Over the past few days, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg has talked about how Destiny 2, Bungie’s sequel to the hugely successful shared world shooter, will have more frequent content updates. However, even the very nature of the sequel being a reset is something that both parties are fervently pursuing.
Speaking to Games Industry Biz, Hirshberg said, “Destiny 2 is a sequel, a hard reset, and that choice was not a casual decision. It was something we really debated, because if you are in a persistent universe, then obviously people’s investment continues to have value in perpetuity. However, it can also become intimidating for new players to join.
“If you have an annual reset like we do with Call of Duty, you run the risk of people not coming back because that investment didn’t carry over to the new game. But certainly the annual release has been a big contributor to what has kept it fresh for so long. We have been able to bring in new ideas in a way that I don’t think we would have been able to do if we were still building on a persistent universe that started 10 years ago.”
Whether this same winning formula pans out for Destiny or not remains to be seen though. “So what we’ve found is that there is more than one good way to do it. We have a winning formula on Call of Duty. It is too early to tell, but having Destiny 1, followed by three years of expansions, and then hopefully Destiny 2 doing even better, will mean we have another winning formula.”
Destiny 2’s changes have enthralled and angered fans in equal measure from the new Lost Sectors and classes to the lack of random rolls on weapons and profile progress carrying over (except for one’s appearance). We’ll see the results for ourselves when Destiny 2 releases on Xbox One and PS4 on September 6th while the PC version arrives on October 24th.