Can a live service game ever have a satisfying conclusion?

One of the concerns that is often voiced about “new” business models – we’re really going to have to stop calling F2P and live service “new” at some point – is that they can bring the business needs of a game in conflict with the demands of good game design.

Like the business models themselves, this isn’t a new worry. It’s a conflict that has existed since the first moment when the notion of turning an unfinished piece of content into DLC rather than adding it to the base game crossed a developer’s mind.

That’s not the usual process through which DLC comes about, of course, except in the febrile minds of the most conspiracy-minded gamers, but neither can anyone claim with a straight face that it’s a conflict that never occurs.

There are far more blatant examples of business models coming into conflict with design principles to be found. Paid-for items that confer a competitive advantage in multiplayer titles – so-called “pay-to-win” models – are an especially egregious example, so much so that they have tarred F2P games generally (most of which aren’t pay-to-win) in the eyes of a large cohort of consumers.

A less-discussed but nonetheless very relevant example of this conflict has been brought into focus in the past week by the mounting troubles facing Destiny 2. Bungie’s travails as a studio are well-documented at this stage, coming to a head with the departure of CEO Pete Parsons at the end of August – but in the background the company’s pillar title also seems to have seen its player numbers fall off a cliff.

The latest depths to be plumbed by the game’s figures are dark and lightless indeed. Player numbers on console platforms aren’t available, but on Steam at least the concurrent numbers have set new record lows in recent weeks, sinking well below what were previously considered crisis levels in early 2018, after a somewhat underwhelming launch and the poorly-received first expansion, Curse of Osiris.

There are a lot of reasons for the decline – any number of articles or in-depth forum threads will give you a laundry list of questionable decisions Bungie has made with the game, including some pretty extraordinary ones around deleting older content (which has made the onboarding process for new players utterly impenetrable) and making playing much of the rest of the game meaningless to player progression.

Many of those complaints, however, are not new (or are recent recurrences of long-standing issues). On their own, they can’t explain why Destiny 2’s player numbers have cratered so dramatically.

What does explain it is simple: Destiny 2 ended.

I mean that in a fairly literal sense. Destiny 2 had a narrative that was set up all the way back in the original Destiny – a grand light-versus-darkness Manichaean epic that’s been building for a decade, tying together most of the game’s major factions and characters. Then, in the last expansion – The Final Shape – the narrative reached its climax, and most of the threads of story woven since 2014 came to their conclusion.

For many players, that was the resolution they’d been waiting for. The new threads Bungie had started surfacing in the narrative in order to let them continue telling a story after the denouement of their main plot didn’t have the same level of investment for these players; they played The Final Shape, saw the resolution of the story they’d engaged with for a decade, and were able to drop the game feeling satisfied in an ending.

For most games, this would be an excellent outcome – really sticking the landing with an ending is one of the things you really want from your narrative. For a live service game, however, creating this kind of satisfying off-ramp is a commercial disaster in the making, as we’re now seeing play out.

This is exactly the kind of conflict some players fear – not unreasonably – when they engage with a game that uses a live service or F2P business model. Any manager or decision-maker with their hands on the tiller of a live service game and looking at the fate of Destiny 2 must surely be thinking that a key lesson here is never to deliver a satisfying conclusion to core narrative threads. Every ending must be a cliffhanger, every answered question must ask three more, and nothing must ever feel neatly tied up.

There are examples of games which manage to strike the balance a little more cleanly. Final Fantasy XIV is celebrated among its playerbase for quite a bit of its writing, with stories generally considered among the best in the franchise overall, and it has delivered a number of expansions – notably Shadowbringers and Endwalker – which had extremely satisfying narrative conclusions to their own stories, while also serving to move forward an underlying narrative that ties together each of the major expansions.

Genshin Impact is another game whose players are deeply invested in its narrative and lore and has used a similar structure – telling somewhat self-contained stories in each of the “nations” players visit in the game’s major expansions, all while building on a background narrative that’s less important to the moment-to-moment story developments.

Destiny 2 did have a similar concept at work – each of its major expansions did tell a self-contained story to some degree. It’s just that it ran out of road, narratively speaking: at some point that background story needs to be brought to the fore and given some kind of conclusion. FFXIV and Genshin just haven’t hit that point yet; it’s too early to say if they’ll handle it any better when they finally do. Many games don’t even survive for long enough to ever finish their underlying narrative arc, so examples of this being done well in a live service game aren’t easy to find.

This isn’t a problem unique to games. Commercial success has stretched many TV series well past the point where the writers could and should have given them satisfying conclusions or forced them to invent ever more unlikely new challenges for central characters who had long since completed their hero’s journey.

Rarely, though, have there been cases where narrative design has been in such clear conflict with business model. With a growing number of live service games with strong narrative underpinnings starting to get long in the tooth, this is going to be a problem that crops up again and again.

Most games – Destiny included – have a long-term narrative plan, but what happens when the end of that plan approaches and the game is still spinning money for the studio? Destiny 2’s example, unfortunately, will probably lead to a lot of pressure to avoid ending anything with a bang – meaning we’ll see many of those games fade out with a whimper instead.