If you’re a Destiny 2 fan, you probably know that Bungie recently held a two-day community summit at their studio to discuss the current and future state of the game. Community leaders from around the land flocked to Bellevue to meet with the development team. There are several recaps of the summit available on Reddit and the Bungie Forums.
Most of the ‘meat and potatoes’ of the summit is covered under a NDA, so we won’t get to learn too much. What struck me the most from the wide array of posts I read was that the attendees truly felt that they were heard, that Bungie didn’t dodge any feedback, and that they didn’t think the summit was ‘lip service.’ Bungie forum user Lost Sols posted:
My fellow attendees have written and talked about what their experiences were and I know there is still skepticism in the community as to motivations and intent on all sides, but this event was literally everything I hoped it might be and then somehow proceeded to exceed that exponentially. I’m as hopeful for the future of a Bungie game as I’ve ever been.
I don’t know about you, but that’s pretty great to hear coming from a community leader. The Destiny 2 community, like many gaming communities, has a wide range of gamers. There are die-hard Destiny fans that will defend the game until their Ghost no longer revives them. There are hardcore salty folks that will try and plug 20 holes in every idea or piece of content that Bungie puts out there. Then there are the folks in the middle, what I call the “Reasonablists” (P&R reference!) who are able to both give and understand positive and constructive feedback. What a concept, right?
What starts to irk me is that it seems that no matter what Bungie does, they just cannot seem to satisfy the player base. And that makes sense, right? There are a lot of gamers on this earth. Each Guardian has their own thoughts about how the game should develop, how valuable the content is to them, and what they want to see in further iterations. You can’t please everyone. It seems that the fan base has forgotten that thought. Example: some folks were very happy that Crucible went to a 4v4 game mode. Others hated the idea.
Ultimately, I’m very curious and will continue to watch the community feedback and sentiment from this summit. Based on the variety of posts from actual attendees, I’m going to give Bungie the benefit of a doubt here. If you have pillars of a community saying that they were truly ‘heard’ and are ‘excited’ about the future of the game, I’m going to believe them until proven otherwise. Hopefully, the community can understand that the dev team will likely be doing everything they can to please a broad base of players. Not all things will be great. Not everything will be what you want it to be. But, that’s life.
What do you think? Do you have thoughts or comments about the community summit? Do you trust the community leaders in their assessment of the event?
2XP Gaming 