In the summer of 2013, months before they were supposed to ship their next video game, the game developers at Bungie went into panic mode.
The storied studio, best known for creating the multi-million-selling Halo series, had spent the previous three years working on something they hoped would be revolutionary. Destiny, as they called it, was to be a cross between a traditional shooter like Halo and a massive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft. It was going to become a cultural touchstone. âWe want people to put the Destiny universe on the same shelf they put Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars,â Bungie COO Pete Parsons said in an interview two years ago. Reports suggested that the publisher Activision had committed to a ten-year deal worth $500 million to make that happen.
Two years ago, something went wrong. Destinyâs writing team, led by the well-respected Bungie veteran Joe Staten, had been working on the game for several years. Theyâd put together what they called the âsupercutââa two-hour video comprising the gameâs cinematics and major story beats. In July, they showed it to the studioâs leadership. Thatâs when things went off the rails, according to six people who worked on Destiny. Senior staff at Bungie were unhappy with how the supercut had turned out. They decided it was too campy and linear, sources say, and they quickly decided to scrap Statenâs version of the story and start from scratch.
In the coming weeks, the development team would devise a totally new plot, overhauling Destiny and painstakingly stitching together the version thatâd ultimately ship a year later, in September 2014. The seams showed. Reviewers singled out the story in particular, knocking the vague plot, thin characters, and opaque dialogue. One line, unconvincingly uttered by a cold lump of person-shaped metal named The Stranger, encapsulated the gameâs narrative problems: âI donât have time to explain why I donât have time to explain.â
Today, as Destiny enters its second year, a lot has improved. The most recent expansion, The Taken King, has levity and charm the likes of which Destiny players hadnât seen before. But questions remain. How did such an ambitious game wind up with such a bare-bones plot? Why did Bungie seemingly change so much of the story before it shipped? And how did it ship in a state that required so much tweaking after it launched? What really happened behind the scenes of Destiny?
For the past 13 months, Iâve been investigating the answers to those questions. After conversations with over half a dozen current and former Bungie employees, all speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to talk publicly about these issues, the story that has emerged is one of a studio that was overwhelmed by a sudden reboot, a ruthless production schedule, and a number of other debilitating factors including the technical challenges of a brand new game engine. Bungieâs last Halo game, Halo Reach, had come out in 2010. The studio had been working on its next big thing at least since then. Despite that, much of Destiny as we know it today wasnât actually conceived until 2013, a year before it shipped.
Bungie declined to comment on this story.
In February of 2013, Bungie invited journalists to their offices in Bellevue, Washington for the official unveiling of Destiny. Details had been trickling out in the previous months thanks to early leaks, but this was the big blowoutâthe event where the well-regarded studio would finally reveal what theyâd been doing since releasing Reach in 2010.
What they did show was ambitious: They promised that Destiny would be âthe first shared-world shooter,â a game where you could seamlessly meet up with friends and strangers among the swamps of Chicago and the rings of Saturn. Over the following year, Bungie would publish trailers with equally ambitious claims: âYou hear shots ring out, and you look to the left and thereâs your friend,â said one Bungie staffer in a Destiny video. âThere he is, like there was no matchmaking, he just pops right in.â
When Destiny finally came out in September of 2014, players immediately noticed that something was off. There was no grand, Star Wars-caliber story. In fact, there wasnât much of a story at all; Destinyâs missions were at best vague and at worst incoherent, strung together by a mess of proper nouns and hilarious dialogue. Proclaims lead actor and constant companion Peter Dinklage during one early mission: âThe sword is close. I can feel its power⊠Careful! Its power is dark.â Thatâs one of the gameâs more memorable lines.
Thanks to the discrepancies between Bungieâs promises and the final product, rumors spread that Destiny had gone through major changes late in development. Fans went back through Bungieâs old videos, pinpointing characters and missions that werenât actually in the game, like the planet Saturn and a blue-skinned alien who was shown in one cut-scene pointing a gun at the playerâs character. It was almost wishful thinking: Surely, fans thought, Bungie couldnât have intentionally released a game with a story this bad? Surely the plot was changed at the last minute?
Turns out they were right.
In the summer of 2013, just over a year before Destiny came out, the story got a full reboot, according to six people who were there. Bungie ditched everything Joe Staten and his team had written, reworking Destinyâs entire structure as they scrapped plot threads, overhauled characters, and rewrote most of the dialogue. The decision was made against Statenâs wishes, sources say. Destiny project lead Jason Jones and the rest of senior leadership were unhappy with the writing teamâs supercut, and their reaction was to scrap it all.
Destinyâs story went through several revisions before the reboot, but the supercutâs version revolved around playersâ hunt for the warmind Rasputin, according to two people familiar with the original plans. In todayâs Destiny, Rasputin doesnât do much but listen to classical music in a steel bunker on Earth, but in the 2013 version, he would have starred in a more prominent role. Alien Hive would have kidnapped the machine and brought him to their Dreadnaught spaceship, which was later cut from vanilla Destiny and moved to The Taken King. Originally, this Hive ship would have been part of the main story. âThe entire last third of the game took place on the Dreadnaught with you rescuing Rasputin,â said one person who worked on the game.
Fans have long wondered about the bloody Exo in one early piece of Destiny concept art. Turns out that was Rasputin, according to a source. In the original story, the player would have rescued this guy from the Hive.
(In the DLC, we would have learned that this Exo was actually a puppet being controlled by a Warmind, the source said.)
The story would have also starred a character familiar to hardcore Destiny fans: Osiris, described by one source as an Obi-Wan Kenobi-like mentor living in an ancient Vex temple on Mercury. Although Osiris has yet to appear in the version of Destiny that shipped, he does have a presence thanks to a competitive multiplayer gauntlet designed in his name: the Trials of Osiris. Groups of flawless victors in Trials of Osiris gain access to the enigmatic wizardâs Mercury temple, which was salvaged from the original story and reused here. In the pre-reboot Destiny story, Osiris served as a guide for the main player. He had a robotic assistant whose model was, according to a source, scrapped and reused for yet another character who will be familiar to hardcore Destiny fans: the Stranger.
She wasnât the only character who would be reused. At E3 2013, Bungie played a Destiny gameplay trailer that showed a slick blue-skinned Awoken gentleman pointing a gun at the player character. Sharp-eyed players theorized that this Awoken was called the Crow, based on a pre-release screenshot of a mission (that does not actually appear in Destiny), instructing the player to âhelp the Crow loot the Academy archive.â
That theory was correct, sources say. In Destinyâs original story, the Crow would have met the players in an early missionâwhere weâd have witnessed the standoff from the screenshotâand worked with them to find Osiris. One person familiar with the original story described the Crow as rogueish and charming, not unlike Nathan Fillionâs character, Cayde-6, in the most recent expansion. âBasically, who Cayde-6 is in The Taken King was the personality of the Crow,â that person told me.
Bungie reused the Crowâs model for a new character: the Awoken Queenâs brother, Prince Uldren. They reused the name in the current version of Destiny, tooâthe Queenâs army of spies are called the Crows, and Uldren is their boss.
The pre-reboot Destiny had way more of a focus on story than the actual game wound up having. âStory missions [before the reboot] always began with a Communique from a character,â said a source. âThey were 30-45 second cutscenes of the NPC setting up the mission context. Osiris announcing a dramatic discovery about the Vex and asking you to dig up an ancient relic on Mars, or the Crow calling for help from the middle of a firefight with Fallen on Venus. And then every mission ended with a full cutscene, three to five minutes.â
Different people who saw the supercut disagreed on its quality. In an interview, one person who worked on Destiny called it terrible. âIt was just a confusing, highly esoteric story that just didnât make sense,â that person said. Others argued otherwise. âThere was some very cool stuff, very powerful stuff,â said one. âIt had strong characters; it had a beginning, middle, and end⊠It unraveled and solved an entire mystery in this corner of the universe.â
A third person familiar with the game offered another take: The story was interesting, but the supercut didnât do it justice. âWhile the quality of the supercut was bad, the plot itself wasnât inherently bad,â said that person. âIt made sense on paper. It was also constantly being edited and changed. It turned into a Frankenstein amalgamation like the rest of the game.â
Everyone I spoke to agreed on one point: Bungieâs senior leadership, including Jason Jones, didnât like what they saw. Some in the studio took issue with the rhythm of progression, which would have shown players all four main planetsâEarth, the Moon, Venus, and Marsâwithin the first few missions of the game. (Obviously the moon isnât technically a âplanet,â but in the parlance of Destiny, the two are interchangeable.) According to one source, Jones also told the team that he wanted a less linear storyâone in which the player could decide where to go at any time. That became one of Destinyâs key pillars.
So in July of 2013, Bungieâs leadership decided to totally reboot Destinyâs story. They kept much of the lore and mythologyâthe Traveler, the idea of Guardians, enemy races like Cabal and Vexâbut they overhauled Statenâs entire plot, according to the people who spoke to me for this piece.
Over the next few months, Jones did two pivotal things, sources said. He designed the interface we know now as the director, a sleek set of maps in which missions are presented as nodes within each planet. He also organized a series of extensive meetings called âIron Barâ where he and other top creators at Bungie like art director Chris Barrett and design lead Luke Smith would figure out how to cobble together a new, less linear plot for the game. This small group of developers spent the next two weeks sketching out a new plot and figuring out how to fit in the story missions theyâd created over the past few years.
In the weeks after the reboot, the Iron Bar groupâalong with a team of designers and producers called Blacksmith (because theyâd hammer and polish the âIron Barâ)âcame up with a new plan for Destiny. They rescoped the game, cutting out the Dreadnaught and moving it to the expansion, which was then called Comet. They changed the order in which players would progress between each planet. And they cut apart each story mission, splicing together encounters from a variety of old pieces to form the chimera that was Destinyâs new campaign.
â[The design team] would have to cobble together and cut and restitch and reuse a bunch of stuff that was already built for a different thread, but now tie it together in some way that fit this amorphous, âYou pick which way youâre going in the directorâ story,â said one person familiar with Destinyâs development.
âThe priority was, âHey, we have to take a bunch of content that weâve spent millions of dollars on, we need to cobble it together in a way that is not going to break continuity, and weâve gotta do it quickly.ââ
Casualties of this process included characters like Osiris and Charlemagne, an artificial intelligence on Mars who was promoted in early Destiny previews but never appeared in the game. Other characters, like the Crow and Osirisâs assistant, were rewritten and recycled, becoming, respectively, Prince Uldren and the Stranger. Many of the story missions that actually shipped with Destiny were stitched together from older ones, sources said.
âSo if you were going from point A to point Z in the course of [the original, pre-reboot story], they would take out section H-J because it was really tight encounter design and theyâd put it off to the side and say, âHow do we get H-J in this other storyline?ââ said a source. âIt was literally like making Franken-story.
â[Someone might say] âIâve got a really good encounter hereâ or âThereâs this mechanism for triggering this that needs to happen,â so âOK, cool, letâs take a piece of A and a piece of X and weâll tie it together.â And that was done for everything. What it basically did was put an order on the planets for you to go Earth, Moon, Venus, Mars, and within those youâve got all the missions that were there. But the missions as they shipped were actually sliced up and stitched together versions of the original story, including the cinematics.â
Joe Staten left the company during the mid-summer reboot, although Bungie didnât announce his departure until September, 2013. Two sources say the parting was not amicable, and when I reached out to him, Staten declined to comment for this article. Although the story he directed is no longer part of Destiny, much of his mythology remains, and even after the reboot, many of the writers Staten had hired stayed at Bungie to work on dialogue, flavor text, and what they call grimoire cardsâa large library of rich, interesting lore thatâs only accessible outside of the game, on Bungieâs website. (Most of Statenâs hires have since left the studio; one, Clay Carmouche, stayed at Bungie to pen the story and dialogue for The Taken King. Carmouche left Bungie shortly afterwards, and the company has hired a slate of new writers over the past year or so.)
As the reboot was happening, the developers of Destiny still thought they were going to ship the game in March 2014, according to two people who were there. Theyâd already delayed the game from its original release window of September 2013, but in the wake of the reboot, company leadership knew theyâd need more time. While holding these development meetings, Jones and other top executives like Bungie CEO Harold Ryan went through the lengthy, complicated process of asking Activision for yet another extension, according to a source. After some negotiation, they secured a ship date of September 2014.
Over the next few months, driven by Iron Barâs story changes, Bungieâs developers continued building Destiny. One source said after they got the extension, the studioâs priority was to polish and perfect the gameplay: how the primary thing you did in the gameâshoot gunsâ felt, how public spaces would function, how encounters worked. They prioritized this instead of building a strong story; narrative took a back seat, as did the writers themselves. âThe writing team Joe put together was ostracized,â said one person who worked on the game. âThe story was written without writers.â
âThe extension actually made it so we could get things to the base level of acceptability, and thatâs what we shipped,â said another person who worked on the game. âIf we didnât have that extension, thereâs no way we couldâve shipped in March.â
Destiny came out on September 9, 2014. Most of the development team was proud of the game, a source told me, and many were shocked to see harsh reviews; although most at Bungie had anticipated that players wouldnât love the story, the team thought Destiny made up for that deficiency in many other ways. One source says they had internal surveys pegging the Metacritic score at around a 90 average; it turned out to be a 76. (Bungie then missed out on a major bonus, that source confirmed.)
Critics and fans did indeed love the look and feel of the game, but even beyond the lackluster story, there was much to criticize in Destiny: the random loot system, the grindiness, the bizarre leveling, and many irritating bugs and glitches. Some of the decisions Bungie had made, like randomizing legendary loot engrams so theyâd occasionally drop lower-tier items, infuriated even the most devoted players, and although Bungie fixed thatâalong with some of Destinyâs other early problemsâthey made a bad first impression. To early players, and even to those who stuck with the game for the long haul, playing Destiny felt like battling against the developers themselves.
Right after Destiny launched, Bungieâs developers started absorbing all the feedback theyâd seen online, according to a source. Although they didnât know where theyâd be taking the game over the next year, they did quickly recognize that they needed to change a lot, including the obscure and often frustrating leveling system. They rebooted the first DLC pack, December 2014âs The Dark Below, scant months before it was due to ship, according to two sources. (One person familiar with development says Bungie sequestered a team and had them crunch out Dark Below in just nine weeks, which may explain how insubstantial it was.)
In December of 2014, Diablo III director Josh Mosqueira and a few other members of his team at Blizzard came to Bungie for a talk, according to two people who were there. The parallels were uncanny; Diablo III had launched to commercial success in 2012 but saw a great deal of criticism from fans thanks to randomized loot, frustrating online DRM, and a lack of endgame content. Both games shared a publisher, Activision, that thought Destiny could redeem itself in fansâ eyes the way Diablo III eventually had after its release.
âThey basically came in and said, âLook, hereâs our story of developing Diablo III and then bringing in [the expansion] Reaper of Souls,ââ said one person who was at the Blizzard talk. âThey were saying, like, âHey, random numbers are not funâdice rolls are not fun. You can give the illusion of randomness, but you want to weight it towards the player⊠The only point you have to deliver on is that when people leave your gameâbecause they willâwhen they leave your game, they need to be happy.ââ
People who were at the presentation say it was extraordinarily helpful for Bungieâs team. One source called it âinvaluable.â Others said it drove some of the decisions they made for The Taken King. In previous interviews with Kotaku and other sites, director Luke Smith has talked openly about avoiding randomness and designing quests with guaranteed rewards, an approach that has served Destiny well throughout year two so far. Destinyâs meta-narrative has followed the same path as Diablo IIIâs: It had a rocky launch, then the developers found redemption.
Before anyone could be redeemed, Bungie had to ship The Taken King, which had been going through its own set of development issues Pre-production on this expansion, which was code-named Comet, had started in late 2013. Two sources say the original plan was to release this major expansion at $60 and include a brand new planet, Europa, as well as a new area on Earth called the European Dead Zone (which itself had been pushed back from vanilla Destiny). They also hoped to add a totally new feature called multiple fireteam activities, which a source described like this: âImagine like you and I are in a fireteam, and weâre fighting down this one path that converges with two other paths and you get three fireteams all fighting together against a boss, or against some sort of mobs.â
None of that happened. In March of 2014, Bungie rebooted Comet, sources say. The team ultimately decided to focus it around a single major mapâthe Hive ship that had been cut from vanilla Destinyâas well as a new public space on Mars, complete with strikes and a new raid. (That entire last Mars chunk was later cut and passed to Activision subsidiary High Moon Studios to develop for Destinyâs full-sized 2016 sequel, a source said. Theyâre helping Bungie make the game.) Over the months, Bungie kept rescoping as they looked more realistically at what they could do, and the final version of The Taken Kingâthe one that shipped last monthâwound up focusing solely on the Dreadnaught.
Itâs not uncommon for a gameâs scope to reduce during development, but Bungie had a unique problem. People who worked on this project say that one of Bungieâs fundamental issues over the past few years has been the gameâs engine, which the studio built from scratch alongside Destiny. Four sources pointed to Destinyâs technologyâthe tools they use to design levels, render graphics, and create contentâas an inhibiting factor in the gameâs development.
âLetâs say a designer wants to go in and move a resource node two inches,â said one person familiar with the engine. âThey go into the editor. First they have to load their map overnight. It takes eight hours to input their map overnight. They get [into the office] in the morning. If their importer didnât fail, they open the map. It takes about 20 minutes to open. They go in and they move that node two feet. And then theyâd do a 15-20 minute compile. Just to do a half-second change.â
People who have worked with Destinyâs tech say the company is capable of powering incredible things behind the scenes, like player matchmaking. Itâs also clear that Destiny is one of the best-looking video games ever made. But as a tool-set for designers, sources say, Destinyâs engine is subpar, and creating new maps and missions at Bungie can be grueling for developers.
Once Destiny launched in September 2014, Bungieâs staff didnât have much time to celebrate. Over the next few months, the developers had to grind constantly. First they had to deliver two DLC packs that each justified $20; then they had to release a massive $40 expansion the following fall. They needed a live team working on constant patches and bug-fixes, and they also needed to plant flags to set players up for the major changes that The Taken King would eventually bring.
The grind of this process led Bungie to approach Activision with another proposition that would alter the ambitious release schedule theyâd previously agreed to: They had released two DLC packs, The Dark Below and House of Wolves, and they had released one expansion, the codenamed Comet that was properly titled The Taken King. What if, instead of releasing two more DLC packs after The Taken King, they tried something new? What if they sold cosmetic items in the Tower? And then put out a dripfeed of free content to keep people playing in the months before âDestiny 2ââor whatever they wind up calling itâin the fall of 2016?
âThere was a bet that was, âHey if we did microtransactions, I bet you we could generate enough revenue to make up for the loss of DLCs,ââ said a source. âInstead of it going Destiny, DLC1, DLC2, Comet, DLC1, DLC2, theyâre actually just gonna go [big] release and then incremental release. So itâll just be Destiny, Comet, Destiny, Comet every year. Itâs basically just switching the game to an annual model.â
Even that process may be rough for Bungie. Destinyâs contract had been leaked in 2012 as part of the messy lawsuit between EA and Activision and it stipulates that the studio stick to this yearly plan, no matter what other extenuating factors might arise. No matter how many hours they have to devote to the game. âA lot of the problems that came up in Destiny 1, and that happened in development of The Taken King, are results of having an unwavering schedule and unwieldy tools,â said a source. âBungie is ravenously appreciative of the people that play their games, and they listen, they listen so clearly. But because the tools are shit, and because no one can reach consensus on how to fix the game in the time thatâs allotted, you get a lot of sort of paralysis.â
Itâs hard not to speculate about what Destiny might have looked like with Statenâs version of the story. People who worked on Destiny rave about the European Dead Zone and the raid on Mars, both of which may be added to the game in the coming months and years, but thereâs skepticism that this yearly schedule will really work for a studio like Bungie. Insiders worry that the studio, hampered by inadequate technology, could find itself overwhelmed by the never-ending demand for more content.
All things considered, itâs remarkable that Bungie was able to ship anything in late 2014, let alone build a foundation as solid as vanilla Destiny. Fans who stuck with the game were rewarded by a great expansion with The Taken King. Maybe Bungie didnât quite make a Star Wars, but the story of Destinyâmore specifically, the story around Destinyâturned out to be fascinating for reasons they could never have planned.
You can reach the author of this post at [email protected] or on Twitter at @jasonschreier
