Rant: Burnouts

(Yeah, yeah, I know, I've been slacking.  In my defense, a canister of See's Toffee-ettes and binge watching Preacher and Game of Thrones does tend to eat up one's time, however much fun it might be.)

Over the last few weeks, Bungie has been running an event in Destiny to close out the year called "The Dawning."  It was largely notable for the Sparrow Racing League activity which was introduced originally in 2015.  This one was rather longer than the first go-round.  Yet at the same time, it didn't feel like much of an improvement.  So a couple of new tracks were added.  Big deal.  New armor pieces?  Just another day that ends in "y" as far as I can tell.  "But you can recover these pieces at a kiosk!" The shapes, yes, but if they're discarded, the replacement pieces will be low powered crap, which in turn inhibits the rewards from the races.  "But we've got holiday armor!"  Yeah, holiday armor which you would have to be insanely lucky to get all the pieces for if all you're doing is the event activities.  Granted, there are some people who probably did just that.  But how many of the others did so by spending a bunch of money to make sure they got it?  Just as a basis for comparison, I still haven't gotten the Desolate Gauntlets for my Hunter toon after getting Radiant Treasure boxes two or three times a week for months before this, without paying extra silver.  So you can perhaps understand my skepticism and my deeply abiding frustration with the RNGesus.



One of the big complaints that has been leveled against the "Rise of Iron" expansion is that it feels uninspired, that for all the new stuff that was there, it wasn't actually all that impressive.  And the Dawning event seems to have added considerable weight to that outlook.  Within a week of the event's start, I was already feeling burned out on it all.  To be sure, I had other things going on at the time which were eating up a lot of my energy, but even with that taken into account, I got just absolutely sick of the activities, particularly the SRL.  For one thing, it never felt like there was anything of actual consequence going on.  There wasn't a "league" format.  There wasn't even any kind of discernible ranking system outside of an individual race.  I'm not sure if Bungie expected people to come up with their own standing system or if it just never occurred to them that they could have done so much more.  Just sitting down and thinking about it for a few minutes, the following format thoughts occurred:

• Drag racing - yeah, this one would be tough, but it could have been fun.
• Stunt racing - since they had a scoring system added on for the "Vanguard Elite" strikes, there's nothing that could have stopped them from working up a system like that for races, where racers have three laps to put together the best scores of the most insane stunts and stunt combos they can put together.
• Trials racing - getting from point A to point B within a certain time limit and without making mistakes.
• Cup circuits - Much like Trials of Osiris or Elimination matches, where multiple rounds are required to achieve victory.  Different finishes give different points, with the winner being the one who has the most points at the end of the circuit.  Probably would have required several different tracks being built for different locales (Mars Cup, Venus Cup, etc.) but could have been much more competitive.  Also would have made it easier to track bad behavior by players.
• Non-gated races - The races in SRL work kind of like a slalom course in skiing, only they boost you when you hit a gate and kill your speed when you miss one.  If you hit a gate wrong, or miss two or three gates, you pretty much lose the race.  By removing the gates, it would have put a premium on player control of the vehicle and reading the course.

I can hear somebody in the Peanut Gallery saying, "You don't know what it's like, man!  It's hard making a game!"  I'm going to stop you right there.  That argument might hold water if we're talking about building a whole game from scratch.  However, one of the big reasons that Bungie paired up with Activision in the first place was to have plenty of resources on hand to build and execute their grand ten year plan.  I find it hard to believe that the devs were interested enough to bring SRL back, but not passionate enough to provide more than two new tracks.  They already had the underlying code available.  Nobody would have had to do anything more onerous than making a new level, and if the tools pipeline is already well established, that should be one of the easiest things to accomplish.  It would have come down primarily to track creation, and since the tracks are separate from the regular PvE environments, it wouldn't have been much more difficult than creating new maps for the Crucible, functionally speaking.  If anything, non-gated races would have been easier to build, since you're removing that functionality from the course.  I also can't imagine that Bungie couldn't have found or hired staff to build more SRL maps, even if they didn't go with non-gated races or didn't try to build up a circuit model.  It would have been a sub-project within the game world, but it could have been done.  They had a whole year to pull it off, if they had allocated resources immediately.

Yet SRL is only a symptom of the problem.  By this point, if my own friends and clan members are any indication, there's a distinct feeling of general burnout.  Sure, there are some folks that are super hardcore about it, that all they do is play Destiny, grinding for hours upon end in the Crucible, or working on their alts so that all three of their toons have light 400 gear and have beaten the Wrath of The Machine raid on Hard Mode umpteen times.  But other players are not nearly so hardcore.  Worse, it almost feels discouraging in a way.  The first year that I completed the Moments of Triumph challenge, it felt good.  I felt accomplished.  The second year I did it, I didn't feel quite as accomplished.  The record book was bigger, and it definitely had the feel of a slog rather than a exciting challenge.  It was less triumphant victory and more exhausted relief.  By now, we're only a few months into Year Three, and it already feels like a forced march without benefit of a compelling reason.  The record book for Year Three has created a perverse disincentive to keep playing.  I've been seeing a lot of friends getting into Skyrim, Battlefield 1, and Infinite Warfare instead of playing Destiny.  I have to wonder if maybe Bungie has made a serious goof, that in their desire to provide quantifiable numbers and stats, they've unwittingly led us to a situation where we cease to care about the game, the story, the things that made playing Destiny so much fun in the first place.