No, 'Destiny' Players Are Not Revolting Over 'The Taken King'

Reading some of the coverage, you’d think someone was storming the Bastille. Bungie is charging too much for The Taken King, Bungie is charging too much for emotes, Bungie is charging too little for new players, Creative Director Luke Smith is annoying, Red Bulldoesn’t actually give you wings — the list of grievances goes on and on. There has certainly been little besides negative news to report about Destiny in the weeks since The Taken King’s announcement, and keeping up on the news can give you the feeling that the whole thing is caving in on itself. Rest assured: this is not happening.

The internet is, as a rule of thumb, unconcerned with those people who are simply enjoying a given video game (or anything else) and not talking a lot about it. But when there’s something to complain about, it doesn’t take long for a few thousand people to dominate an entire conversation, especially when that conversation takes place mainly on message boards, forums, subreddits and the like. The rest fall somewhere on the spectrum from “totally unconcerned” to “slightly miffed,” watching the spectacle from a certain distance and wondering how it’s all going to shake out. This is hardly a new phenomenon in human existence, but it becomes especially striking in a community like Destiny, which exists solely in virtual space. When you spend time on forums, the loudest people are not just the most visible people, they are the only people.

It is difficult to find empirical evidence about just how annoyed the majority of gamers are, but we can certainly get an approximation. For example, a petitionto get Bungie to give year 1 players the same perks as new players has just north of 30,000 signatures. It seems like a lot! Though it’s not a huge chunk of a game with 20 million registered players, especially when you consider the minimal effort it actually takes to sign a petition. A peek over at the top stories on the Destiny forums at Bungie yields no mention of any of these controversies at the time of this writing, nor does the Destiny subreddit (update, there’s a superthread for The Taken King Controversies) — the top post there is “Why Hard Light is Unquestionably The Best Auto Rifle.” The Facebook communities I watch still overwhelmingly trend towards talking about the actual gameplay rather than the controversies. And that’s only among the people who are inclined to spend any appreciable amount of time on forums in the first place: again, a very small subset of any given playerbase.

I definitely think that Bungie could have handled the rollout of The Taken King a little better, and probably found a cheaper price for all those cosmetic items while they were at it. The way Luke Smith came off in that interview was frustrating to say the least. But the apocalyptic tone of the aggrieved just gets tiresome. The game has improved, and will likely continue to improve. It is either worth your money or not.