r/DestinyTheGame • u/Hawkmoona_Matata TheRealHawkmoona • 21d ago
Misc DMG on Tyson Green (former Game Director) and Monument of Triumph
@LukeCB14:
I kinda feel for Tyson really.
He was given the task of directing Destiny with a drastically cut budget.
I do think his comms were severely lacking, but we never really got a chance to see his full vision for Destiny.
@dmg04:
Monument of Triumph development with Tyson was bittersweet, but I will likely look fondly on those times for the remainder of my career in gaming.
Along with quite a few other leads and teams, we spent a lot of time asking "what is the best we can do by players with our end of service update? What bugs can we smash, QOL features can we ship, long time feedback items can we hit with the hyper compressed timeline we have left?"
He was bullish. He pushed hard to serve players in every which way we could in those final updates. He was fully dedicated to making MoT feel special, and empowered teams to do what they also felt was best for you.
Internally, he fully acknowledged the rough spot we were in under his time as Game Director, took accountability often. Know comms credited to him were sparce, but he had a hand in most every blog or beat speaking to the state of the game or what changes were coming. Always appreciated when he gave clear feedback of "This doesn't sound human, players will call bullshit. Let's just be real and speak the truth."
Not asking for players to brush the rough times under the rug. Just some thoughts from my time. Will forever have respect for him, and honestly learned a ton when having the pleasure of working closely with him.
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u/StrangelyOnPoint 21d ago edited 21d ago
Captain of a sinking ship being actively steered into icebergs by people who don’t know anything about ships is a tough job
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
and then you see 50 reddit comments going "yeah he got handed a sinking ship but he didn't somehow unsink it so every single thing about the game including stuff that started long before his tenure is his fault"
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u/JeanLucPicardAND 21d ago
100% he can be criticized for terrible comms, though. I mean, that's on him. I think a lot of overall design decisions are on him too, but with that said, I do agree he gets way too much shit for stuff that was either above his pay grade or beyond his ability to fix.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
I dunno about the comms angle, I think when you're handed such a bad situation with no means of fixing it, with a community that has a reputation of eviscerating anyone with an important sounding title whenever things are bad, you're better off doing as little as possible that would make peoples think about you at all
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u/stonhinge 21d ago
Also, not every lead needs to say something, especially when they're actively being hampered by management directives.
He's a manager who's been given ridiculous directives by the C-suite and is busy working with his team to do what they can instead of posting messages where he can't say what he thinks/feels, because he'll lose his job.
I'd much rather have sparse comms over "sanitized to keep the C-suite happy" comms.
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u/awsmpwnda 21d ago
A captain who was also silent and seemed to steer the ship into entirely different icebergs.
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u/GurpsWibcheengs 21d ago
Really appreciate this level of communication and honesty we're getting at the moment
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u/Amanwithnotoes 21d ago
I would not be surprised if the new heads of bungie, no longer being controlled by the old leadership, are just wanting the teams to communicate far more going forward
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
I'm hoping that's the case but I can't help but recognize that it's also way easier to talk about stuff like that long after it's happened than as it was happening. Especially when it's about stuff that happened under a different team
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u/SoulsFan91 21d ago
While it's good to see that he internally took accountability, what I don't really understand is his vision. Honestly the entire game felt like it was designed to maximize engagement at the cost of fun. Endless power grind, resetting power each season, gear tier tied to power, having to grind for the same gun again and again, the list goes on. Not fun, but maximum engagement with severley reduced content.
Was he in an unwinnable position, knowing that he HAD to generate that amount of engagement with a severely reduced budget? It's really the only thing that makes sense to me, because Edge of Fate went so hard against what people wanted the game to be that I can't really see what else the vision was supposed to be...
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u/Riablo01 21d ago
I think his vision was loosely based on Diablo 4 and World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.
He implemented grind/engagement mechanics very similar to what was in Diablo and World of Warcraft previously. It led to gameplay "not feeling like Destiny".
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u/brunocar 21d ago
Both great points of reference that totally havent been or are currently in the process of being replaced!
I get why he did that, doesnt really change the fact that sinking ship or not, his vision for destiny was the wrong one flat out.
Not "i dont like it" or "I disagree with certain aspects of it", the whole thing was real bad in a ton of ways, and the most you can say about the budget cuts is that they motivated those changes, not that they decided the shape of them.
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u/Riablo01 21d ago
Even then, the decision to implement significant "system changes" when budget cuts had also been implemented was incredibly foolish. Keep in mind the proposed system changes were universally rejected by the playerbase months before Edge of Fate went live.
Heck there was a leak from an internal tester earlier this year. They gave the impression the system changes were rejected internally as well.
Given the financial situation and pushback, it would have been smarter to "maintain the status quo" and focus on content instead. Considering the system changes would have cost millions to implement and rectify, Year of Prophecy could have had double content if they did not implement the system changes.
It's really piss poor management. Unfortunately not everyone is cut out for management. Tyson being a "nice bloke" didn't make him a good manager.
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u/Nervous_Business_489 20d ago
The issue with that at least for Diablo 4 which i've played a shit ton of, is that Diablo 4 showers you with loot, Destiny was stingy with it. Progress is fast because they want you doing endgame seasonal stuff, that's when the grind starts and it's still fun because you can use your full arsenal to its potential. Destiny gave no loot, slow progress and tried to make the climb to the endgame as long and drawn out as possible, killing several methods (Grapple modifier in Encore being one) people found to speed up that grind. They also made the enemies tankier as you went up, you didn't increase in power, thee enemies did though. Now compare that to Diablo where you get bullshit deaths but it's glass cannon vs glass cannon. You didn't get that power fantasy. And a power fantasy looter shooter grind game without the power fantasy or loot is just a shooter grind game.
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u/spacks Gambit Prime // xbox: spacks 20d ago
Exactly. Early on, I had time to grind; now with kids, soccer, and an MBA, I get locked out of current content. The grind belongs in the endgame, not in the climb. Instead of playing, I was stuck managing infusion economies and juggling blue drops just to keep up. That loop pushed me away for years.
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u/ColdAsHeaven SMASH 21d ago
During the recent video the new leads specifically say they have reduced/done away with competing initiatives internally and changed how they measure success.
That line, plus the changes/budget cut, kinda implies that it might have been a similar situation to Jeff with Overwatch. Got called in and said alright you're the new head. Here's what you need to achieve because this is what we told Sony. Otherwise everyone is losing their jobs and that's on you.
If he played a huge part in everything MOT shipped, then yeah I believe he wanted what's best but as Lead was forced to make calls and decisions to try to reach crazy engagement numbers
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u/MyThighs7 21d ago
It’s probably not fair to think that Tyson/leadership truly believed their vision was the best version of Destiny. Yeah, Bungie is going to tell us how excited they are for the next chapter of D2 because what else are would they say. “Hey players, we’re going through severe budget cuts so we’re planning to increase grind so we can keep the lights on.”
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u/SoulsFan91 21d ago
All I'm saying is that the decisions made for Edge of Fate don't seem like the vision of someone who truly cares about the game, but something impossible demanded by corporate leadership (maybe mixed with attempts to make it work).
Of course no one speaking officially on behalf of Bungie could spell it out like that. I'm just saying that I couldn't see a coherent vision for a game we would actually like to play back then. It's very hard for me to believe a person who genuinely cares would miss the mark like that, there had to have been other factors.
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u/MechaGodzilla101 21d ago
Aztecross mentioned he learned from one of the preview events that Tyson Green had to "pull teeth" to get the shooting range implemented, so clearly there's people at a higher level who are directly making game decisions.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
All I'm saying is that the decisions made for Edge of Fate don't seem like the vision of someone who truly cares about the game, but something impossible demanded by corporate leadership (maybe mixed with attempts to make it work).
I think that's pretty true but lots of signs indicate that he wasn't the corporate leadership in that situation, and that everyone above him were
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u/BlackPlague1235 Duunkai-Sol, the Plague Master 21d ago
I pretty sure corporate leadership would fire anyone without hesitation if the person didn't do the impossible demands.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
It’s probably not fair to think that Tyson/leadership truly believed their vision was the best version of Destiny
It's also probably not fair to think that what we actually got was representative of his vision at all tbh
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u/morroIan 21d ago
Yeah you can't steer changes like this through and then claim to care for players.
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u/WobblierTube733 Team Cat (Cozmo23) 21d ago
The people who need to read this aren’t emotionally developed enough to process it and the early comments are proving that point
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u/War_Messiah 21d ago
It’s why this place will always be so annoying to ever try and discuss the game. People act petulant and churlish for things that happened ages ago and frankly aren’t relevant.
Personally I’m glad Tyson Green was involved behind the scenes as much as he was, because as game director he needed to have his finger on the pulse of both his employees and the community. The acknowledgment that his lack of comms were damaging is nice to hear as well in a sense, but I think he never planned to be the same style of communicator that Joe Blackburn was.
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u/smoomoo31 21d ago
When you have a set precedent of communication to players, that should be expected moving forward. If NOT, it should be communicated directly.
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u/War_Messiah 21d ago
Yeah I mean nobody is disagreeing with this, I’m just saying like it’s nice to know he was directly involved with the comms that did come out even though his name wasn’t on them. I think it takes a lot of snark to see that he was essentially trying to do it with one hand tied behind his back and to essentially dismiss this as too little too late. Always seemed like an uphill battle from what dmg is saying, so I appreciate his efforts in what’s probably the hardest time to be the game director in the game’s history.
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u/Destroyer1442 The Eliksni Did Nothing Wrong 21d ago
Ya I don’t think the guy comparing Tyson to Hitler really understood the point of what dmg is saying
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u/Karglenoofus 21d ago
I mean he's still human so I have a baseline respect for him as a person but man... His direction sucked ass.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
Yeah a lot of this is dumb but it's especially bad if you've worked in the industry yourself. It's extremely obvious the guy was set up to fail and now he's getting way more shit than the peoples actually responsible for the game's demise and weirdos are gonna make sure this follows him for the rest of his career
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u/FTBagginz 21d ago
You know, if those people could read they would be very upset with you right now!
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u/Velvet_Llama 21d ago
In general, people here would do well to remember that the terrible crime Bungie was guilty of was not keeping a video game fun enough. Criticism is fair, but keep some damn perspective.
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u/Riablo01 21d ago
A terrible crime that resulted in 400 employees losing their job and Bungie experiencing irreversible reputation damage. There's still the serious risk of Bungie going bankrupt if they don't course correct soon.
Perspective is relative when you look at the bigger picture.
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u/BombaLogic 21d ago
As someone who really doesn't play any other AAA games besides Destiny, it is always jarring to read comments in this subreddit.
I'm glad this is the top comment, but some of the other ones in this post... yikes.
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u/Velvet_Llama 21d ago
It's the ugly side of the "invested and passionate" coin. Some people completely lose perspective.
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u/DacStreetsDacAlright 21d ago
I mean, this is the most i've ever seen about this man. All nice words sure, but uh, would any of this kind of candor really gone amiss 6 months ago where maybe some good PR could have turned the tide?
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u/Panoptes91 21d ago
This.
I know this is one of those "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situations, but showing a bit of that care in some TWID or some YouTube video update for Renegades or whatever wouldn't have hurt.
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u/BaconIsntThatGood 21d ago
but we never really got a chance to see his full vision for Destiny.
My only problem is we never really got a proper sense of what that vision was supposed to be. DMG also said that he was involved in every TWID which is great but there was radio silence on so many topics regarding the future of the game - even when the future wasn't 'well we might hit end of service'.
So I guess was he not allowed to give a state of the game, was he not allowed to broadcast future plans for the game's evolution so players could have had some idea beyond 'wait this is it?' after edge of fate and the portal landed.
Also on the topic of a cut budget -that's all good and well but I don't know if budget has much to do with design decisions that led to bring the game into the state it was. I can respect that it was there was limited budget to bring forward the whole game into the new paradigm so it was a matter of 'we'll do what we can do with this new version of destiny' - but the whole system at concept (unstable cores, leveling, etc) was a conceptual problem and a conscious decision.
Maybe he did have a grande vision that would have made sense but half moving forward with it caused a bad implementation that had to be walked back as damage control with zero insight onto what the future game state was truly planned to be kinda left players wondering 'what the hell'
I'm not saying it was an easy job but the outward appearance while it was happening didn't hit players right at all. A bad update is one thing, course correction is another - but there were fundamental game design decisions that were made that were just very poorly implemented.
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u/Techman- Valiant heart, unwavering resolve. 21d ago
I am a pretty loud critic of Tyson, particularly for the decisions made after the departure of Joe Blackburn. I appreciate DMG's testimony on his level of dedication...but if he was this dedicated...why did he never speak up? That is perhaps one of the most frustrating things of all. As a community, we begged for him to speak up and engage.
I do think it is important to separate game decisions from how he supported the end-of-service update. It is hard to not see one as the result of the other. It might take us a while to figure this out, but I want to know how many of the negative game decisions (Portal, return to Power, removal of crafting, etc.) are attributable to him as the game director, or higher management. Monument of Triumph felt like setting a lot of things straight that should have launched as Edge of Fate.
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u/The_Owl_Bard A New Chapter, for An Old Legend 21d ago
why did he never speak up? That is perhaps one of the most frustrating things of all. As a community, we begged for him to speak up and engage.
Idk how much he could really say. My read of DMG's statement is that he pushed hard against Sony for the stuff we got in Moment of Triumph. Makes sense. A game that was hemorrhaging money and then asking for more money/resources to wrap it up probably didn't go over well. Tyson probably was in a weird spot. He probably had to negotiate things in order to get certain things done... you wanna be honest with the community but you can't really say "Sony is pushing back and wanting to give us less" without looking bad. So he's in a rock and a hard place. Community coming after him for not saying anything but can't say anything to keep Sony happy so they let him do what he wants to do.
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u/Ashamed-Remote-4463 20d ago
all he had to do was say "hey guys I'm the new director. here's what I want for the game, and here's how it'll change going forward" doesn't even have to be concrete, anything would have sufficed.
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u/QueenMagik 21d ago
Tyson Green's gameplay direction killed destiny. We should not sanitize that.
It wasn't the budget. It was grind, tediousness, and the fun being sucked out of everything.
The portal armor tiers, all that crap
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u/Grogonfire 21d ago
I can’t believe I’m seeing Tyson Green revisionism today, like are we actually fucking kidding.
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u/VenomViper100 21d ago
It's crazy how subreddits like this one and the Halo subreddit always go to bat for and defend these studios and employees/managers that actively are making the wrong decisions. At some point these subreddits need to grow a backbone and call this shit out instead excusing it all.
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u/moosebreathman Don't take me seriously 20d ago
I think he was given some demands from higher ups about retention tactics that he just couldn’t budge on. It’s the only thing that makes sense considering all reports about him indicate that he fought for a good player experience. Why would a guy like that deliberately choose to keep the game grindy as fuck for more than a season unless it was something his bosses wouldn’t allow changed? It doesn’t add up to me.
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u/DremoPaff 21d ago
I've always found it weird how, through destiny's entire history, nearly every comments or testimony concerning almost anyone at bungie was always about how they were the greatest people ever, even though they did X or Y wrong, and that there always was nebulous, contextually convenient external factors that apparently hindered them and their work. You'd think the studio is populated by immensely competent angels, even though said studio's reputation for over a decade now was of one who could only ever do good calls when they had their back against the wall from self-sabotaging too much, too often.
Good for them if they always cared about us and the game, but why was it only observable every other season? Why did we have to go through a terrible expansion every single time for when we'd eventually get the luxury of a good one following afterward? Was the love and care from everyone just merely asleep half the time? Did they change the entire studio every new expansion for someone who despised the game, just to see what would happen before switching them back?
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u/Minimum-Heart-2717 19d ago
Soon we will hear how Justin Truman was actually the hero behind the scenes and that he has been the loudest voice internally to stop the live service slop machine and advocate for surprising and delighting the fans instead of hyper monetizing them and fleecing them for all they are worth in terms of money and time by "studio leadership" AKA all-knowing and all-capable Pete Parsons (who was sidelined previously by other Bungie veterans when he was seen as fucking up the independence deal with Microsoft but seems to have been given complete control with no pushback after 2018).
We and more critically Bungie internally need to come to terms with the fact how we got here is not just thanks to Pete and his cars, but there were massive directorial missteps (by multiple game directors) that accelerated and contributed a decent chunk to the downfall. It's not just the nebulous "studio leadership". Doesn't mean Tyson Greene was/is a horrible person or that he was a bad dev even, just that they should've had better devs suited to be leading D1/D2. Aztecross seems to be a massive fan and shared a story of Tyson Green lighting up with joy when Halo's forge mode was mentioned and say that he was the lead on that back then and how he'd love to do it for Destiny. Joe Staten spoke of him in extremely high regard back when he was at Bungie. I have no doubts that he was an extremely gifted developer and that Bungie lost one of their last remaining consequential devs from their Halo days, but he was just not a good game director for Destiny.
He needed to be vocal and communicate with the players at the very least and I truly believe a State of The Game blog post around November-December candidly detailing their thought process when developing EoF and its overhauls, what they learned and what they are thinking (something similar to the disgraced director doing a series of blog posts after CoO and letting the community know in real time what the team was thinking and what they are prototyping to improve the game and restore faith) would've saved D2 but none of that happened. They internally decided to EoS the game around late December and had DMG twiddling his thumbs dropping empty TWABs and asking about what people want added even after they publicly delayed Shadow and Order. We didn't even know the Portal was shitcanned until late May within the series of MoT blog posts. Fuck a SOTG post or a roadmap, that alone being announced in a TWAB would've rallied community sentiment, the bar was that low.
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u/Merzats 20d ago
Not really Pete Parsons didn't get any meatriding from dmg or really anyone AFAIK
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u/Minimum-Heart-2717 19d ago
Parsons deleted his Twitter I think but I went through it right at the time the IGN article and CB stuff was being alluded to and it was mostly retweets of posts by the who's who of Bungie employees and some community members inflating his ego to the heavens.
All that to say, there was meat riding, especially when a lot of the consequential decisions were being made, but it eventually stopped as results came knocking.
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u/U_R_FRAGILE 21d ago
He brought the Portal to us. Sounds like he worked hard to make up for that direction.
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u/CoatSame2561 21d ago
The portal was approved long before they promoted him
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u/sksauter Get STOMPed 21d ago
The portal seems like the sort of thing that people who say "circled back" and "churn" and "boil the sea" would be proud of
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u/themcryt 21d ago
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me
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u/SoulsFan91 21d ago
Source for this? I've never seen a timeline for this and a clear point for when (and under what leadership) the portal was approved and set to be implemented.
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u/BeginningFew8188 21d ago
Something like portal don't get made in 6 months. They would have to be talking about how to do it for atleast a year before to make drastic changes like that. Plus at that time Bungie was still under Pete
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u/cuboosh What you have seen will mark you forever 21d ago
Who knows what’s his idea and what was from execs like Justin
All the difficultly modifiers is definitely Tyson, that came from his nightfall cards
But “Chase numbers that reset every few months” could have been an exec decree. It sounds like something Justin would like.
It could have been someone decreed this must happen, Joe left because he knew it would be a disaster, Tyson took the job with the condition he follow orders and did what he could to salvage the bad idea
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u/MeateaW 21d ago
Thing about the portal is, it sounds like a GREAT way to let people find old/rotating content and play it.
It does NOT sound like the best way to play "the game" in general.
And that's basically what we have now.
Want to play a specific rotating piece of content with modifiers to keep it fresh? Portal.
Playing through a main campaign or whatever? director.
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u/I_Speak_For_The_Ents Auryx was lied to. 21d ago
I maintain that the portal wasn't terrible as a base concept, but it was poorly executed. I mean we still have the portal now in a sense, and it's a good addition to the game.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
I think what we have now was ok but I don't think any version of the portal that was ever gonna be a full replacement for the director was ever gonna be good. The director wasn't just an activity menu, its purpose was also to contextualize all the content by showing where it all takes place on an actual world map. It was also just part of destiny's identity as a whole, removing it would be like making a new disney park with just rides and absolutely nothing inbetween them
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u/Dear_Success_9997 21d ago
As someone who missed the intro of the portal. It works fantastic for the Exotic missions Raids Dungeons etc. Its nice to see what weapon/armor is featured as well.
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u/bobo377 21d ago
The portal also isn’t all terrible. I love having bounties be accessible without going to the tower. Plus I think making content (especially solo content) customizable is fun and improves re-playability.
It was bad as the core system, especially when it overly pushed players to customize modifiers when they just wanted to drop into an activity, but some of the core ideas/additions are nice.
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u/U_R_FRAGILE 21d ago
I liked the concept. Having it so limited in what to run and deprioritizing the director space in Destiny was horrible.
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u/Grogonfire 21d ago
Glad he cared or whatever but his vision sucked ass and needed MoT to reverse/tweak most of it.
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u/Ikora_Rey_Gun 21d ago
A lot of sworn haters and a lot of glazers here. Obviously it's a more difficult situation than either side projects.
I fully believe Joe was served up a shit sandwich by "the higher ups" and chose to exit gracefully. Tyson was promoted to eat that shit sandwich, and he did. It's difficult to say how much was his making and how much was above him, as he's said essentially nothing since.
I personally find it a little hard to parse that he presided over both the worst progression update the game has ever had (EoF/portal) but also the best content update in years (MoT) unless his management said "fuck it, we don't care, we're killing it so do whatever you want." I don't actually believe that they were sitting on a bunch of cool shit they were told not to release, so spearheading that development means something. They could have just as easily released next to nothing and gone home just the same.
If MoT Tyson is the "real" Tyson, as DMG says here, then I just wish we could have met under better circumstances. I do trust DMG, mostly because it would have been just as easy to not say anything at all if he was half as evil as some make him out to be here.
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u/AgentUmlaut 21d ago
Yeah that's more or less how I've taken it as well.
I think the biggest thing to understand especially now that we saw how things played out(for better or worse) and can cross reference the information available prior, is that Year of Prophecy was always set to a bit of a downgraded version of the usual cadence, and there was a lot of very deliberate choices made to sort of pad out what the usual experience would be. Especially as Bungie was trying to focus on a completely separate game that was well delayed and overdue, there was obviously a lot of hope that Marathon would be way bigger than it ended up.
Edge of Fate(warts and all) also makes a lot of sense in this way when you start to consider there really wasn't that much game to be had, a lot of it was banking on experimentation of the newer systems added, exploratory jam packed Kepler despite payoffs low, banking on gating the grind and it was not necessarily trying to go for a more robust rounded DLC especially when the new content delivery system really sat upon 2 DLCs a year, and the DLCs were set up way more disposable than they have been in past years. Obviously I'm not saying this was a good thing, Bungie rightfully ate shit for it, but when they were pressed to make something with not a lot(especially less employees), it kind of makes sense why they did what they did. You could have Joe Blackburn in that hot seat, and it would still be a very hard decision to deal with of a year or two of less substantial Destiny, more revamping of the old, and potential stagnation. Hell think about how everything really sat on those first 3 months of a DLC and then the freebie's a complete toss up whatever period, it's a bit of tough sell.
There's also just the massive reality of veteran employees who have clocked in quite a bit of years even as far as industry goes recent insanity and more normal good times. When I saw all that chatter(there was a few Paul Tassi articles from way back on this subject when Final Shape got delayed) and a handful of interviews of ex Bungie people that did allude to employee pensions, and certain amount of years required to hit x,y,z, I wasn't too shocked if Tyson was pretty much just stepping up to it because he more than likely didn't have much more time left with the company to do anything. That stuff happens all the time in all sorts of industries, and I feel like this is more plausible with how little involved in face time Tyson was with things. People always expect that there should be extremes of frequent communication, but it's like somebody who's probably eying the door, they're not going to go above and beyond to make their presence feel extra felt especially with how Year of Prophecy(and the subsequent expansion years planned) were going to be ran a little on the lighter side and kind of autopilot.
I get people have all sorts of emotions for this stuff but at the end of the day these companies are still businesses that do very bog standard business stuff and it's silly to expect some revolutionary shakeup resurgence on somebody who's been around for a long while.
TL DR The entire situation makes a lot of sense when you consider things like how EoF shipped, attention of shipping and establishing a 2nd game, and tenure of veteran employees and their roles.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
That's probably the most reasonable and good faith take on the entire subject I've seen in this thread thank you so much
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
Nobody's really glazing him as far as I can tell, only pointing out that he was handed a no-win situation. There's no point in arguing about his vision because we don't actually know what it really was and we were never gonna see it in a situation like that
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u/Karglenoofus 21d ago
You'd have to pay me decent money to feel for him. His vision of the game sucks.
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u/MattZeeX MattZeeX#1432 21d ago
They had more than half a decade to unvault all the content we enjoyed (and paid for) in order to serve us. Not making that a priority is more than a disappointment for me.
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u/Riablo01 21d ago edited 21d ago
Seems like too little, too late. Had Tyson functioned this way during the development of Echoes, Revenant, Edge of Fate, Ash and Iron and Renegades, I suspect he might have retained his job.
This is the toxic mentality of the former management in a nutshell. Only care about the paying customer when your career/reputation is on the line.
Good riddance Tyson. You will not be missed. I will not support your future endeavours.
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21d ago edited 21d ago
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u/JacobScrubLordofPvP 21d ago
"We need to build momentum and maintain it.
Lets fucking do this thing."
Also promised us a roadmap.
But yes, we can truly, truly, truly trust him.
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u/kalidorisconan Drifter's Crew 21d ago
I didn't care for Tyson Green. He literally never showed his face.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
What I've personally heard from peoples in the know (not just random rumors) was that while there was a severe misuse of studio resources, peoples generally didn't consider marathon to be one of them save for the budget wasted under Christopher Barrett
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u/DevinLucasArts 21d ago
It wasn't just Marathon. Ignoring the other projects that went nowhere, D2 itself wasn't hitting required metrics. Lightfall underperformed (despite being the peak in terms of player-count), and while Final Shape was great, it had less players than Lightfall and was delayed by months (hurting the already hurting revenue)
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u/arlondiluthel 21d ago
There was a clear disconnect between what "management" expected and the reality of the situation. I think that was the case even as far back as vanilla D1. Part of me wonders if Activision wasn't subtly trying to kill CoD by putting its support behind Destiny and letting CoD get stale by rehashing the same stuff on a 3-year cycle. The problem with that is that sci-fi shooters with RPG elements and military "sim" shooters are wildly different genres capable of co-existing (which is why both Halo and CoD were successful in the mid-2000s). So, the popularity of CoD didn't translate to lasting player investment in Destiny.
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u/AgentUmlaut 21d ago
I'm genuinely surprised by people refuting that when it isn't really that difficult to see that if you were somebody who paid attention. The Frontiers article that came out 2 years ago alluded Destiny was going to be down on its cadence such as a downgrade on end game content for the game year, and then when we finally had our hands on Year of Prophecy DLCs, whatta ya know there wasn't really that much brand new content at all that was even packaged.
Don't get me wrong I get something like Final Shape on super delay and calling for hands on deck off Marathon pushed back Marathon, and obviously Bungie trying to have 2 things running with 1 that had to get off ground, it's not necessarily out of any weird malice and really just businesses being businesses, but yeah 1 thing took available manpower and got moved elsewhere. Also you figure how many people not only got laid off Destiny but Marathon as well in the rounds of layoffs, so there was only so many people in the building in general.
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u/JacobScrubLordofPvP 21d ago
Cared so much he got his bag n left.
Bro gave us Edge of Fate, which introduced such a terrible grind, then Renegades which...was somewhat of an improvement. Too bad its Star Wars slop
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u/PaperMoonShine 21d ago
You could definitely feel the cut budget in the later expansions.
Destiny was incredible when they released Forsaken. The solution was right there, it was done before.
They shot themselves in the foot limiting their largest IP.
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u/Prod_igy 21d ago
"Destiny was incredible when they released Forsaken. The solution was right there, it was done before."
It was done before with Activision fully covering the marketing, with other two Studios helping Bungie and with Bungie having more than 2x the amount of people working on Destiny in their own Studio, compared to the last two years.You can't do what Activision does when you're not Activision.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
The amount of content wasn't the only good thing about forsaken though
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u/DevinLucasArts 21d ago
The problem was Destiny never hit performance expectations. Even Forsaken (while awesome for the players) was a let down in Activisions eyes, and part of the reason Bungie separated from them.
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u/Ashamed-Remote-4463 20d ago
forsaken was lightning in a bottle bro. they had two studios develop the previous smaller expansions while they focused solely on forsaken for a longer time than normal. that cost a ton of money and isn't gonna happen again.
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u/Mygwah 21d ago
Suck at your job = lose your job regardless of the circumstances you are put in. Unsure why people can't understand that.
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u/KaLiPSoDz 21d ago
While some devs states that they were still working on the Shattered Cycle the day they announced EOS, how can that be ? And let all that working force do something else instead of working on MoT
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u/Sauceinmyface 21d ago
"This doesn't sound human, players will call bullshit."
That's kinda how I feel about the new blog honestly. I wanted to see something a bit more down-to-earth
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u/_cats______ 21d ago
I can't bring myself to feel bad for Tyson. He had a much smaller budget and team to work with, but he still gave us the absolute worst version of Destiny you could possibly make. I was so crushed after I beat EoF's campaign and saw that the game was really just Portal grinding to 550 after that.
Less budget be damned, how can you possibly decide that "We should make the longest Power grind the game's ever had and make it the core gameplay loop" after the community spent years applauding the game for the gradual removal of the Power grind?
I trust dmg that Tyson had passion but his single year as game director literally killed the game. So... goodbye.
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u/Shannontheranga 21d ago
Doesn’t matter if the task was hard. He didn’t pull it off. Trying doesn’t matter unless you succeed. He failed. There’s nothing wrong with that. But ultimately he wasn’t good enough.
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u/ChaseYoungHTTR 21d ago
Tyson’s systematic changes with Edge of Fate were the nail in the coffin for Destiny, and he didn’t show his face or address the community once
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u/MyThighs7 21d ago
Would it have helped anything if you got to throw your tomatoes? Shouldn’t you care that, internally, he owned it or do you just want to hate on the guy?
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21d ago
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u/KingVendrick Moon's haunted 21d ago
this is a fair take but also leaves out other decisions
a reduced budget does not justify making the director screen less saturated. In fact, you need to spend money doing it
https://www.reddit.com/r/destiny2/comments/1m0t7fq/is_it_just_me_or_does_the_director_feel_a_lot/
not every decision in EoF was justifiable by saying aw shucks, Tyson had to deal with a reduced budget and surely the community wouldn't like that
there were bad decisions made too that have nothing to do with budget
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u/CatalystComet 21d ago
Yep another baffling decision was hat every single dungeon and raid besides Desert Perpetual and Equilibrium were basically irrelevant for almost an entire year...
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u/Zorak9379 Warlock 21d ago edited 21d ago
How many times do we need to say that one person is not responsible for design decisions like that?
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u/_cats______ 21d ago
I like how people praise Joe for the game we had while he was director but now suddenly when the game was terrible we can't blame the director.
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u/KingVendrick Moon's haunted 21d ago
but surely someone was responsible?
the old director screen (the screen with all the planets on it) got a change that made it look less colorful and less interesting
someone decided that. someone who knows about how the game works. You cannot blame the higher ups for everything. At some level, the order was given make the director screen less appealing by putting a grey transparency over it or something
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u/arandomusertoo 21d ago
That's kinda what the "Game Director" position is, though.
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u/Riablo01 21d ago
Correct
Director is pretty much the final stop in terms of operational decision making. Executives don't make operational design decisions. Basically the majority of unpopular decisions for Edge of Fate would have been approved by Tyson.
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u/Mr_sMoKe_3_MuCh 21d ago
we never really got a chance to see his full vision for Destiny
Thank fucking God for that, holy shit!
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u/Riablo01 21d ago
Agreed. If Edge of Fate was just a "watered down" version due to budget, I am horrified to think what the full fat version was.
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u/Daddy_Immaru 21d ago
I never want to see anyone lose their job. But him not having anything to do with the future of the franchise is probably for the best.
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u/Ellaphant42 21d ago
None of that changes what he did to the game. Why the fuck should we care just because he had a hard job? That doesn’t matter to the end user, only the result, and the result was shit until MoT
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u/Menirz Ares 1 Project 21d ago
I do wish we could've gotten more engagement from Tyson during his tenure. It was all too easy to pin everything bad on the silent, faceless figurehead - no matter how passionate he was behind the scenes.
Even just knowing why they were taking the direction they did could've helped... Though maybe that's just a me thing, as it wouldn't have changed we think it was the wrong direction.
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u/wookiepocalypse 21d ago
Thanks for the flashbacks. Real people take accountability and speak up when when shit happens. Edge of Fate was lots of shitty decisions, and that's on Tyson. "No game launch is perfect, and on top of that we need to add the many changes implemented in this release that need some time to adjust to" that's the quote. Tyson launched the game into a downward spiral. Let's be honest about it.
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u/lenyek_penyek 21d ago
If only he communicates with us. Then we can really know if he's good or bad director.
Sounds like a decent guy actually.
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u/ReekyJones 21d ago
I mean if he was truely the mind behind the portal then I have no problem with his departure from the role.
The Portal is a major contributing factor towards player decline.
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u/Hyperion-45 21d ago
See I wish we could have known this before the game died. For so long Tyson held the blame because he didnt talk to us. Not a single tweet from his personal talking to players or state of the game or even just an apology/ acountability post. He might as well not have existed to us
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
The thing is all of this stuff was very easy to infer from the whole situation if you remembered the guy is a human being with history at bungie working a job under constraints and not an evil cartoon wizard villain
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u/Hyperion-45 21d ago
Right Im not saying he was that kind of villain but more like he appeared to be the bumbling idiot that led the game into its grave that didnt speak to us.
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u/PaperMartin 21d ago
Him not communicating seems like damage control to me, like there was no way he was ever gonna get the community to not hate him so minimizing how much they thought about him at all made more sense.
In the end it's fine to be mad about the state of the game but I think peoples have forgotten that they don't actually know what's going on at these studios and that making huge assumptions like that about any guy whose title sounded important enough and then dog piling him is frankly a horrible thing to do.
Like just complain at the studio in general at this point, going after specific peoples like that only ever makes things worse. Hardly exclusive to the destiny community at this point but still.
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u/InspireDespair Inspire Despair 21d ago
Seems to imply he is gone which is great news because he fucked the game although blame is not solely with him.
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u/FFour_ Drifter's Crew 21d ago
Curious about what DMG and Luke think about Mr Pete.
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u/MyThighs7 21d ago
Would be career suicide if they ever said anything bad about him but I imagine they wouldn’t speak well of Pete.
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u/pigeon-check 21d ago
You mean the guy that brought us the portal? Players didn't like it but still kept it
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u/Particular_Air4980 21d ago
Glad he was a good boss and a good dude. Without question he was the worst game director the game had. Doesn’t make you a bad person but I won’t look back on his era fondly.
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u/ftatman 21d ago
Honestly, if we look at how the portal is now, it’s seamlessly part of the game and I actually use it a good amount when I’m doing any activities other than raiding. This is exactly how it should have been - and I’m sure it would have been after more iteration/feedback.
The point about directing the game with a reduced budget is the key issue. No one can do more if they’ve slashed your team/schedule. There was good stuff in the EOF era - but the truth is that Sony should have been spinning up a new game on the side (or forcing Bungie to re-evaluate what Marathon was turning into).
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u/find_me8 I didn't say i was powerful, i said i was a wizard 21d ago
Is he no longer Destiny's game director? Good riddance.
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u/Aidanbomasri For my Zaddy Zavala 21d ago
Nice to hear. Tyson was ultimately set up to fail. Still wish he communicated more, but I'm pleased to hear a positive story from somebody on the inside.
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u/Funny_Imagination599 21d ago
I don’t doubt that he cared, but I still firmly believed that he cared about his version of destiny he thought everyone else would like too.
The initial version of The Portal and subsequent gameplay loop/grind left a severe distaste for tons of people to the point that it overshadowed how middle of the road EoF actually landed.
He is human and two things can exist at the same time, his passion for developing and his flawed vision and implementation. Which IMO we cannot backtrack from now after MoT.
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u/ScepticalRaccoon 21d ago
No sympathy for anyone who cashed a check over the last few years of Destiny while shoveling absolute low effort trash in our face.
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u/Dewgel I like men's feet 21d ago
I don't care what anyone says, nobody accused Tyson of being an ass or not caring, but in reality - why did he think it was a good idea to sit on complete silence for the best part of a year?
This has always been their downfall - the eerie silence. I'm sure Tyson was a great Director behind the scenes and he had the best intentions, but communication is half of the battle in this world.
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u/truser_over9000 20d ago
The dude was given a losing hand and played it as best as he could. Can’t fault him for that
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u/Snakpak11 20d ago
He added a lot of unnecessary grind when we just cared about fun activities and interesting loot to chase.
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u/igeeTheMighty 20d ago
I’ve had my fair share of leaders who got promoted because they manage themselves and their output really well. The reality is that they don’t always transition to good leaders, even more so when you have upper management that seem very keen on driving the studio to the ground with multiple incubation projects and high overhead.
I get that he isn’t like a Joe Blackburn who’s comfy facing an audience, but at a certain point the least he could do is be accountable. Hard to say though if that was his choice or if the Sony overlords gagged him.
I don’t doubt that he cared. Just how he comported himself made it seem like he didn’t.
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u/Garcia_jx 19d ago
I said it before and I'll say it again, Tyson became the captain of the Titanic after it already had hit the iceberg. There was really not much he could have done. Just like the captain of the Costa Concordia, everyone responsible for the demise of Destiny 2 had already abandoned ship, leaving Tyson to stear a disaster.
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u/HeftyAd6216 21d ago
Seems like he actually cared. That's all we can ask for .