Bungie Responds to Destiny Reviews: We "Thrive on Feedback"

The latest Bungie Weekly Update has been published on the developer's website today. Along with discussing some of the updates coming to Destiny and the release of its soundtrack, the developer responded to a mailbag question inquiring about its thoughts on Destiny's reviews.

As you may have noticed, many of the reviews Destiny received--including GameSpot's--scored the game lower than most of Bungie's previous games, and lower than what many people were expecting. Asked to comment on reviews, community manager David Dague writes, "Bungie thrives on feedback. Never feel like you need to stick up for us when you see someone expressing an honest opinion about our games. We're harder on ourselves than anyone else."

Aside from inspiring more of the continued discussion about what role review scores serve, there is possibly a tangible effect of the scores that Destiny received. If a 2010 contract between Bungie and Activision is still being used, the developer may have lost out on a $2.5 million bonus by failing to earn a average score of 90 or higher on GameSpot sister site Metacritic. If so, it wouldn't be the first time review scores cost a developer a bonus.

Elsewhere in today's Weekly Update, Bungie highlighted today's launch of the Destiny soundtrack, which you can now pick up on iTunes. $10 gets you the 44-track album, or you can pick out your favorite songs for $.99 a pop.

Also of note, Bungie's staff suffered another defeat in last night's Bungie Bounty; a group managed to complete the Vault of Glass raid on hard mode; and the first person to find all of the hidden coins in the Tower (and let Bungie know) will receive an exclusive player emblem.

Amusingly, the Weekly Update goes on to mention yesterday's shut down of the so-called Treasure Cave, saying, "Our Dev Team is currently working faster than the Mail Sack. The fix is in. And it's hot!" Despite this, players managed to find another location that works in much the same way before the Weekly Update even went live.

Destiny was launched earlier this month on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Just yesterday, a new update went out that addressed a variety of issues, and Bungie outlined some of its plans for more updates to come over the next few months. It also recently announced some upcoming in-game events, which are nicely summarized in the image below.