‘Destiny 2’ and the ethics of removing two years of paid content

Now that we have the complete list of everything Destiny 2 is “vaulting” ie. When deleting from the game with Beyond Light, I find myself pondering a question that has plagued the game since the announcement of the Content Vault.

What are the ethical or potentially legal implications of removing previously paid content from a video game?

I’m not going “crazy” at Bungie here. In truth, personally, I don’t really care about most of the things that get away from a practical standpoint, I just think that’s an interesting question in the age of video games in 2020, and “Changing worlds” that must break for a long time – rules established or risk of being strangled to death.

The point is, Bungie is removing access to more or less two years of content. All Red War, Curse of Osiris and Warmind campaigns. Everything in Black Armory, Season of the Drifter and Season of Opulence. The full areas of Io, Titan, Mercury, Mars, and everything in Leviathan, from four raids to Menagerie. Really, the only things left years 1 through 2 of Destiny is the EDZ, Nessus, and the Tower, the loot we got from those first two years if we kept it (even though it’s “sunset” it doesn’t go away literally).

But it’s a bit of a delusional situation because depending on when you got the game you paid $ 60 for the base game and $ 35 for the expansion pass. That’s $ 95 for content just a few years ago that just doesn’t exist anymore.

Think how that would feel in a different service game, maybe non-live. You have purchased Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and its DLC. One day you log in to find the map cut in half and all the story missions are gone. This is effectively what has happened here, only in the case of Destiny, there is Year 3 content and now Year 4 content to fill the void.

The problem is, Destiny has essentially positioned itself as a subscription service like Netflix, although this was not made clear beforehand. When you pay $ 120 per year for Netflix, you understand that you are not literally paying to own every title in its library. Things are added, things are leaving every month.

But Destiny only recently started saying up front that some things have a time limit. Seasons in Year 3, for example, made it clear when you bought them that most of the stuff in them would be gone when those three months were up. People didn’t like it so it looks like the seasonal activities last at least a year before they leave. But at least in this case, we were told from the start that this stuff was impermanent. It was do not the case with core Destiny 2 content, two DLCs, three Year 2 seasons and two expansions, and while Forsaken and Shadowkeep aren’t in the content vault just yet, they could very well be soon enough. . When you purchased the game, you weren’t told that in a few years, the content in that game might become indefinitely inaccessible.

It doesn’t seem like the same situation to me as when, say, the New Light has come. New Light made Destiny 2 vanilla and Osiris / Warmind devoid of content. But giving something for free to new players doesn’t take anything away from players who already own it.

Perhaps the other comparison I hear is the closest one, where games ultimately shut down servers making multiplayer inaccessible on older titles. I guess i can kind of see this, and yet these hours are generally really very long. Season of Opulence, for example, was a year ago, and now it’s going to be wiped out completely.

I’m not saying we should all be filing some sort of class action lawsuit against Bungie, but this is truly a unique situation, and I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more in this industry. What exactly is Bungie supposed to be doing here? The “normal” option would have been to do Destiny 3 and leave Destiny 2 completely behind. The game would have been “intact” but we would have practically lost access to all its content is also relevant to the current series, as we did when Destiny 1 was left behind.

So stick with Destiny 2, Bungie just can not keep it stretching forever. Its technical and hard drive space limits are approaching with so much content in the game, so the content vault is born, and 40-50% of the game is heading there to free up room for new things. more relevant. I guess Bungie is technically get around the “but we paid for this content and go” question because the safe implies that things can come outside from the vault, and in a year maybe, say, Menagerie will come out of it, and voila, you have free access to that because you already bought this season a long time ago.

I think the ultimate answer is for gamers to understand how games are going to change and develop in the future. While Destiny isn’t literally a monthly subscription, it is essentially a monthly subscription. It’s Netflx. Things add up, things disappear, and the money you pay is access to what is currently there. Again, this was not clarified years ago when this content was first purchased hence the problem, but it’s pretty clear now that this is how the game works. ‘future, and even though I’m paying $ 40 for Beyond Light this fall, that content could be tossed in the vault in two years as far as I know. But I’m ready to buy it anyway.

I don’t envy Bungie’s position here, but I also don’t disagree with fans who see this as simply removing something they paid for and who really, that’s exactly what it feels like. . It sounds “necessary”, yes, but in practice it’s very strange in the entertainment space, and a situation that most games have never faced like this in the past. But more likely in the future.

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