Rant On : Fornite, Rant Off: Destiny 2

Rant On

The news that the Fortnite Battle Royale Mode – which currently does not have the capability for a revenue stream – is going completely free to play in 6 days is another head scratcher.

Read the release here. With a line about some PVE content that may or may not be coming, at some point.

Forget the fact that you have diverted away all of your paid for resources (PVE content) from your base game (PVE content) to crunch time develop a free PVP mode instead of supporting your paid for early access player base (PVE content). Forget all of that for just a second. (I can’t)

Would be an interesting idea to let everyone play the Free To Play (eventually) base game (PVE content) to make sure people have lots of other people to play with. There is also a revenue stream there in Llamas that could further build development budgets. But I get it – in order to that you would have to have a worthwhile to play game beyond the first city with compelling and immersive PVE content. Which, I am sure they will get to fixing and developing as soon as this side mode (PVP) is all fixed up and no longer a distraction.

Of course – to compensate for this change they are offering a refund! Well, a refund to anyone who bought the game to play Battle Royale between September 12th and September 19th. If you bought the game to support Early Access development of compelling PVE content you can’t have a refund. Even though they are abandoning ¹ that part of the game.

OK, I get it. the PVE part is done. Better to accept defeat and move on! Just say so. Admit it.

Bait and switch, losers.²

Rant Off

Destiny is not forgiven for failing to living up to my lofty expectations being awesome (or at least, much better) but it did give me some fun gameplay last night. I played through some Strikes (5 mans in MMOs are my most-favorit-ed thing, and I have always enjoyed them in Destiny as well) and also played some Crucible matches. The Crucible matchmaking wasn’t well done (4 randoms mish-mashed against a clan of 4, all of which had over 290 Light) but that was over quickly and painlessly anyway. They have a system to somewhat normalize the gear and levels – unfortunately you can’t do that to coordination of a clan team versus a rag tag crew. Premades only fighting premades is a good place to start.

The Strikes I did were fun, challenging, and introduced some old mechanics in new ways to keep it interesting. The story line is pushing into “so bad that it’s good” territory – cringe worthy cut scenes that are fun to laugh at and accept the ludicricy that anyone involved in the game would think it would be an engaging narrative. It’s the video game story equivalent of Sharknado. The acceptance here is that they are way too far down the path to actually fix the story now, and I need to prepare myself ³ for Sharknado 1 through 5 – the Destiny 2 version.  Is phase three acceptance? or is that something else? I found this flow chart to help me deal with that I will never get what I want from Destiny 2. It’s too late.

The Psychology of Disappointment

But, at least, I can still get some good. Which remains to be seen if that is possible with Fortnite. Their next PVE patch needs to be bigger and better than anything they have launched, and needs to outshine their new PVP mode – IF they hope to keep their PVE group (many of which feel like I do) which in the end may be the lesson they learned from their Early Access experiment – that their core game is too broken to fix.

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Footnotes

¹ abandoning in actions, not words. So far.

² I am one of the losers. Fortnite is the first early access title I have ever regretted buying. And as a reminder, I bought Landmark.

³ I find the O button, ‘skip cut scene’, as the current  best solution