Even though this year’s Game Developers Conference is long gone, we’re still getting peeks at how the gaming sausages are made in many respects, and just like that analogy suggests, that manufacture can turn out to be ugly indeed. Take the case of Destiny 2 and its efforts to try to retain players, as discussed by principal technical designer Alan Blaine in a GDC panel that can be described as honest yet mildly depressing.
“[S]tarting in September 2022 and continuing through November, our weekly active users dropped lower and faster than we’d seen since 2018 with no known cause,” Blaine recalled. “Similarly, player sentiment was also falling lower and faster than we’d seen. […] At the same time, likely due to this falling sentiment, pre-orders for our yearly expansion were well under expectations too.”
The solution was to put together a player retention team, which pulled from various disciplines and attempted to put together solutions and deploy them rapidly in what reads like a miserable, panicked, and crunch-filled time; Blaine detailed how this team would “find things that they could get into the game in the next week, like actually get into the live game in the next week, which meant, in reality, the work had to be done in the next day or two to get it tested in time.”
Blaine claimed in the talk that the efforts bore fruit in terms of player sentiment, yet he also made sure to point out that complaints over the Lightfall expansion were mostly about narrative and were out of the hands of this team. “If players had a problem with the narrative, […] that wasn’t something my team was equipped to deal with, but tuning numbers instantly, my team was perfect for that,” he’s quoted as saying.
As for current events in D2, the looter shooter is gearing up for act 3 of the Heresy episode due to land on April 1st, which will bring on a new area with new foes, new mechanics, and reward adjustments for the Court of Blades activity as the centerpiece, while players can also expect the next catalysts for the Barrow-Dyad exotic weapon, another row of season artifact benefits, and a reprised and grandmaster version of The Sunless Cell strike.
Finally, the odd bedfellows of D2’s cross-promotional collabs continue, this time with cash shop items in Sea of Thieves that let players of the pirating sandbox dress up their ships, weapons, and characters in “Lightbearer” style that references the FPS.
