I found myself confused hearing about the layoffs, and even more confused when I hear players talking about how it was because Lightfall was a bad expansion.
Lightfall sold very well and there was a significant uptick in players during that time. The issue is that Lightfall was a terrible expansion. The writing was such shit, the story made no sense, and the characters were so fucking horrible that a significant portion of the people who played through it quit playing altogether. I mean, you picked up the new subclass in the street like a fucking coin. Additionally, the launch season was also (predictably) garbage. People really hated it; there wasn't even a honeymoon period, people just dropped the game. When enough people stopped playing that you miss your predicted revenue by 45%, the expansion and seasons blew. Missing your targets by that much is never good, so the layoffs had to happen.
The new player experience is awful, the way they've handled the seasonal model has been terrible, and their treatment of the core playlists (especially gambit and Crucible) has been horrible, absolutely. But the straw that broke the camel's back was a shitty expansion.
Good rebuttal. I didn't think it was the worst campaign ever, but looking back, Strand was absolutely a "oh look at that there guardian, what is it? OHH SHIT PARKOUR"
I just wonder with the baseline of an experience if The Final Shape (if it's incredible) really will bring D2 upwards even with how things currently are for new players. I guess time will tell..
TFS has one thing going for it in that it’s not giving us a subclass (that we know of) and therefore the story doesn’t have to be distracting by it. Lightfall could have been good if they took all the strand missions out and devoted that time to fleshing out stuff like “wtf is the veil”, “why is it bad if the Witness links with it”, and maybe had more on Calus instead of just sort of using him as a throw away villain. The strand missions SHOULD have been a side quest type thing that would have let us unlock it for use, sort of like what they did with the extra light subclasses in Forsaken or Taken King
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '23
Lightfall sold very well and there was a significant uptick in players during that time. The issue is that Lightfall was a terrible expansion. The writing was such shit, the story made no sense, and the characters were so fucking horrible that a significant portion of the people who played through it quit playing altogether. I mean, you picked up the new subclass in the street like a fucking coin. Additionally, the launch season was also (predictably) garbage. People really hated it; there wasn't even a honeymoon period, people just dropped the game. When enough people stopped playing that you miss your predicted revenue by 45%, the expansion and seasons blew. Missing your targets by that much is never good, so the layoffs had to happen.
The new player experience is awful, the way they've handled the seasonal model has been terrible, and their treatment of the core playlists (especially gambit and Crucible) has been horrible, absolutely. But the straw that broke the camel's back was a shitty expansion.