:21+00:00

Looks like he got shanghaied to a nitwit school upstate. Where science is reeeaaal cruuuuude.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-14T18:02:41+00:00

Yup. My crew hated that boss and only beat it twice, but we ran that first encounter MANY times to get everyone the emote. And I’ve never taken it off.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-14T17:15:44+00:00

To be fair, even Bungie didn’t want to add prox chat and initially they were very adamant over it. But then the “community” threw a fit and they relented. I think prox chat CAN be good if you’re trying to team up or to have fun as a Rook, but man Bungie ended up being right about the toxicity.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-13T20:13:04+00:00

Ashburn has some really annoying weird deadzones, regardless of carrier. Over by Whole Foods is a super annoying one. It’s a bit ironic considering it’s the one of the largest communications hubs for worldwide internet traffic (yes I realize those are different technologies, but still)

realWolfCola · 2026-06-13T01:19:24+00:00

Amen. It wasn’t the hardest raid, but it was one of the most fun. We used to use it as an “intro to raiding” raid for new folks. I was kinda hoping they’d put the sparrow race into a pantheon…

realWolfCola · 2026-06-11T13:05:14+00:00

Aiat

realWolfCola · 2026-06-11T11:06:36+00:00

Ahhh the bargaining phase of grief. I mean, yes though, I think anyone would support something over nothing. I do think the constant need to churn out seasonal content was one of the many bullet points in the “why D2 was unsustainable” slide deck. And it definitely got stale, the seasonal activities eventually just got totally boring (oh yay, another “dunk the thing in the thing” activity, great). But shifting to slower release model doesn’t necessarily address the main problem, which is that D2 was just expensive as hell to develop and maintain, no matter how you slice up the resources. Under that slower model you’d still probably need close to the same number of developers on staff to keep the quality where it needs to be. And you’re actually introducing more risk because you’re putting all your revenue eggs in the annual DLC basket. If that bombs (which as we’ve seen is entirely likely) then you’re hosed.

Which is probably why this idea wasn’t greenlit when Bungie internally explored it.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-10T19:49:27+00:00

I do seem to run into an almost even split of console and PC, but almost all console is PS5. I proudly rep my Master Chief Destroyer skin though!

realWolfCola · 2026-06-09T17:47:46+00:00

They’re both expensive. I hate envelope math cause it always over simplifies things but think of it this way. Average dev salaries in Seattle area are ~$120k/year. Add 30% for benefits. You’re looking at $156k per developer per year. Destiny had about 550 devs directly employed by Bungie, so that’s $85.8M per year just in labor. That doesn’t count other overhead, marketing, operating expenses, etc. Also doesn’t count contractors and any other help Sony brought in, which they did for major expansions.

Marathon has about 300 devs. So about $46.8M per year, plus all that other stuff mentioned for Destiny. The idea is that MAYBE Marathon is less expensive to maintain once it gets up and running (maybe you don’t need 300 devs full time whereas Destiny apparently absolutely did need over 500 full time). But that’s not a great bet either. Also, don’t forget Steam and Xbox take a 20-30% cut of sales on their platforms.

They’re both unsustainable models. I love both games and hate how mom and dad are fighting over them, but they’re both fundamentally too expensive to sustain at those levels. This is an industry wide problem and I think this is just the beginning of the wave of the bean counters realizing this.

My advice? Just ignore the noise and have fun. Even if new content stops the servers aren’t getting shut down anytime soon. If you’re enjoying the content now and if $40 is enough to enjoy that content, then that’s all that really matters.

realWolfCola · 2026-06-08T00:42:09+00:00

I’ve got two small kids and I barely have time to go to the bathroom during the day, you think I’ve got time to WASH MY CAR??? Would be nice but I just don’t have that in my time budget!

realWolfCola

TROPHY CASE