It's fair to say that they didn't exactly try to drown out the huge expectations that people had. I avoided the hype train, I didn't pre-order the original game, I didn't play the beta. So going into it cold was probably a better experience than what the hype followers got. To me it was a decent, but short story with great gameplay. I did feel a bit let down at the end of the original solo campaign, but I looked forward to the endgame. Which I had envisioned to be something like an MMO, with grinding raids and factions for goodies. I did find a raid grind, but it took me a while to get a consistent group of people to raid with, so I missed out on a lot of level appropriate VoG. Raiding Crota was fun too, but it lacked the depth of design quality I had come to expect from VoG. I was surprised to find that the PVP vendors gear was no different than PVE vendor gear. I had assumed that the faction stuff would have some kind of perks or stats that really made it more desirable to PVP'ers over the raid gear. I was, from a PVE perspective, disappointed that the queen's wrath event was a one time thing, while Iron Banner came month after month. I was disappointed in the lack of things like barbershops and other little customization things that I'd assumed were a given in an MMO-like game. So it's not at all to say I was super happy with the vanilla Destiny and TDB was a lot of false hope. Once I learned that the game we had was the game we were going to have, I let go of those lofty expectations and started to enjoy the game for what it was. I do find it somewhat funny that I managed to disappoint myself with expectations Bungie never promised. Just running on the assumption that Destiny might replace WoW for me, which it and the PS4 in general did. I have 21 PS4 games now and a lot of that is due to looking for things to play that aren't Destiny. Some of those games were great, some were so so... But I've yet to find much of anything that's lived up to its hype yet.