Tag: Bungie

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Microsoft: The Apex Predator

Most people who follow games know that Microsoft, the recent apex predator of games, has been on a buying spree. They have been bolstering their portfolio to flesh out what they have to offer for their Game Pass service. In the beginning they started small but in recent months the purchases have been getting bigger and bigger. When it was announced that they had purchased Activision Blizzard to the tune of about $70 billion it gave me pause.

Microsoft: The Apex Predator
That’s a lot of big names

I love my Xbox and I am a devout Game Pass subscriber but the purchase announced in January made me wonder about the future of the industry. Microsoft just purchased “the” largest or one of the three largest video game publishers in the world. It is akin to Apple purchasing AMD or Intel. It is a huge purchase that has ramifications across the gaming spectrum.

After I heard the news, I wondered if the console wars had effectively been turned into a battle of East vs. West. Microsoft is working hard to gobble up all of the western developers in the Americas and Europe. Sony and Nintendo are left in Japan trying to hobble to keep up. I’m sure that Nintendo, as always, will be able to sit in their corner and bring in a tidy profit for their shareholders but Sony, who has been the king for so long, has been lagging behind recently. Their subscription service, while amazing in this author’s opinion, just can’t hold a candle to Xbox’s Game Pass.

It was announced this week that Sony had acquired Bungie but Bungie would continue to make games for all platforms. There are rumors that Sony has some other acquisitions that it wants to proceed with in the coming months. If this is true, can Sony keep up with Microsoft. Who knows?

It’s a start

I think the first thing Sony needs to do is get as many people as possible moved over to their PlayStation Now service. Microsoft did this by combining their Xbox Live service and their Game Pass service into a combo and then throwing the Xbox Live service out the window. PlayStation needs to look into doing the same thing with their services.

I pay for both PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now. I picked up PlayStation Now a few years ago on sale at a criminally low price so I am set up with that service for the next few years. I think for PlayStation 5 customers they need to get them started on a combined service as soon as possible. The fact is that people don’t want to be double billed by a company for something that they could provide for one price. And Microsoft proved that it doesn’t even matter if that price is high than they were originally paying, as long as the value is there.

Sony has been making some small acquisitions but overall Sony, not PlayStation, as a company just can’t compete because it’s business isn’t as healthy as Microsoft’s overall. Many of the various departments within Sony are not holding up against competitors which means that the PlayStation division doesn’t have as much money to throw at growing their business.

How will Sony keep up with Microsoft?

I believe that Japanese companies will band together to support Sony as a way to fend off Microsoft’s encroachment into their territory. Microsoft has always had a hell of a time getting the Xbox to make any headway in Japan and even with Game Pass, Japanese gamers haven’t gotten on board with the insane value that Game Pass provides. (Japanese Netflix also lags behind America because that isn’t how Japan watches TV usually.)

The Bungie acquisition looks good on paper to shareholder but overall it doesn’t give me hope that Sony is taking these moves by Microsoft as seriously as they need to be. I want to see a strong video game industry and moving towards services instead of boxes is where the industry is heading without question. We need Sony to step it up and become the HBO Max of video game services to Microsoft’s Netflix to keep this whole thing interesting. Right now Sony is looking more like Crackle. If that reference is still applicable in this day and age.

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Design vs. Function

Destint-Splash-screen-2
Simple

It has been a long time since I have fallen into a game like I have with Destiny. It does a lot right and it does a lot that infuriates me – with any game this is true. Esthetic design choices versus functional design choices are something that Destiny has made me think about recently. I love the way Destiny is designed, but there are parts of it that are hard to swallow.

Bungie chose to use a companion app to dispense information about their game. They aren’t the first developer to do so (Mass Effect, WOW, GTAV, etc.), but they are the first developer who has chosen to put so much information in the companion app. So much of the information is in the companion app that it makes me wonder “Are people getting enough out of this story?”

Paul's hunterDestiny is a self-styled MOFPS (Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter). Everything from the dailies to the raids show that this game is going after that MMO status. They aren’t making MMO money yet, but if they continue putting out these expansions they might at least look like Blizzard in that regard. They are definitely going after MMO playtime; they want people coming back everyday. Bungie has done all of this while staying safely within the FPS milieu with which they are so familiar.

Bungie has chosen an artistically minimalist strategy in it’s design for Destiny. The whole menu structure is exquisite when one thinks about how most games are continually assaulting the player to visit the store, check their achievements, or even change the options – something that is extremely functional yet would throw a kink into the design of Destiny’s opening menus.

In most MMOs, the player usually is updated the moment they log onto their server. They are shown updates to the game usually in blog posts or special bulletin messages. This information is really just the first stop before moving on to official or unofficial message boards.

I was playing Destiny before the launch of House of Wolves and I picked up a Decoherent Engram, as one does when they play Destiny. I went to the Tower to decypher the engram, but the Cryptarch didn’t even recognize the engram – nothing popped up when I entered into his shop screen.

destiny_settingsI thought the engram was glitched. I almost deleted the engram thinking that it was broken. Luckily, I went online and checked with my google overlords. I found an official message from Bungie on a Destiny message board that said they knew about the issue and we should keep the engrams until May 19th when the House of Wolves patch drops.I’m glad that I searched around for the information! I might have missed out on some sick gear.

Adding an info tab or a blog would kill the clean look of the menus, yet it would make the game more informative and user friendly. I am undecided if I want the I Love Bees-ification of game design to take hold in the industry any more than it has. I’m not sure if I want to comb the internet for all of the information behind Destiny. I like playing games. So, I really just want the game to tell me what’s going on within the game. This goes doubly for all of the story information in the Grimoire! There are huge story chunks written just for the Grimoire, and a lot of the audience will never see it.

Destiny is an evolving game. I am sure that it’s design will evolve as well. That also means that my opinions on it’s design will change.

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I Finally Finished Destiny

the traveler in the background
Gorgeous!

It has taken me a few days to collect my opinions of Destiny. Destiny, being such a divisive game, is hard to critique because each player was hoping for something that this game didn’t end up delivering. Once we all can agree that Destiny didn’t deliver the “goods” we had anticipated, this is where the player base divides.

One group are those who got “butt hurt” when the game didn’t pan out the way they had expected it to. Some of these people were hoping for the next Halo. Some of them were hoping for a Call of Duty replacement. There are a million different reasons why they turned against the game. Some of these people put too much hope in these games, they yearn for these games to become the next “it” game and they want to be there when “it is happening. It pains them when these games that they invested too much into turn out to be just another game.

The other group of people are, like me, people who expected something more but have decided that we are going to keep plugging away at Destiny and continue to try to mine more fun from the game. The issue with this is that it very much is like farming. It is laborious, but, when you do find that vein of gold in the rock, you know you are going to enjoy yourself for a little while longer.

browser version of grimoire
Why wouldn’t you use the app?

I think that what Destiny presents to it’s audience is very much a refinement of where we are in game design. Destiny is member of the nouveau shooter class, a class of shooter that focuses on daily online content in lieu of spending development costs on single player content. Destiny is like a race tuned Skyline GT-R; they have taken out a lot of the bloat and streamlined the product to be good at one single thing. For the car, they take out things like air conditioning, radio, seats, etc. For Destiny, which in my opinion is a detriment, they took out the story. What we were left with was a thin story that was peppered with bits of interesting plot points that, sadly, only accentuate the dearth of overall story in the game.

cool wolf legendary
A dire wolf?

I think Bungie made a great shooter. They made a great game that is fun to log on and shoot stuff. Each of the different guns controls very differently. The pistol is amazing. I haven’t really chosen my favorite among the assault/SMG type guns that fill out your main guns. Your secondary gun can either be a shotgun, a sniper rifle, or a charge/fusion rifle. I’m not the biggest fan of the fusion rifle, and it doesn’t sound like the rest of the community is either. The developers have made some changed recently to these guns. I never really like sniper very much – in any game. But, in Destiny, I love the sniper rifle. The shotgun is really nice as well. Finally, you also have a heavy weapon. You can choose either a chaingun or a rocket launcher. (I don’t think there is a third. At least I haven’t seen one yet.) Also, you have grenades and some class based abilities that are on a cooldown, etc. Blah, blah, blah.

Of course, Bungie made improvements on the tried and true first person shooter, with games like Titanfall, another member of the nouveau shooter class, and COD: Advanced Warfare breathing down on them they had to. I think that Bungie, with Destiny, is falling in line with EA and their approach with Titanfall; they recognized that people who play first person shooters play online much more than they play offline and most people don’t finish single player games. The data is there. These companies who see dwindling profits year-after-year and they are in a fight with Activision, who have a huge war chest of funds – from COD, and they are moving with the times and moving these games into a much more online focused market where, these companies believe, they don’t need to focus on story as much.

I think I am going to keep with Destiny for a little while longer. I am now level 23. I have been playing Crucible matches finally and it is fun playing against other Guardians. I am still combing through the Grimoire trying to find more information about this story – and where it went.

wide shot of enemies and guardians

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Activision CEO’s talk a lot of game; can they bring it?

destiny splash page
It's coming...

destiny splash page
It’s coming…

According to Gamespot.com, in a post-earnings financial call yesterday, two Activision Blizzard CEOs claimed that Bungie’s Destiny will become the “best-selling new video game IP in history.”

What does that even mean?

Bobby Kotick on Act/Bliz broad audience
Yeah…real broad

Nothing. It means that Activision Blizzard is letting it’s investors know that this basket that they have put a lot of their eggs into is a sturdy piece of equipment. When consumers get a load of what’s in Blizzact’s basket, the basket that was dipped in the same gold as Bobby Kotick’s balls, they are going to want to buy some of those badass eggs that the fucking Halo dudes made.

It means that Blizzact’s CEOs are convincing their investors that even if Call of Duty’s sales start to slip there is another property waiting in the ass of some golden chicken that is gonna crap out Blazzact’s next golden egg.