If they consistently drop stuff like a raid, ToO, or PoE during the course of the coming year, I agree that it could be a great thing and I'll happily drop cash for more. But I think you're being way too optimistic expecting new locations and modes, and I'm not sure what really gives people that confidence.
Again, happy to be wrong, though. I just think there's a lot of blind hope in the bolded thoughts.
And I would never trust a guy who calls himself Captain Science anyways.
I prefer "cautious optimism". What I listed is best-plausible-case-scenario; I have zero belief anything approaching the sum total of TTK will be given to us for free, but the contents of TDB and HOW spread out over a year just doesn't seem that far fetched, for all the reasons we criticize that content. "Crota's just a big knight!" "PoE is just a few modifiers in tiny arenas!". Both expansions felt "stopgap" to begin with, so it just doesn't seem that bonkers to me that they'll simply move the release schedule for that order of content to a drip feed instead of retail releases.
I just don't see it myself. I think the idea of a live team is fantastic to bring life the game. But with small changes and events. Make all of the suros guns drop in hot pink for a couple of weeks. Snow in the tower. A new exotic weapon hidden away in a nightfall. A new quest line, or bounties.
When it comes to new geometry, full armor and weapon packs like the ones introduced in raids, and raids themselves...should, and probably will, remain in the hands of full development teams. That's not what they are saying the micro trasactions will fund.
Yeah IMO Bungie is working on Destiny Fall 2016 now.
I think that all of the incomplete year two content is now being worked on by that other studio that they brought on board last year.
Official or otherwise, it's fairly apparent that there's at least an "A" team and a "B" team. There may be some degree of overlap, especially in the realm of something like overarching raid design and other senior positions, but I just can't believe CE, PoE, and KF were developed serially by the same group of people as whole, regardless of the degree to which you subscribe to the "withheld from vanilla" theory.
So I absolutely agree that some portion, probably even the lion's share including that "A" team, are working on the Fall 2016 stuff now, just like they were working on TTK while the B team did TDB and HOW. I'm positing that the stuff the B team (and that acquired studio) would have been doing between TTK and the F16 release is what we're going to be drip fed.
I just think:
- Microtransactions covering JV stuff like towersnow and Mad Libs bounties ("Kill [number] of [enemy race] with [weapon type] on [patrol area]")
- 2x $20 expansions covering TDB/HOW-level things
- $60 megaexpansion covering TTK-level content dumps
... would result in the userbase (even the dedicated ones) pushing back. It also seems like one too many "things"; i.e. do any other games do multiple small expansions then a big one? (legit question, I really have no idea).
The Deej post goes out of his way to say "more robust and engaging events", so somewhere between the OG Queen's Wrath event (which included weapons, armor, shaders, etc.) and CE doesn't seem unreasonable.
We'll obviously need to wait and see, but they've publicly acknowledged that HoW and TDB aren't at the quality they're aiming for now. EDIT: so assuming "towersnow" isn't an acceptable perceived value, the A team is doing the F16 release, and HoW/TDB weren't good enough, what is the B team and the acquired studio theoretically working on if not what I'm suggesting?
