[Megathread] Destiny

[Edge-]

I didn't say that though, I stated quite clearly that the vast majority of this is down exclusively to shit management, and has been from the get-go, I stated that the whole woke agenda bullshit has been the icing on top of this shit pie and is one of the many reasons they have so little trust in the community now.

I thought it was because they kept doing shit like launching really obviously bad expansions or abandoning support for PvP for years at a time that was doing that, as they seemingly have spent quite a few years investing too much of Destiny 2's revenue into other projects and not maintaining a sufficiently large team dedicated to ongoing support for their literal only product that's making them money right now rofl.

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however pushing the woke narrative continuously has destroyed any sort of community support they could have fallen back on, as evidenced by the fact that revenue is down 45% on projections, meaning that all the harm the company has done to its image through the woke fiasco's over the years has now started to hit them where it hurts, their wallets.

See above. Quality issues seem to be the cause, not some dude with purple hair or someone who uses they/them pronouns. You're gonna need to draw a more direct line to connect those dots for me, because I'm not seeing the cow. Or maybe not as I don't want to "bait" anyone into crossing the line and these social/cultural issues can be sensitive at times.

[Mojo03]

As a person that's had Destiny 1 or 2 installed since they launched to play here and there because I enjoy the gunplay, I actually finally uninstalled it completely. I'll check out Final Shape probably, but I'm completely done until then.

Not surprised at all it's down 45%. Even most of their top streamers have long since quit.

Lightfall was shit, story is shit, the seasons are the same shit remixed, the prices keep going up while they keep offering less, PVP is a joke, they've had years to fix problems and they continue to neglect, etc, etc.

Hiring activists and using incompetent people in their PR events to virtue signal progressive crap doesn't help, but I'd agree that they have far more problems than that. They've been a shit company for a long time.

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See above. Quality issues seem to be the cause, not some dude with purple hair or someone who uses they/them pronouns. You're gonna need to draw a more direct line to connect those dots for me, because I'm not seeing the cow. Or maybe not as I don't want to "bait" anyone into crossing the line and these social/cultural issues can be sensitive at times.

The idea is that the people getting hired to do the work are less competent and aren't getting hired because of their merit, but rather because of politics.

[rogoth]

I thought it was because they kept doing shit like launching really obviously bad expansions or abandoning support for PvP for years at a time that was doing that, as they seemingly have spent quite a few years investing too much of Destiny 2's revenue into other projects and not maintaining a sufficiently large team dedicated to ongoing support for their literal only product that's making them money right now rofl.

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See above. Quality issues seem to be the cause, not some dude with purple hair or someone who uses they/them pronouns. You're gonna need to draw a more direct line to connect those dots for me, because I'm not seeing the cow. Or maybe not as I don't want to "bait" anyone into crossing the line and these social/cultural issues can be sensitive at times.

during the initial development of destiny 2, the woman put in charge of the 'communication systems' team put out an interview stating that the game would not allow ANY form of communication between players unless they were already friends purely on the basis that she was verbally abused online for being a woman, not condoning verbally abusing anyone but being such a snowflake that your personal vendetta excludes a BASIC FEATURE of most games that have multiplayer features is pretty stupid, that's the first major instance.

a little after Destiny 2 was released, there was an interview where Bungie was all like 'Making games is hard man, we can't do it like a factory because it's tough and shit' (I'm paraphrasing for effect but you get the idea), that really rubbed the community the wrong way after the utter shambles of curse of Osiris.

i quit after finishing everything in COO, I only came back halfway through season 4 after a friend of mine at the time was adamant that the game was better, turns out the reason the game was better was because Bungie didn't make any of it at that time, the entire support studios from Activision essentially took over making content for destiny 2 for the entire forsaken era, and when it came out that most of the stuff the community hated was actually stuff Bungie themselves directly worked on, it became a meme for a while regarding the kind of quality that Bungie was capable of making, which really didn't help them when they had that very public spat about splitting from activision and how 'we as a company will always put our community first' bullshit, they are worse now than when they were partnered with activision, yet another meme in the community btw.

years now of rehashed copy/paste bullshit has eaten away any and all respect people have for the dev team, not to mention the sheer incompetence shown by management on numerous occasions now coupled with the well documented twitter shenanigans it's all culminated to come to this conclusion, it's become its own vicious cycle where the developers produce F tier content, the 'marketing' team push out some woke garbage, the management put out a blog post to try and clean up the mess of the previous things and end up making it worse as a result, this has been a cycle now for years, it's only now that the rose tinted specs are falling off that people are finally seeing it for what it is.

[Edge-]

The idea is that the people getting hired to do the work are less competent and aren't getting hired because of their merit, but rather because of politics.

Which is never really born out and ignores the forest for the tree. Again, if this was as much of a causal problem as y'all imply it is then we should be seeing similar issues at the other internal Sony studios and the like. But we're not which is a pretty strong indicator it's something else that's a bit more unique to Bungie.

This is largely the same Bungie that shipped the prior expansions that weren't well received, and also the very well received Witch Queen expansion. It really does just seem like Bungie struggles to ship decent expansions period.

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during the initial development of destiny 2, the woman put in charge of the 'communication systems' team put out an interview stating that the game would not allow ANY form of communication between players unless they were already friends purely on the basis that she was verbally abused online for being a woman, not condoning verbally abusing anyone but being such a snowflake that your personal vendetta excludes a BASIC FEATURE of most games that have multiplayer features is pretty stupid, that's the first major instance.

This is the first I'm hearing of this, and I'm not able to find any historical record of this interview or related discussion through my web searching. This story also sounds super suspect, and there are a host of other reasons why Bungie would limit in-game communication.

The closest I can find on this topic is this article - https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/d...public-channel

Which is an interview with a man, David Shaw, who was lead on the PC version, for why there aren't global chat channels on PC. Console limitations seemed more tech driven as that functionality was added far later (2021) and required a separate keyboard.

a little after Destiny 2 was released, there was an interview where Bungie was all like 'Making games is hard man, we can't do it like a factory because it's tough and shit' (I'm paraphrasing for effect but you get the idea), that really rubbed the community the wrong way after the utter shambles of curse of Osiris.

Ok, but I don't see what that has to do with anything beyond bad management? Bungie got savaged for the poor quality of Destiny 2 at launch by the community, at least on PC, once the newness of the excellent gunplay and smooth performance wore off and we started getting a real look at the endgame, amount of content on display, and could start evaluating whether promised engine improvements had really made it or not. The whole base game and first few DLC's were utter disasters because Bungie - hot-take here so prepare your arrows and slings - is a developer who can make incredible moment-to-moment gameplay but is grossly overrated as actual game makers and is well out of their depth when trying to build something bigger than an arena shooter like a MMO.

@ me all you want bros, come at me hard, I will throw down that Bungie is a grossly overrated developer over their handling of the Destiny franchise overall.

i quit after finishing everything in COO, I only came back halfway through season 4 after a friend of mine at the time was adamant that the game was better, turns out the reason the game was better was because Bungie didn't make any of it at that time, the entire support studios from Activision essentially took over making content for destiny 2 for the entire forsaken era

Alright slow down here because you're just making YUGE claims without evidence.

Vicarious Visions led the PC port for Destiny 2 initially, and did a lot of work (alongside High Moon Studios) on both Warmind/COO (IIRC) and also Forsaken. But I'm also not finding any support for your claim that Activision and/or their studios took over development during the Forsaken era, anywhere.

years now of rehashed copy/paste bullshit has eaten away any and all respect people have for the dev team, not to mention the sheer incompetence shown by management on numerous occasions now coupled with the well documented twitter shenanigans it's all culminated to come to this conclusion, it's become its own vicious cycle where the developers produce F tier content, the 'marketing' team push out some woke garbage, the management put out a blog post to try and clean up the mess of the previous things and end up making it worse as a result, this has been a cycle now for years, it's only now that the rose tinted specs are falling off that people are finally seeing it for what it is.

OK, we're again back to "bad decisions by management" that would have been bad no matter who was hired to work on the game. You've connected no dots and I still do not see the cow you claim is really there : /

[rogoth]

Which is never really born out and ignores the forest for the tree. Again, if this was as much of a causal problem as y'all imply it is then we should be seeing similar issues at the other internal Sony studios and the like. But we're not which is a pretty strong indicator it's something else that's a bit more unique to Bungie.

This is largely the same Bungie that shipped the prior expansions that weren't well received, and also the very well received Witch Queen expansion. It really does just seem like Bungie struggles to ship decent expansions period.

yes, that's the point being made but layered on top of that their entire media presence has all been about diversity and inclusivity while shooting themselves in the foot, they hired a huge number of 'media' people last year I think it was, and they were all purple haired they/them clowns who pushed the narrative so hard it alienated so many people who had been there for years, as stated the whole LatinX debacle very recently, while the developers making the game aren't doing any favours, the overall COMPANY is rotten, top-down, completely broken, we're saying that hiring these activists for key roles in the company has massively heaped even more pressure on an already brittle framework holding the house of cards up, does this make sense now or are you still confused?

[Mojo03]

Which is never really born out and ignores the forest for the tree. Again, if this was as much of a causal problem as y'all imply it is then we should be seeing similar issues at the other internal Sony studios and the like. But we're not which is a pretty strong indicator it's something else that's a bit more unique to Bungie.

This is largely the same Bungie that shipped the prior expansions that weren't well received, and also the very well received Witch Queen expansion. It really does just seem like Bungie struggles to ship decent expansions period.
/

Probably a bit of both and other factors.

1) If there were problems, you're not going to hear about them unless a leak gets out. No one is openly going to blame sensitive political issues.

2) They've had issues for years and years. Bungie has been with Sony for barely a year. I have no idea what, if anything changed under their umbrella. It actually seems like nothing really did when you consider Sony paid a lot of extra money to keep the same people.

[Edge-]

yes, that's the point being made but layered on top of that their entire media presence has all been about diversity and inclusivity while shooting themselves in the foot, they hired a huge number of 'media' people last year I think it was, and they were all purple haired they/them clowns who pushed the narrative so hard it alienated so many people who had been there for years, as stated the whole LatinX debacle very recently, while the developers making the game aren't doing any favours, the overall COMPANY is rotten, top-down, completely broken, we're saying that hiring these activists for key roles in the company has massively heaped even more pressure on an already brittle framework holding the house of cards up, does this make sense now or are you still confused?

Except that they did this before they did any pushes. Hell, Destiny 2 was a pretty dogshit follow up to the great game Destiny was. Y'all are the ones that put so much focus and attention on all the other things, I keep an eye on Destiny 2 pretty consistently and while they do some social initiatives and the like the situation y'all describe is one that's pretty foreign to me.

Things they've done "very recently" have nothing to do with the fact that their current struggles to put out good expansions/sequels simply continues a long pattern from them that dates back to Destiny, where they actually improved before reverting.

Y'all keep talking about activist hiring and just expect me to take y'all at face value as if you've got personal work history with all these folks and can speak to whether they're actually qualified/good at their jobs first-hand, while also posting as if you're very clear about exactly who is responsible for what decisions and content which would definitely require a lot of insider knowledge.

I have no clue who these 'media' people are. Is it former Valorant director Joe Ziegler? Did they ever fill that "Destiny historian" position to finally get a handle on the complete clusterfuck of lore and narrative and writing that Bungie has apparently struggled to keep straight? Bridget O'Neill, who has a background in film/TV and would likely be working on that angle vs. doing gamedev? (this is something they've been at for a while, btw - https://www.ign.com/articles/destiny...-movies-comics) Maybe Derick Tsai, who did animation for Riot and is doing transmedia (i.e. TV and shit, not related to trans folk) for Bungie?

Who are we talking about here, because I'm still confused as you're not being very specific and I'm not one to just take vague arguments as a given because the have the ear-feel of being "right".

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Probably a bit of both and other factors.

1) If there were problems, you're not going to hear about them unless a leak gets out. No one is openly going to blame sensitive political issues.

2) Bungie has been with Sony for barely a year. I have no idea what, if anything changed under their umbrella. It actually seems like nothing really did when you consider Sony paid a lot of extra money to keep the same people.

Why not? People go out all the time when there are huge internal issues, or even small ones, within companies. Why not on this topic? This has all the hallmarks of "conspiracy" to me, and while I'm not calling it that here for the sake of moderation and all I'd argue that the ongoing lack of hard evidence to support this theory is probably some kind of signal that folks are choosing to ignore.

Bungie has been with Sony a bit, and from everything we know has an incredibly generous set of terms that afford than an enormous amount of creative freedom. Nothing really seems to have changed at Bungie beyond the reality that they're working on more projects now and have tighter budgets to maintain overall while needing to deliver results for their parent company. They likely can't just eat a bad expansion (again) and post-expansion sales window when they're working on two titles, one announced, plus more.

[rogoth]

Which is never really born out and ignores the forest for the tree. Again, if this was as much of a causal problem as y'all imply it is then we should be seeing similar issues at the other internal Sony studios and the like. But we're not which is a pretty strong indicator it's something else that's a bit more unique to Bungie.

This is largely the same Bungie that shipped the prior expansions that weren't well received, and also the very well received Witch Queen expansion. It really does just seem like Bungie struggles to ship decent expansions period.

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This is the first I'm hearing of this, and I'm not able to find any historical record of this interview or related discussion through my web searching. This story also sounds super suspect, and there are a host of other reasons why Bungie would limit in-game communication.

The closest I can find on this topic is this article - https://www.pcgamesn.com/destiny-2/d...public-channel

Which is an interview with a man, David Shaw, who was lead on the PC version, for why there aren't global chat channels on PC. Console limitations seemed more tech driven as that functionality was added far later (2021) and required a separate keyboard.



Ok, but I don't see what that has to do with anything beyond bad management? Bungie got savaged for the poor quality of Destiny 2 at launch by the community, at least on PC, once the newness of the excellent gunplay and smooth performance wore off and we started getting a real look at the endgame, amount of content on display, and could start evaluating whether promised engine improvements had really made it or not. The whole base game and first few DLC's were utter disasters because Bungie - hot-take here so prepare your arrows and slings - is a developer who can make incredible moment-to-moment gameplay but is grossly overrated as actual game makers and is well out of their depth when trying to build something bigger than an arena shooter like a MMO.

@ me all you want bros, come at me hard, I will throw down that Bungie is a grossly overrated developer over their handling of the Destiny franchise overall.



Alright slow down here because you're just making YUGE claims without evidence.

Vicarious Visions led the PC port for Destiny 2 initially, and did a lot of work (alongside High Moon Studios) on both Warmind/COO (IIRC) and also Forsaken. But I'm also not finding any support for your claim that Activision and/or their studios took over development during the Forsaken era, anywhere.



OK, we're again back to "bad decisions by management" that would have been bad no matter who was hired to work on the game. You've connected no dots and I still do not see the cow you claim is really there : /

I had a reddit article saved from back then but when I went to get it it's now 'oops 404', it was from back in 2016 so it might take a lot of digging through stuff to find but it existed, a female lead interviewed why there was no public chat in the game and her primary reasoning was because after being verbally abused in other games that had open communication she stated she wanted to shift things in destiny to a more 'make friends and chat with them' narrative.

as for your take about bungie, I'm not disagreeing with you so I dunno why you keep harping on about the whole 'hot take' shit, you're preaching to the choir here buddy.

as far as the content development, it was revealed in multiple places who worked on what during those days, one of those sources is the infamous 'don't over deliver' conference that bungie put out where it showed the majority of forsaken content was developed by external studios from activision, and the ENTIRETY of season 7 (season of opulence) was built by VV, and the parts of that seasonal cycle that were done by bungie (season 6 and the whole season of gambit bullshit) were relatively hated by the community that it spawned the meme that bungie were only capable of 'supporting proper dev studios'.

and in terms of VV, they had devs come outright and state they took over development on destiny 2 content when the studio got shut down by activision and merged into blizzard, so if you are really invested in that go look up that stuff, it's all there to see.

[Mojo03]

Why not? People go out all the time when there are huge internal issues, or even small ones, within companies. Why not on this topic? This has all the hallmarks of "conspiracy" to me, and while I'm not calling it that here for the sake of moderation and all I'd argue that the ongoing lack of hard evidence to support this theory is probably some kind of signal that folks are choosing to ignore.

Are you really that far removed from the current political climate in the US?

Because people get cancelled and labelled hateful things.

If you have a tech/design job, it's very, very difficult to find another company that isn't openly progressive.

[Vetali]

They released a sub par (or missing the mark, after all the hype) expansion in a year thats been loaded with GOTY after GOTY candidates. Increased prices for... just about everything. Their revenue being way under the mark isn't surprising. I didn't buy LF, and I suffered through SK+BL playing D2 as my main filler game. Now I'm back to WoW for that.

Sucks for the workers, there are some big names getting released like Salvatori. Even more shitty there isn't any sort of extended benefits package... even Activision does that when they lay off people...

[Edge-]

I had a reddit article saved from back then but when I went to get it it's now 'oops 404', it was from back in 2016 so it might take a lot of digging through stuff to find but it existed, a female lead interviewed why there was no public chat in the game and her primary reasoning was because after being verbally abused in other games that had open communication she stated she wanted to shift things in destiny to a more 'make friends and chat with them' narrative.

I did historical searches (you can narrow results to specific timelines) and didn't find anything, and my google-fu is pretty alright. You can repeat your story, that doesn't make it more true without an actual link to show it existed and wasn't just a story you read from someone else without double checking and has now become "knowledge" (we all do it).

as far as the content development, it was revealed in multiple places who worked on what during those days, one of those sources is the infamous 'don't over deliver' conference that bungie put out where it showed the majority of forsaken content was developed by external studios from activision, and the ENTIRETY of season 7 (season of opulence) was built by VV, and the parts of that seasonal cycle that were done by bungie (season 6 and the whole season of gambit bullshit) were relatively hated by the community that it spawned the meme that bungie were only capable of 'supporting proper dev studios'.

Ah yes, GDC, the place where industry talks are always taken out of context by consumers who see a slide or hear 30 seconds of an hour and a half long discussion and will take that out of context information and just run wild with it.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/102759...oducts-to-Live

You can find the image the meme is based on on page 70 in the PDF here. And contextually, as a game maker, Justin Truman is 100% correct here and we've seen games run into this problem where they overdeliver early and set unreasonable expectations about what's sustainable, only to change course later and piss off the community. The many MMO's committing to "monthly content updates" that stopped almost immediately, GW2's initial bi-weekly update cadence which changed to a quarterly cadence with expansions which then changed to reduced scope expansions to (paradoxically, but it works) give the developers more freedom as they're not needing to ship a new elite class/weapon and 4 new zones a bunch of other things that really suck up a ton of development time and don't give them the freedom to explore too many stories.

I'm sure there's much more context in there especially with the train analogy and all.

Where was it revealed who did what, though? Can you point to me in the PDF or show me an article? Or where there's any confirmation that VV built all of S7? I ask because either you're again passing on "knowledge" or my google fu is far weaker than I'd imagined.

and in terms of VV, they had devs come outright and state they took over development on destiny 2 content when the studio got shut down by activision and merged into blizzard, so if you are really invested in that go look up that stuff, it's all there to see.

This is HUGE Citation Needed*

I'm not sure why it's on me to try to track down verification for all your claims. I have been and there hasn't been much, which leads me to believe that many, if not most of your claims are incorrect.

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Are you really that far removed from the current political climate in the US?

Because people get cancelled and labelled hateful things.

If you have a tech/design job, it's very, very difficult to find another company that isn't openly progressive.

This is the kind of path we don't want to go down as it's not discussing game but topics that are off-topic for this forum.

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https://www.ign.com/articles/pete-pa...k-on-destiny-2

Employees were also told that Destiny 2 player sentiment was at an all-time low. Sources tell IGN that this issue had been flagged to leadership repeatedly for months prior to the layoffs, with employees begging for necessary changes to win players back.

Depressingly unsurprising as we continue to read example after example of developers trying to sound the alarm bells to leadership only for leadership to completely ignore it, and it's the developers who paid for leadership's hubris and inaction.

[PACOX]

Destiny 2 is lucky that no one has been able to make a game quite like it. Not sure why but no one has been able to emulate the gunplay or level design, things that made players tolerate the games lopsided monetization and direction. Lightfall was an embarrassment. The sad thing that it is only due to greed and Bungie finally got the stinging blowback it deserved.


You can see how they purposely cut LFs story to sell it off in seasons. And there's no reason why seasons cost as much as they do. The price of the seasons wouldn't be so bad if a) expansions didn't launch with a season b) there wasn't the overbearing sense of FOMO c) you didn't feel completely SOL if you bought an expansion but not the season pass.


The seasons for lightfall pretty much have had more and better content than the expansion they came out with,even the one that rolled out with the expansion. Feels like you're paying x5 as much for the shittiest season.


But really if a company could just make a pve fps shoot that doesn't run like shit and has gunplay they are 60% of the way to dethroning Destiny. Sadly even co-op fps games not meant for MMO like play struggle to get their gunplay right or performance is terrible or a kid in Roblox could design better maps.


Sony has no reason to 'fix' Destiny's poor management as a long as Destiny dominates it niche. Don't think there's any strong competitors on the horizon.

[arandomuser]

remember when everyone said destinys problems were because of activison management

[Edge-]

remember when everyone said destinys problems were because of activison management

I don't think anyone has said that for a long, long time. Bungie separated themselves from Activision nearly five years ago by now, it's been abundantly clear where the issues with Destiny 2's support resided in that nearly half decade.

[arandomuser]

I don't think anyone has said that for a long, long time. Bungie separated themselves from Activision nearly five years ago by now, it's been abundantly clear where the issues with Destiny 2's support resided in that nearly half decade.

sorry this was in response to this recent news i should clarify https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultas...h=35c25c0140d0

[Kathandira]

Destiny was dead to me once I opened my eyes to their idea of new content was reskins, and previously released areas...In reverse!.

The laziness knew no bounds.

[Aliven]

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...pularity-waned

Revenue at 45% below expectations is going to send basically any management into a panic if true.

Wow, so agressive monetization, delivering as little as possible to not "spoil" payers and being greedy untalented idiots finally bit them in ass and common workers would pay for it? It never happend in the industry before. Im schocked!

[Flaks]

This shitshow is great to see. I hope to see Bungie dismantled by Sony some time soon if not a complete wipeout of Bungie management.

They're probably the single most financially corrupt US video game company out there which is saying a lot when the competition is the likes of Activision-Blizzard and EA.

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I don't think anyone has said that for a long, long time. Bungie separated themselves from Activision nearly five years ago by now, it's been abundantly clear where the issues with Destiny 2's support resided in that nearly half decade.

Everyone including Bungie themselves blamed Activision for Destiny's failures. Within a couple of years after it looked like things were still looking up since Witch Queen was pretty dang good but the seasonal model started getting players to be savvy. Even then there were a ton of defenders.

Destiny has been feeling like that quote "sell them each bullet" for quite a while.

[Zenfoldor]

The last Xpak was actually great for the playground at first. Then the season of the deep came out and it all just became so tiresome. The seasonal activities were boring with lots of waiting for the story that you have to hear EVERYTIME you play, then the new strand abilities dropped and they were so-so, but by then the game was so stale.

I'd say they could have fixed this EASY if they made it easier to target those new exotics, but having to do the heroic lost sector solo, while eventually only pretty hard for me(coming from actually impossible) who built out for it, was so boring and repetitive and awful. Those exotics were the biggest collectable in the game and they are basically really sucky to farm(or were) and when I could no longer beg my bro online to play, it was over for me.

The playground is fun and a solid time for about 100-200 hours if you haven't been around since crafting was introduced, but it is actually a hollow game imo. They could fix it easily but want to play around the high end collectors rather than the casual players or solo players.

Also, an in game matchmaking tool for raids or dungeons would vastly change the game for casual players. It would also cause some groups to wipe. Freedom is scary, why don't you give it a chance bungie, making your 50 hardcore fans super happy they don't have to deal with pugs or making newbs fail at heroic solo lost sectors to even get their meta build going is not really broadening your appeal.

Do yall think this is why Jim Ryan is "retiring"? Terrible GAAS plan that even I can see will fail from lightyears away, bought Bungie right during their bed shat, and the real string pullers at Sony saw the writing on the wall? Sony thinks(thought) Bungie was going to revolutionize their gaas model, but nobody wants Sony to become like Bungie is today.

Imagine if Larian bought Bungie and made an announcement that they were hired to help them monetize BG4, lol. It's the same thing here!

Still not sunk in? Jim Ryan closed down the studio that helped with Bloodborne and bought the studio that made Season of the Deep.

[Aliven]

You can find the image the meme is based on on page 70 in the PDF here. And contextually, as a game maker, Justin Truman is 100% correct here and we've seen games run into this problem where they overdeliver early and set unreasonable expectations about what's sustainable, only to change course later and piss off the community. The many MMO's committing to "monthly content updates" that stopped almost immediately, GW2's initial bi-weekly update cadence which changed to a quarterly cadence with expansions which then changed to reduced scope expansions to (paradoxically, but it works) give the developers more freedom as they're not needing to ship a new elite class/weapon and 4 new zones a bunch of other things that really suck up a ton of development time and don't give them the freedom to explore too many stories.

Sure, but there is a difference between saying:
"We need to have reasonable release schedule of updates, meassured based on our team ability to deliver"
and
"We need to be very, very wary of not delivering too much because maybe we would not be able to do that"

Those are not the same things and not the same philosophy. And looking how Destiny 2 is a prime example of why monetization is fucked up im gonna say that they are greedy motherfuckers.