Bungie Fails at Transmog

So this mornings post is not going to be an enjoyable one for most people. Yesterday Bungie released a TWAB (This Week at Bungie) about the new transmogrification system aka Armor Synthesis in their language. For those who are unaware “Transmog” or “Transmogrification” has become the universal name for systems that allow you to change the appearance of your gear in a game. This term was popularized by World of Warcraft when it was released during the Hour of Twilight patch at the end of Cataclysm. It is not the best example of this system, and in fact when it first went in it was fairly horrible… however over the years it has improved to contain most of the same features as better systems. Given the critical mass of players that play World of Warcraft, their specific naming convention stuck to identify ALL wardrobe appearance systems.

Some other details that you should probably know going into this post, and why it took every fiber of my being not to call it “Fuck You Bungie”. Destiny is a pretty important game to me. When it first was announced I used it as the reason to buy a PlayStation 4 just so I could play the Alpha. Granted there were other games I wanted to play, but it was absolutely the catalyst for me wanting to buy into that console generation. I loved the first game and by the time we got Destiny 2 it was in a really amazing place. Even from that first outing however the one system I wanted more than any others was the ability to change my armor appearance. Nothing makes a game feel bad like running around looking like an Fury Warrior from Burning Crusade. Wearing matched gear makes me feel better about playing a character and in relation makes the entire game feel better as a result.

How Transmog in Destiny Should Work

Shortly after the release of Forsaken, a new system went into the game called Collections. If you picked up an item it ended up recording that fact in your collections tab and for a small cost you could retrieve a version of that old item at any time. This gave us some long term goals of completing collections because it was around this time that they began talking about possibly putting in a transmogrification system. In my mind it made sense that we were getting out accounts flagged for having owned a specific item, because the best Transmog systems in general work off item flagging. When you pick up an item you earn the ability to use its appearance. Some systems put additional rules that make this process worse, for example World of Warcraft and not being able to collect appearances of armor types other than the one your class uses but the basics of account flagging have been around for awhile.

In my mental picture of how this system would work, it would rely on everything that you have bound to your account. In a perfect world we would have an additional paper doll that allowed us to place any appearance we had collected on any armor slot. There would of course need to be a carve out for Exotics, given that those give functional information to the players about what sort of abilities they can expect from you as a result. So in theory equipping an exotic would ignore whatever appearance was assigned in the transmog system. This is clean and would build upon a system they already have had in place since 2018. If they really felt them needed to, changing an appearance template could cost a nominal amount of glimmer and/or legendary shards.

A Slightly Worse Way to Implement It

At the tail end of “Year One” they implemented a system called Armor Ornaments, that allowed you to change the appearance of a single piece of armor. It isn’t a great system but until now it has been the only cosmetic system we had in Destiny. In “Year Two” they modified this system to open it up to all cash shop armors leading me to actively start collecting these because it gave me some access to modify my appearance. It was not a great system but again it was better than nothing, and Bungie also began talking about creating some sort of more holistic transmog system. I was willing to accept it because it would tide me over until they had time to build the better system.

Again a reasonable way to implement a cosmetic system would have been to combine the collections tab with the armor ornaments system. This would in theory allow us to swap the appearance of any single piece of gear with any other piece of gear that we have already collected. Again you would have a carve out to Exotics because they have their own appearance system but it would be manageable. Again there would be a nominal glimmer and/or legendary shard fee for swapping an appearance out but it would just be adding in the missing items from the existing ornament system. When they started talking about turning armor sets into ornaments, I honestly thought there would be some sort of nominal conversion fee to make an armor set show up in your ornament menu. I was fine with this and this is ultimately what I had resigned myself that we were going to get instead of the better option.

How Bungie Completely Fucked It Up

At face value this screen looks awesome. It allows you to swap out the appearance and shader for a complete set of gear at a time. This is precisely that additional paper doll that I was hoping they would give us. However they found a way to completely ruin this system. Instead of making it a simple process to turn those items you have collected into transmog appearances they added a needless grind into the system. Here are the basics:

• ADA-1 is coming back into the tower and will offer you access to the Armor Synthesis System
• Killing Enemies in the world has a chance of dropping a currency called Synthstrand which I am sure will take up another damned inventory slot
• You can spend Synthstrand to get bounties from ADA-1 which reward another currency that will also likely take up inventory space called Synthcord
• When you collect enough of bullshit currency number two, you can turn these in to convert them into Synthweave
• You can spend Synthweave in your collections tab in order to unlock something as an armor appearance
• You can earn 10 of these per season for each of your characters

The thing is… they took the system and made it arguably worse than the system I was envisioning but I was largely on board with the whole nonsense until that final bullet point. You can only earn 10 of these tokens per season, or in real world terms you can earn 10 of them every three months. The first season they are being “generous” and allowing players to earn 20 of them per character, which again Bungie fuck you for deciding that was generosity. It sounds like the tokens won’t transfer between characters so you can unlock two full armor sets every three months for each of your characters… when there is a mountain of gear that has been accumulating in our collection since the day we started playing this game.

The Blatant Money Grab

So why did they put the stupid limitations on the system? The short answer is they want to milk silver out of us for a system we have been waiting on years to be implemented. Like I have given Bungie a lot of credit in the past for the way the Eververse store has worked, and I have been more than happy to spend additional funds because I felt like I was more or less supporting a fair game. The items that they were selling me felt like they were worth the money I was spending for them. However this crosses the line. Instead of being limited to 10 pieces of armor per season, you are going to be able to purchase universal synthweave items from the Eververse store and “priced to own” prices to borrow a bullshit phase from the Disney Vault era. The prices they announced are as follows:

• 1 Synthweave Token – 300 Silver aka roughly $3
• 5 Synthweave Tokens – 1000 Silver aka oughly $10

So we can “earn” as many appearance sets as we like, pending we are willing to break out the credit card and pay $10 a pop for the right to look cool in Destiny wearing gear we collected years ago. This is a really bad look Bungie and I am feeling like it might be time you and I officially parted ways.

Making things even worse… and me even more salty is that I am not even certain that I am going to be able to transmog to my favorite set of armor in the first place. I loved the year one Iron Banner armor set and I still have it sitting in my vault for the day that we FINALLY got a proper transmog system. However there is also a bit of a note about certain year one armor sets not being supported due to technical difficulties. One of those listed is the Iron Banner set and I am uncertain if they are talking about the entire set as a whole or only if you converted them to Armor Ornaments back in the day… which honestly I didn’t love the look of the ornamented set.

I am frustrated and all of my goodwill for Bungie as a company is gone. I thought we lost too damned much in the move between Destiny 1 and Destiny 2. I hated the fact that they decided to blow up half of the world with the Beyond Light expansion and took a number of my favorite places in game away from me. I kept a wait and see attitude but the Weapon Sunset was a horrible idea and served to only put another nail in this coffin for me. That solution was the equivalent of bringing down the hammer or entire group of people because one or two them were fucking up, and it was the chickenshit move because they didn’t want to nerf the few weapons that were out of line for fear of the backlash. When they reversed the sunset they did so on a half assed manner that still locked away some of my favorite items.

Finally delivering on Transmogrification and then making it a complete fucking dumpster fire… I think it is the final straw for me. Fuck You Bungie.