Destiny 2, Sea of Thieves, and the problem with seasonal content

Sea of Thieves recently received its long-awaited “Captaincy” update, packed with features that hopeful pirates have been clamoring for since the game launched in 2018. You can now name your ship and decorate it with custom trinkets and cosmetics — simple but appreciated stuff like that.

The update to the larger game was less well-received. Since the Captaincy update’s launch, the game’s subreddit and official forums have been flooded with posts decrying the new “milestones” system, a layered series of trackers that are supposed to “allow you to look back on all the unique things that you’ve done,” as the game’s creative director, Mike Chapman, phrased it in the studio’s recent season 7 deep dive video.

It is simple: Sea of Thieves’ most dedicated players have already been doing “unique things” — and plenty of not-unique things — for More than four years. The game’s menu has pages and pages full of “commendations” that track everything from the distance you’ve sailed under the flags of specific factions to the number of skeleton ships you’ve sunk since achieving Pirate Legend status. The new milestones start at zero, regardless of how many hours, hundreds or thousands of them a player has already logged. Veteran players may have already earned tons of gold, completed hundreds of quests, and slayed dozens of Megalodons — but if you want any of those new trinkets or rewards, you’ll have to do it all again.

Image: Rare/Microsoft Studios

It is one thing to place veteran and new players on an equal footing when it comes time for new quests or voyages. But this is another: Rare doesn’t respect the long hours that some of its most committed players have invested in Rare.

Rare has already updated the system to reduce some of the most outrageous milestone grinds, like 100 hours spent sleeping, drinking grog, or literally being on fire — things no player would ever accomplish incidentally in the normal course of playing the game. Sea of Thieves lead designer Shelley Preston took to the game’s official blog to clarify the designers’ thinking around the update as a whole: “The intention of this system is to enable you to track the way you uniquely play and the things you like to engage with the most, and then give you rewards for that.”

In other words, these milestones aren’t meant to be a checklist that you tackle one by one, but a reflection of your personal play style that no individual player is meant to fully complete. But the system is meant to track only what a player accomplishes while on a “Captained” ship, which hasn’t existed before now (although this is at its core a silly rationale, since I’ve obviously been the captain of my own ship in Sea of ThievesFor many years.

Preston explained to me that these trackers weren’t coded in the game, so they are impossible to retroactively award. It is true that it can be painful to look at all those zeroes as a player for a long time, even for trackers. These wereIn the game in the form commendations. To Sea of Thieves’ most dedicated players, the Captaincy update has left a taste more sour than week-old grog.

Image: Rare/Microsoft Studios

It is not a rare problem. Sea of Thieves, though. Cliff Bleszinski is a former game designer. pointed outAs seasonal models become more popular, games will be able to offer new content, as well as new work, for their players. A game that, had it existed a decade ago, might have received one or two expansions, today exists as a “live-service game” — one that’s treated more as a subscription than a single-purchase product, usually with a new premium battle pass every few months.

There’s nothing wrong with the battle pass system itself; whatever the game, it generally gives hardcore players new things to earn by simply playing however they want, while allowing more casual players to ignore it entirely.

But the live-service model’s overlapping hamster wheels of content — and the need for developers to constantly add new wheels to keep players running in place — often lead to a game’s most ardent fans feeling disrespected.

It’s the reason why I quit playingDestiny 2. In 2020, several months into the pandemic, developer Bungie announced the “gear sunsetting” system, by which guns and armor that players had earned would be gradually phased out to make room for the new toys being released with each season. This system was intended to address several real issues: Destiny players tended to use only the best-in-class weapons for each inventory slot, ignoring most of the new guns released each season (many of which were boring reskins of older guns, but that’s beside the point). That meant less grinding of each season’s new content, and, maybe, more time spent playing other games. In addition, Destiny’s massive sandbox of weapons and abilities has, historically, been unwieldy for Bungie’s designers to balance.

Whatever the intention, in practice, the “gunsetting” system was simply the latest way for Bungie to wipe the slate clean. Instead of Guardians being free to choose how they liked, this system made them follow a set of instructions that rendered new weapon batches mathematically unusable. Logging in would be a great idea. Destiny 2 now, two years later, I’d find a vault full of guns and armor, trophies that represent great memories of Nightfalls and raids and Crucible matches my friends and I sweated and cried through — most of which is, as of now, effectively worthless. Their numbers just don’t go high enough.

Destiny 2’s developers have talked extensively about the problems they have attracting new players. Here’s assistant game director Joe Blackburn discussing it with GameSpot, and design director Victoria Dollbaum discussing it with PC Gamer. It’s tempting for devs to wipe the slate clean and make it easier to onboard new players. But disregarding the accomplishments of players who’ve spent thousands of hours in their world feels like an overcompensation.

Bungie discontinued the gear sunsetting mechanism in 2021. Blackburn wrote that although the studio “still believes in [the] goals” that sunsetting’s infusion caps were meant to address, “it’s clear [its] execution was off the mark.” However, Bungie continued adding things like destinations and activities to the “content vault,” effectively deleting them from the live game to lower the game’s file size and funnel players toward newer stuff. Announcement of Destiny 2’s next big expansion, LightfallThe studio also promised that it would end this practice.

But for some players, including myself, the damage was done: Bungie had once again attempted to negate hundreds of hours that we had chosen to spend in its world, and there’s no guarantee that they won’t do it again sometime in the future.

Image: Bungie via Polygon

Live-service games by definition are constantly evolving. Developers are still trying to figure out the best way to draw new players and keep existing fans happy. It’s a difficult balancing act — but it isn’t impossible. FortniteFor instance, This happens a lot. Any cosmetics earned or purchased throughout the game’s entire lifespan remain useable forever, and things that are rare tend to remain rare, and continue to reward players’ investment — they were There are They can still display the rewards, regardless of how long it has been since they won them.

Some MMOs accept player investments. Consider these points.Final Fantasy XIVIt received version 6.2 patches this week and added new content, such as Island Sanctuaries. FFXIV Earned titles and fancy Relic Weapons can be used to show off your achievements. The “level sync” system ensures that high-level players can’t cakewalk their way through old content to earn prestigious items, while the game’s version of a transmog system, called Glamours, ensures that you’ll always be able to show off your trophies.

All this to say: These areLive-service games are designed to strike a balance between veteran players and newer ones. It is not an easy task to design systems that both reward and punish the two camps. But the alternative — repeatedly burning your game’s most passionate fans — can only have diminishing returns.