Guardians take aim at Bungie's "broken" development cycle for Destiny 2

Since the launch of the Destiny franchise in 2014 with the original Destiny, Bungie has struggled with finding a compromise between content generation and maintaining a healthy work environment. 

Luke Smith, the Creative Director at Bungie, has spoken about this issue in his ‘Director’s Cut’ commentary piece. Smith praised his team at Bungie with him saying “they did a great job of providing stuff to do, items to chase, growing fat with strength, et cetera."

Unfortunately this work pace “was harder on the team than we anticipated.'' Smith goes on to say:

“The scope of what we delivered, the pace that we delivered it, and the overall throughput for Annual Pass takes a toll on the Bungie team. I—and many others—had conversations throughout the year with team members—who had jumped from release to release—about the grind of working on Destiny. Working on the game was starting to wear people down.” 

At the present time, it’s not really clear how Bungie has chosen to tackle this problem as the Seasonal release model is still in use with Season of the Undying finishing up in December and with Season of Dawn currently active. 

The speed of content release does not seem all that different to last year's Annual Pass but it’s possible that the work crunch for Bungie came from developing these seasons in addition to the larger release of Shadowkeep. 

It is possible that this year Bungie has gone all-in on the Seasonal model and will not even be releasing a large DLC in September/October akin to Forsaken and Shadowkeep but there has yet to be confirmation of this. 

This decision to steer towards steady, bite-sized content releases has been somewhat divisive amongst the player base. Many players like the idea of having a constant stream of content to sink their teeth into but on the other side of the argument, players feel that these smaller pieces of content are far less meaningful than the larger releases.

Even though the newer content schedule has been divisive, all players seem to agree that the rate at which Bungie is releasing updates to the balancing of the game is simply unacceptable. 

A post was made of the Destiny subreddit by user ‘NeonAttak’ titled “Balance updates every 3 months for a game that's disguised as GAAS is just lazy” that generated over 5000 upvotes from the community. ‘GAAS’ here stands for ‘Games as a Service’ which is a development model used in games today where once the game is released the developers continue to generate content for the game for a price. 

‘NeonAttak’ goes on to say:

“Overwatch, League of Legends, Path of Exile, Warframe - I could go on. Most of those games are free to play and yet there's a balance update in span of every two weeks to one month. Destiny? Unless something is absolutely broken, Bungie won't hotfix it.

"Balance updates are coming only at the beginning of new seasons and when they do (with exception of subclass reworks) it's just minor changes to 2-3 exotics or 1-2 guns. So many exotics are underperforming or just straight up disappointing to use. So many guns are forgotten in trash can.”

Other community members chimed in like “SomewhatStoked” who had this to say:

“I think the real problem with this game is that Bungie is far too slow at getting anything done. I know that seems really easy for an armchair dev to say, but I think that's the reality. Whether it's because their engine sucks, their creative process has too many steps, their teams don't communicate, or whatever else may be going on, it's just too slow.
I totally agree that balance updates should be regular and not lumped into content bundles. I also feel like 3 months is plenty of time to get refreshes on gear and more QOL changes, on top of the new content we are delivered.”

A game to compare this to is League of Legends by Riot Games. League of Legends sees a constant update schedule of once every two weeks where everything from new Champion releases to small gameplay tweaks are delivered.

League of Legends also has a ‘Public Beta Environment’ server where untested changes can be released for players to do the testing and leave their feedback. Now, it is understandable that Riot might be more able to sustain this update schedule due to its higher amount of developers but there is a very big difference between an update every 2 weeks and an update every 3 months.

Bungie has used an excuse several times for this delay in updates, saying that their development tools and game engine are somewhat outdated. It almost stands to reason that Bungie should take a page out of Ubisoft’s book and dedicate a season to fixing the engine and releasing many quality of life updates to the game much like Rainbow 6: Siege’s ‘Operation Health’.