If you live under a rock, you at least know that Destiny was extremely underwhelming at launch, with an extreme lack of story content, multiplayer content, locked-off and unfinished on-disc DLC, the works. So weren't the DLC going to fix all that and continue off of the story? Well, I guess they did, but that in no way forgives for the travesty that was Destiny at launch last year.
But that's not what I'm mad about.
I'm mad about how bullshit Bungie and Activision's marketing and pricing tactics are on people who purchased Destiny. With the release of the new Taken King expansion/revamp of the game, you'd think that things would be a lot better from here on out, right? Welp, I can pretty much say no to that, at least from a pricing standpoint.
Let's take a look at the pricing of Destiny. The base game at launch was $60, and the game with the Season Pass was priced at launch as $90. That's standard (unfortunate, but standard) with most games at this point. Their first expansion, The Dark Below, cost $20 to those who didn't have the season pass. Their 2nd expansion, House of Wolves, followed the same suit, $20, covered by the season pass. HOWEVER, this new Taken King expansion is not only double the price of the earlier expansions at $40, but it isn't included in the Season Pass. Essentially, anyone who dropped extra on the Season Pass would have no choice but to purchase The Taken King. On top of that, to even access the new content of the Taken King, you HAVE to have both previous expansions. So let's do a bit of calculating if you can't follow so far:
Without the Season Pass:
$60 + $20 + $20 + $40 = $140 to access the Taken King from the base gameWith the Season Pass:
$90 + $40 = $130 to access the Taken KingNow this only applies to those who already purchased the game. For someone who doesn't own the game such as myself there is a Destiny Legendary Edition that includes the base game, all the previous DLC, and the Taken King for a flat $60. So it's not exactly bad if you don't have Destiny.
However, if you just have the base Destiny game you'll find that literally scrapping your current copy for a Legendary Taken King Edition of the game is actually CHEAPER than buying all the expansions seperately. Seriously, do the math. If you dropped $60 on the base game, and drop $60 for the new Legendary Edition, you only dropped $120. If you drop money separately for all the content you end up paying $140 total.
Is this what you want us to think of your game Activision and Bungie? That your base game is so worthless that it's actually more worth it to re-buy the game? That's terrible! You essentially beta tested everyone who made up that $500 million profit revenue on Day One of your damn game, and then expect them to at least drop the same price again for the expansions.
And yeah, there's a story floating around that originally Bungie had planned around 5 games to launch within 2 year time windows starting at 2013 for around 10 years. I believe the writer quitting or something like that impacted the game significantly to the point where they had to scrap their entire plans and start with a new plan and push a game out within a year. But that DOESN'T EXCUSE this. It doesn't excuse continually charging your customers for the same game over and over again. There are companies like CD Projekt Red that actually know how to treat their customers. There is no value in this game from a company, whether Bungie, Activision, or even both, that doesn't know how to treat its customers and expects you to keep throwing money at them over and over.
With how messed up this industry is, I originally found it hard to pinpoint a single game as the worst of the industry, but after this whole Taken King fiasco, it takes the cake as the worst of the industry.
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