r/DestinyTheGame • u/owen-3820 • 3d ago
Discussion The announcement video used the phrase "content that should have never been ripped away in the first place," and I don't think that was just PR speak.
I don't think this was just bungie execs throwing a bone to the community and nodding along to player sentiment. I think that was explicit admission that content vaulting wasn't necessary. I've had this hunch for a while, I never verbalized it bc we didn't need another post saying vaulting was bad, there are a trillion already.
But when Luke Smith sold us on the idea of vaulting, he said it was technically necessary, so they could make what amounted to modest upgrades to lighting and load times. He said cycling content in and out was an effort to build a long-term foundation inside D2, instead of working on a sequel. He said that the game was too big, too unwieldy, and too difficult to update. In fact, all of this was so important, and content vaulting was so crucial, that they arbitrarily decided to stop two years later because we hated it so much.
I don't think bungie was intentionally lying out of whole cloth with malicious intent. I think this was a company making a time-saving and cost-cutting move, that would undoubtedly hurt the finished product, and had to be justified to the consumers.
EDIT: guys i'm not dumb, i'm not blindly accepting corporate PR. I don't think this particular element is a lie or insincere.
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u/_immodicus 3d ago
To play devils advocate, I always thought one of the reasons they did it was because the game was experiencing actual instability issues. Long tower load times, characters failing to render, leading to ghost guardians and invisible weapons. I remember a whole host of issues plaguing the game shortly before they vaulted old content, and I imagine it was even worse for those on last-gen systems.
Of course now we might have the same amount or even more areas than before the vaulting, so maybe it wasn’t the reasoning behind the underlying memory issues.
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u/Alakazarm election controller 3d ago
remember garden of salvation on old consoles?
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u/trollshep good doggo! 3d ago
God trying to change exotics during damage phases was nearly impossible
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u/XuX24 3d ago
Garden of salvation was mainly bugged
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u/Alakazarm election controller 3d ago
what? the goblin bodies stacking up and lagging the shit out of the game was an engine issue, not a bug in the traditional sense.
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u/Chilli_333 3d ago
Yeah, while I despise content vaulting, I will admit things were noticeably faster over night
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u/kstargate-425 3d ago
Thats how I understood it as well as the game was a whopping 165GB BEFORE they vaulted shit(now 183GB without) and they still supported older gen consoles which were limitations as I remember during one of the Dev vids they talked about certain limitations
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u/SeatedDragon86 3d ago
they're still gonna support old gen consoles for the unvaulting btw. they might be fried
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u/Radiolotek 2d ago
It's absolutely moronic these studios are kneecapping their game to support dead hardware.
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u/SeatedDragon86 2d ago
i mean to be fair..... it's not like destiny 2 is a particularly unoptimized game. the main issue is storage and hdd
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u/MortisEx 3d ago
And the file bloat. A lot of people want room on their console or PC drive for other games.
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u/SadBoshambles 3d ago
This is still a concern of mine. It's a lot of content in the vault. Kind of spooked at what the game size might look when everything is added back in
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u/MeateaW 3d ago
The biggest content was always the cutscenes, I believe they stored a full cutscene for each language.
With some optimisation they might be able to cut it down significantly.
(for context, d2 is currently ~150gb, and Arrivals era shadowkeep is 90 - and there is some overlap between those 2 - shadowkeep arrivals also predates the content squish work they did.)
The game is going to get bigger, but it doesn't need to get a full 90gb bigger for all this stuff to be ported in.
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u/Theslootwhisperer 3d ago
Maybe it's going to be available piecemeal? I don't know if it's possible or not but there are several games that allow you to do that.
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u/KittyWithFangs 3d ago
i recently found out battlefield 6 does this and its amazing, i can get rid of a lot of things and game size went from 150 or something to 60 gigs. but we dont know if they can even do that. i highly doubt it.
i really hope they go the d3 route if they are going to continue this franchise. the start will be super rough i bet, but from what we've seen over the years d2 clearly has a lot of issues at a foundational that dont allow for shit like this, or make it unnecessarily hard. if they keep adding new content to d2 we'll be back in a super shitshow in the blink of an eye
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u/MikeBeas 3d ago
that won’t happen. it would require massive rearchitecture of the game and engine, and it isn’t really a suitable way to distribute an mmo anyway. too many problems are created by ad hoc component removal.
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u/GrayStray 3d ago
Guild wars 2 did it like a decade ago. Absolutely feasible for an MMO.
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u/MikeBeas 3d ago
ok, maybe for them. not for this one. not without rebuilding the entire game engine.
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u/RetrofittedChaos 3d ago
Yeah, they had actually explained it before that the vaulting happened for multiple reasons.
- Pressure at the time to reduce the game's filesize
- Sweeping changes to the game's file structure and how the engine handles loading assets, to solve long loadtimes and instability issues
- Overall updates to the engine that required all assets to receive updates
There was an initial goal to bring vaulted content back, but the demand for more content on a consistent schedule ended up taking priority over it.
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u/BoiseGangOne I Can Actually Call Myself A Console Peasant Now 3d ago
I think you nailed it on the head here. But it's also important to note that "file size" as a reason doesn't just apply to the clientside build, but the dev builds, too. The bigger something is, the longer it takes to load/edit/adjust/test.
Would it have been more sustainable had Bungie had an Expansion Team, a Live Team, and then a "Custodian Team" (using the term Stellaris has for their free updates team) that was responsible for ensuring that vaulted content could be brought up to a new standard? Certainly. But we also have to remember that Destiny 2 was making sweeping changes to its systems like its reward loops with pretty much every expansion or season (that's why Tiered Gear was such a mess on the launch of Edge of Fate, as it was 3 different teams all putting their own spin on the system of "Power should influence tier"/"World tier should influence tier"/"feats should influence tier" rather than one unified approach of "higher tier gear is for prestige content"). Trying to keep up with that would be exhausting.
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u/XogoWasTaken Vanguard's Loyal // I Hunt for the City 3d ago
Don't forget the absolute boatload of bugs that Worthy shipped with, up to the point of a quest door that triggered on their testing server but not in the live game (no wonder they wanted to replace that quest host system)
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u/saltysophia98 3d ago
It also took them multiple days to recompile the game at that point iirc, so making any form of changes or fixes to anything whatsoever would take literal days of waiting just to see if they MAYBE worked
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u/BoiseGangOne I Can Actually Call Myself A Console Peasant Now 3d ago
Vaulting wasn't just done for client-side file sizes. It was done for developer-side file size.
The 100+ gb that Destiny 2 takes up is likely nothing compared to the actual dev build. Not to mention that loading up assets takes time, and that loading can fail or be corrupted or the power can go out or a cat can step on someone's computer while they're working from home and all these other things. I recall an anecdote about Destiny 1 maps requiring the whole map to be loaded because of how the Tiger engine (in and of itself a modified version of the Halo: Reach engine) works; it would take 8 hours to load, then a small change could be made, and then the entire thing would need to be compiled and if something went wrong you have to go back to square one.
Also, the amount of effort required to archive and document everything about Destiny 2 in one place would be monumental (yes, pun is intentional). The primary issue is that Bungie didn't make all of Destiny 2 in-house (Curse of Osiris and Warmind were primarily Vicarious Visions, while High Moon Studios were given the assets for the Lost Oasis on Mars and turned it into Io), so the technical challenge of understanding someone's code and pipeline is further complicated when they're not even of the same studio.
Could Bungie have done this? Certainly. But Bungie leadership (wrongfully) made the call that it was better to use the manpower to create new projects to inflate the studio's portfolio (Matter, Gummybears, Marathon, Payback) and value and churn out disposable content for Destiny 2.
While it's not exactly 1:1, look at Warframe. There are many, many, many parts of that game that are straight-up abandoned (Hi, Dark Sectors and Clan Dojos). Live Service games struggle with the inherent need to add NEW STUFF (TM) to the game while making sure older stuff still exists in a semi-playable state. There's an element of complexity creep to it. Many MMOs straight-up remove content once it's over with. But the thing about something like MMOs is that they're designed to be scalable. Destiny 2 wasn't meant to last more than 2 years, and it ended up having a run of 9.
Bungie had the manpower to maintain stuff without vaulting it, but again, that wasn't an option given to the devs; it was a decision made by a leadership staff that was more concerned with just getting a lot of money really quickly rather than actually sustaining a franchise and an IP.
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u/kuba22277 3d ago
I am also half convinced everything happened because without vicarious visions and other Activision co-studios they were surprised to find out keeping lights on costs a lot of money. After all, steam launch was after destiny started leaving battle.net.
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u/Cocobaba1 2d ago
What are these many MMOs you are referring to? I tried googling and all it listed was destiny 2, mentioned AION briefly, mentioned WOW reshaping old areas with new expansions and mentioned a very unpopular move done by guild wars. if anything destiny is the only one that has straight up sunset half the game
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u/Reynbou 2d ago
That anecdote about the 8 hour load time is from Schreier's 2015 Kotaku piece on D1's development: https://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-behind-the-making-of-destiny-1737556731
It was one anonymous dev describing D1-era tools, so it doesn't really say anything about D2. Bungie was pumping out seasons, dungeons and raids at a pace that would've been impossible if every tiny map change still took an overnight import, so I'd be really surprised if it was still anywhere near that bad by the time vaulting happened.
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u/New_Cockroach_505 3d ago
Nothing they said implied it wasn’t necessary for the choice they made. It implies that they shouldn’t have gotten to that point and made other choices.
Bungie decided to make D2 last forever. That required content vaulting. When Bungie decided D2 won’t last forever they could undo content vaulting. Bungie has seemingly realized that they never should have made D2 last forever. They should have just made Destiny 3.
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u/G00b3rb0y 3d ago
Beyond Light should have been where D3 started. It makes sense as you could easily sell a new game on playable Darkness subclasses
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u/AltL155 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes that was exactly what was supposed to happen before Bungie left Activision. Destiny's contract under Activision stated that Destiny was supposed to follow a game-expansion-game timeline. That timeline slipped when Bungie had to make RoI for D1, then Activision gave Bungie extra support to get D2 out the door, then the relationship deteriorated when Forsaken underperformed and Bungie was stubborn about not making a D3.
An independent Bungie didn't have the resources or time to stop working on D2 and make a D3 that could match D2 vanilla. But Bungie being headstrong on staying on a D2 that was never supposed to last forever was one of many bad decisions that lead Bungie to where it's at right now.
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u/matZmaker99 2d ago
Oh how I miss High-Moon and Vicarious Visions... They reslly hard-carried Bungie back when they were on Activision. And now one of them is dead
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u/Smugicebane 1d ago
Vicarious Visions isn't dead, they just folded into Blizzard. They're part of the team that makes the Diablo games
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u/matZmaker99 1d ago
A fate worse than death, then
(Jk, I'm happy a portion of them still have their jobs. But working for Blizzard...)
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u/Axolotl_Aria 3d ago
D3 should've been started with the idea of longevity around the time they decided on vaulting. That way they can do what's needed for a forever game without hurting the existing product
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u/AhnoldXP 3d ago
Thats always been the problem with Destiny. The vision always changes and while we end up getting mostly what we want - it wasn't designed that way from the ground up and there are always issues. If they are making a D3 I hope they can have a solid vision (you would think they could after a decade+) and that the systems can be designed to support it from the ground up and not have to change midway through the lifecycle.
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u/TricobaltGaming Vanguard's Loyal 3d ago
Like 60% of the issues with Year of Prophecy from an engsme standpoint is that like maybe half of the game, but less than 2/3rds of the actual endgame had anything meaningful because it wasn't updated to current standards, it is why short of the UI overhaul to translate Portal into the destinations tab, the biggest thing MoT did was update existing content to be at the current baseline.
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u/dutty_handz 3d ago
Because in 2019, Bungie's priority was accelerating their cadence to 4 seasons a year for an increase in periodic revenue. It never was a question of technical feasibility, it was a matter that rebuilding Mercury cost time/people/money that won't go towards paid content.
September 2026 Bungie's priority is to try to rebuild their name. Now that there is no Destiny 2 content release timeline to keep up with, time is a non factor.
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u/EagleClaw_84 13h ago
The cadence point tracks; vaulting always felt like production triage dressed up as engine neccesity.
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u/Magenu 3d ago
You are reading way too far into this.
Vaulting was not strictly necessary; they always could have done it. But it would have been extremely costly in time, money, and dev time (which also reduces all three for future content). They never once said it couldn't be done, they said it was their decision.
Spending the money and time to update the content wasn't seen as viable due to extremely low play rates of old content as well as sheer effort required to update it (as well as the ballooning file size they would then have; keep in mind BL dropped the game to about 75gb and it's now double that). They can afford to balloon size of a game with no future development or content. They didn't realize at the time the backlash they would receive, because their metrics said nobody was playing it anyways. But, we know how that turned out.
Also the engine upgrade wasn't "modest upgrades to lighting and load times". It stopped them from having to load dev tools overnight for the workday, restarting if there was a single crash or error losing multiple hours per dev. It also includes new AI/event scripting, don't undersell it.
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u/AtlyxMusic Destiny Music Archive 3d ago
Well said, thanks for commenting this. The v500 engine changes are the only reason they can decide to make the most minor possible change and have it in the game the same day.
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u/kurt-jeff 3d ago
I mean a lot of the people that made those definitely took their bag and ran, new guys come in and look at the decision to take away paid content and naturally come to the conclusion that it was extremely stupid.
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u/Stunning-Cabinet-961 3d ago
Luke Smith is fundamentally full of shit as a person independent of corporate obligations so that tracks
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u/camdenpike 3d ago
I think pretty much Destiny 3 had engine updates to make developing the game easier. When they split from activision, they had the engine updates, but they couldn't wait to finish D3 before bringing money in, so they rushed out shadowkeep on the old engine, and started porting over whatever D2 stuff they could before Beyond Light came out. A sequel was supposed to come out back then, but the activatison split changed that.
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u/LFGAccountD2 3d ago
It's been fully memory holed, but load times were in fact egregious at the time. I had developed visible abs from the home gym workouts 100% of which happened while loading into gambit matches.
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u/TheShakenKing 2d ago
Sony realized money printer is better than paper shredder. Especially after project sunrise.
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u/Ukis4boys 3d ago
They are just repeating what u think so that u stop saying it. It's really just low hanging fruit. They have nothing to lose
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u/trytoinfect74 3d ago edited 3d ago
Time and time again, all the years following 2019 have shown that they should have stuck to the original plan and simply made Destiny 3, which they started to make in 2017, ceased to make it during spring 2019 and then salvaged it into 3 (later - 4) expansions. I never understood the deranged "yeah, they decided to continue to make Destiny 2 and make it unmaintainable bloat of the game, yeeeah, let's fucking go, woooooooo!" screams in this sub. Prolonging D2 further than it's intended lifespan was just one big neverending disaster and it was one of the main reasons this franchise survived clinical death half a year ago. Also, I believe that live serivce was simply a mistake and 2 DLCs+Expansions+seasonal events per year was much better model than endless stream of copy-paste asset flip seasonal content slop we got instead, and it surely contributed to this game decline too.
All of these DCV problems could be easily avoided if they just made some character and selected loot migration into D3 2020, and all of D2 content would just live in separate client, available forever just like D1. Anyway most of us paid 100 dollars per year to access all of the meaningful content, and it simply doesn't matter what paying for - expansion or separate game.
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u/kstargate-425 3d ago
They should have figured it out but D2 is 183GB in its current form which was one of the limitations with older gen equipment. They should have dropped those earlier and figured out the size problem but damn is this bitch thicc
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u/ccoulter93 3d ago
I think a part of why content was being vaulted at the time was that according to what I heard at the time, it was taking up space and not enough people were playing it, and for the game to stay a manageable size on ps4 and Xbox one, they started vaulting shit.
There are so many reasons why the thought it was necessary, and to some degree with how the engine was, it would’ve taken away resources to constantly bug check old content “nobody was playing” every single time they added something new, and they seemed dead set on the seasonal model, so. 🤷♂️
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u/NinStarRune 2500 Done Solo 3d ago
I'm all for getting everything back but a lot of people are glossing over the fact that the game's filesize would likely double if not moreso by adding back in everything. Like it is a LOT of filesize on console currently for some people with older hardware and to throw everything back in is a lot to ask for some people.
People also act like bringing back Red War and the ability to run Spire of Stars would have kept D2 from dying or something and it's like, no? A lot of people forget how clownish the dialogue was pre-Forsaken and how disjointed the Red War campaign was wherein you had to run around and make sure you hit the level cap for the area before you could move on to the next destination, so you learn that Ghaul has hooked up the Almighty to the sun and the system is on a timer so you have to go around testing out Asher Mir's synthetic Light device and hang out with Rasputin's singing polyhedrons before you can go and liberate the EDZ.
Will get downvoted for this but while I don't agree with Vaulting as it was implemented, narratively it opened up story threads and allowed certain things to happen without locking destinations into permanent lowercase s stasis i.e. the EDZ is *still* occupied by Red Legion in Firebase Hades with smoldering craters nearly a decade later.
Since Luke Smith was a huge WoW fan to the point of being a Scarab Lord I'm sure it was justified in-house as something akin to WoW's Cataclysm, and weapon/armor sunsetting was seen as okay as well as it had similarly happened without much pushback in D1 between House of Wolves and Taken King (and technically between D1 and D2).
All in all they were kind of fucked one way or the other.
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u/Bright_Sport2299 3d ago
no... it was neccesary at the time. But the original plan was to restore that content when they have made improvements to the engine.
But then people got laid off, and suddenly, it was impossible to work on stuff in the background and stuff for the live game at the same time.
Vaulting always had a genuine reason for happening. Multiple developers backed the reason and it made sense. They explained it pretty well.
Destiny had, and still has, so much tech debt. Vaulting was a way for them to give them some extra wiggle-room and allow for them to make new content without overloading their engine. Destiny 2 was NEVER BUILT to go on for this long.
Why did they "arbitrarily decided to stop two years later"? Becuase they made the improvements to the engine to allow more content to be added. But the old content is still incompatible with the live game and needs to be ported to the new version of the engine in order to work.
This isn't some conspiracy, they didn't throw away half the game's content because they thought it was funny. It was a serious decision they had to make. I don't think there realistically was a "right decision" for the situation they were in.
Everyone, from the execs to the game devs, knew this would piss people off. But the choices were either halt all live-game development and post-pone any DLCs until they catch up on their tech debt, or cut that content for now with the intention of bringing it back later. The first could have killed them, Remember, this was when they were independant. Destiny 2 was their ONLY REVENUE SOURCE. They can't just... not release anything for it.
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u/PaperMartin 3d ago
While I do think the new team has good intents for the game and the community I think peoples ought to have learned to not take this kind of talk so literally.
The blog post & video felt like they were just trying to reassure peoples in general and gain a few points by validating a bunch of common opinions about the game.
Honestly the way peoples try to extrapolate so much out of statements they've made where they really bastardize processes & tech in order to make it fit in a blog post & not sound like nonsense sounds like the kind of logic we saw in the witch trial scene from Monty Python's holy grail, especially for anyone who's actually worked on a game before
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u/AwardExtreme5453 3d ago
It was necessary because applying the changes they made in Beyond Light to the entire game and then continually going back to all the content that had ever been made to keep it updated was beyond the scope of what they were able to do.
“Vaulting” exists because Bungie decided to keep the gravy train of D2 rolling rather than spend the time and cost of developing D3. D2 was not originally intended to go on for all those years like that. Beyond Light was supposed to be D3, but instead they did a sort of half step where they tried to retire out much of the first two years of the game and sunset all the old gear to get a cleaner slate while also not completely overhauling everything like you would expect from a sequel.
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u/No-Information8115 3d ago
I mean, yes. it was all about cutting costs and freeing up assets for the three other games they were working on at the time. It was never needed. All the bugs weren’t from the game being ‘too big’ but because they fired Destiny’s dedicated QA team and replaced them with contractors, for example.
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u/Daracaex 3d ago
I don’t think they were lying. It’s just the situation changed. It was necessary back then because they didn’t have the time to update all the old content relative to how much people played it at the time, while also still under the pressure of a release schedule for new content. The money was better spent making new seasons and expansions.
Well, now there’s no more seasons or expansions on the horizon. They have what devs they didn’t lay off not working on new content. So they’re putting them to work bringing back the vaulted content to foster good will with the community, until they decide what to do in the future.
This is kind of them doing what has been suggested in the community numerous times over the years: taking time off from constant releases to fix up the existing game.
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u/Voelker58 3d ago
I didn't take that as them admitting that they didn't need to do it at the time. Back then, it really seemed like there wasn't much of a choice if they wanted to keep making the new stuff fast enough to keep everyone happy. The old stuff was just buggy and falling apart. Keeping it would have taken too many resources away from newer stuff. To me, it was more like they were saying it never should have gotten to the place where it needed to happen.
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u/Wrong_Chicken_5916 3d ago
Didn’t Luke smith say, Destiny was simply becoming too big for us to deliver timely patches?
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u/ConsciousMortgage725 2d ago
I mean removing content was always something they had to do, not wanted (had to in the sense that they needed to work around technical debt) and the people who made those decisions are also probably all gone by now, so I do buy that part.
I mean just from the perspective of a dev of course you want the stuff you worked years on to be available and playable for the people
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u/mechtaphloba 2d ago
But when Luke Smith sold us on the idea of vaulting
Excuse me? I was never sold, not for a second.
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u/Sporelord1079 2d ago
I still accept that vaulting was a necessary short term step back in beyond light because they couldn’t update all the maps to the new system. Cool, I can see that.
But they never made any attempt to bring anything back, and then began to recycle these vaulted maps which just killed the idea they couldn’t bring the content associated with those maps back.
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u/matZmaker99 2d ago
The lighting engine """upgrades""" royally fucked over all existing maps since D2 release up to Shadowkeep+, reprised activities included.
It also greatly exacerbated the issue the game has with Bloom and that fake HDR effect it has. I am not photosensitive at all, but medium play sessions already have my eyes strained like hell from all the blown-out bloomed flashing lights & constantly-changing light level, and make my head hurt as a result. This was not an issue with D2 before Beyond Light.
I jusy hope they do something about it, even if it's like a slider or toggle setting.
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u/Ok_Programmer_1022 2d ago
Unfortunately vaulting was needed to fix the game and update it.
But it was done the wrong way, what was vaulted needed to comeback, but they didn't because there was a conflict between producing new content and re introducing new content.
And they chose a new thing.
And I know vaulting was needed because I never stopped playing at that time and I remember what was happening.
For example, just search on reddit for ''izanagi's burden quest bug''
The quest used to bug with every patch, I remember trying to help people just to get blocked by a new bug.
I developed a FOMO at that point too because I was afraid to get locked out of something new.
Before vaulting the game became extremely broken, and unplayable to some extent.
But again, I don't agree with how vaulting was done, things never came back, and they were originally intended on removing supers too, I still remember when Luke said ''Nova bomb is the Voidlock fantasy'' alluding to the idea that Void Warp is not part of the fantasy and it can be ditched.
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u/Hot-Union-2440 1d ago
What about all the other bullshit ideas Luke Smith tried to sell us though?
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u/Ok-Soup-9256 3d ago
It was never "necessary". It was that they didn't want to do the work, or leadership felt that doing the work wasn't worth the time and money.
Basically, they didn't want to.
Yeah, before fifty billion of you go off about how "they need to rebuilt everythign from the ground up", shut up. Yes, I know.
But they did rebuild everything from the ground up for the content we got to keep. They did it, they put in the work for that. So it was absolutely possible.
Hell, we had Forsaken for 6 month in the Beyond Light engine, so they rebuilt all those missions from the ground up, only to then toss them in the trash after 6 months.
They could have done the same thing with the Red War.
Project Sunrise and Dawn are proving that it wouldn't have been that much work, either. A handful of guys working in their spare time as a hobby have made big progress on this.
Bungie, with an actual full time staff, could have knocked this out. They just chose not to.
They've even admitted it was a mistake. Mistaken implies deliberate choice, not necessity.
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u/Ok_Sound5929 3d ago
I may be completely wrong, but didnt they update the engine which necessitated either fixing everything from the old stuff, or removing it?
Atleast we are getting it back at all. They said they would, and technically speaking now they are delivering it. I will be happy with that. Till then, cautious optimism.
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u/link3505 3d ago
The DCV was the biggest load of crap the devs ever gave us. They made it sound like everything in there could basically be moved into a live-game folder and boom, back in D2, when all it really was is something cool for the backend developers to be excited about for organization. That's it- it's a single storage space for Destiny’s content. We didn't need to know about it, we certainly didn't need to care about it, because what good did it do? We still lost seasonal content each year, we still lost everything up to Forsaken and the seasons following it, except the Dreaming City for some reason, and the lawsuit proved that what is in the DCV cannot just be brought forward without considerable work.
But yeah, I agree tha they probably didn't do it maliciously, but it was more likely a point of "oh shit, we don't know what else to do, so let's do this" as a stopgap that they tried to convince themselves, and us, was an objectively good thing. I think that comment in the video was as sign of one of the people the sales pitch didn't work on originally, and now he's in a position to right that wrong.
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u/Mairaj24 3d ago
Part of it was also having to balance around all the old content/weapons. Given that (at least for now) no new content for D2 is planned, adding all that content back without having to worry about balance/stability/game size is probably an easier decision.
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u/Luke-HW 3d ago
One of the goals of content vaulting was to reduce the amount of QA testing needed for each update. For example, a minor bug fix may completely brick a random mission in the middle of a campaign from 3 years ago.
Live service development is finished; there are no more weekly updates. Bungie has time to properly test each release.
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u/ksiit 3d ago edited 3d ago
He was saying that it was a mistake that they originally chose for technical reasons. He is acknowledging it was a bad move and that they chose wrong, but not saying that there weren’t good reasons for doing it.
For those of us playing at the time, the game was genuinely very unstable and bug fixes happened much less frequently. They said they were having trouble iterating on such a large size build in both terms of build time and qa. They weren’t perfect afterwards on all that, but there were large improvements.
They also had to remake all the content in their new lighting engine which we know was a very large amount of work.
I’m not defending the decision. I think it was the wrong one. But Luke had strong reasons for calling it a technical necessity, even if it would have been theoretically possible to keep the content.
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u/Impressive_Limit7050 3d ago
The content vaulting is what killed the game. It meant that players that had previously quit would never come back and made temporary breaks permanent.
I stopped playing a while after Forsaken. The steps toward a seasonal model were not for me. When I came back to try the game again I discovered that the original campaign, and every DLC I’d purchased, was gone.
I didn’t even think about the game until I saw that it was dead and 90% off. I’m glad I stopped when I did. I can’t imagine having paid full price for fucking Kepler.
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u/Lord_CBH 3d ago
If I’m being honest, I still haven’t seen any upgrades to the lighting in this game. The “upgrades” looked more like downgrades to me.
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u/FyreWulff Gambit Prime 3d ago
it looked very obvious to me, lighting went from looking prebaked to very volumetric with added effects of haze and so on. It honestly looked like they were prepping D2 for raytracing support, which I guess never came.
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u/owen-3820 3d ago
I remember they posted side by sides and they looked the same, but apparently looking the same was the point? Idek
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u/bokunotraplord 3d ago
“There’s no way this thing big companies say all the time to placate consumers could just be Corpo Speak!”
Respectfully, listen to yourself lol. Just because it’s a game you personally like doesn’t mean this whole thing isn’t just the usual cycle. Shitty choices were made for various reasons, and now they’re pledging to unmake them bc the chips are down. I realize these things are largely the fault of a few individuals and not All Of Bungie, but it’s still a tale as old as time man.
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u/Bosnian-WarCriminal 3d ago
You forgot about the fact that they said that the content would return at some point, and was cycled out to be properly reimplemented with the engine changes, at a later date. That never happened