No, what this really proves is that they've been sitting on a lot of shit so they could drip feed it. There's no way Bungie made all this content and changes in the past few months. After all, making content is so hard, guys! Just the number of catalysts is well beyond anything they've released during the game's lifetime. But retards will slurp it up and praise Bungie, because they're too stupid to realize they've been played all along.
I semi-agree with you in that this obviously wasn't all whipped up in the last minute, but that tracks with what we've heard coming out of Bungie. Namely, management let them continue working on stuff for future expansions and believing that the next expansion was still going to come out before finally doing the rugpull. This also explains why comms were basically completely silent for months in that they simply weren't allowed to confirm anything one way or the other, and I'm assuming they thought it was because they needed to wait for a confirmation on the next update's timeline before laying down anything concrete, and certainly not because they didn't know the end of life update was coming.
My take on the situation is that the devs were being told to give it their all and push out a bunch of updates to make a big splash with the delayed midseason update, and only when it was nearly time to release did management finally pull the "lol trolled" card and tell them the game's dead. The last thing they wanted was for the devs to give up before they'd gotten all the work out of them that they could. And now that it's this close to release, there's no point in sabotaging it, so might as well give it one last hurrah before they're inevitably either shown the door or pushed over to the Marathon team.
Again, consider that they basically added
nothing to the game for six months. When it comes to actually new content, it's pretty much just Pantheon, a new Heavy Metal map, and porting SRL from D1 with a new map included. The rest of it is systems updates and balancing. While I don't know much about the ins and outs of gamedev, my gut feeling is that all of that is reasonable to assume was in development over that period, with some of it potentially stretching back a bit farther, especially when it comes to things like adding tiered loot to the whole game. Like, this isn't a whole expansion's worth of content, a fair amount of it is stuff that we were supposed to get back in March.
And with regards to community sentiment, I've seen nothing but praise for the devs and vitriol for management. Sentiment is higher than it's been since arguably TFS, but none of it is directed at the higher-ups. People know where the blame lies.
Speaking of comms though, after all that radio silence, it's almost deafening now. Other stuff not listed in the previous articles:
Also, this got lost in the weeds, but they did confirm in the initial post that the final season pass exotic will be another exotic hand cannon. While it could be something entirely new, my money's on The First Curse. It's the only exotic hand cannon from D1 that never got ported to D2, on top of also not really having a day in the sun even when it was new. One final weapon reprisal would be a nice sendoff, on top of potentially giving it a good rework that would show it some love it never got. I guess we'll find out soon enough.
