Creative Lead CJ Cowan departs Bungie.

Twitter link, and also picked up by shacknews.

He's been with Bungie since Halo 2, apparently. I can't pretend to know his involvement in Bungie, but I saw the story and figured folks here might be interested.

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Geez. He just became story lead. It's getting toward evening here, and I'm the opposite of Levi.

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Twitter link, and also picked up by shacknews.

He's been with Bungie since Halo 2, apparently. I can't pretend to know his involvement in Bungie, but I saw the story and figured folks here might be interested.

Rats leaving the sinking ship :-(

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We've had good guys leave plenty before Destiny. Wideload, Certain Affinity, 343, and so on. Some people just change jobs.

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It's easy to look at this as people abandoning ship, but I don't buy that. I can't back it up with evidence and actual numbers, but as you said, people have left Bungie before. Probably just as many as have left since Destiny. It's just never been as high profile, as Bungie wasn't in the spotlight as much before. People love drama, and it's easy to attribute this to the drama surrounding Bungie at the moment.

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It's easy to look at this as people abandoning ship, but I don't buy that. I can't back it up with evidence and actual numbers, but as you said, people have left Bungie before. Probably just as many as have left since Destiny. It's just never been as high profile, as Bungie wasn't in the spotlight as much before. People love drama, and it's easy to attribute this to the drama surrounding Bungie at the moment.

The difference is that time and time again in the Destiny era, major departures are not amicable. Marty and Jamie we know for certain, and according to the Kotaku article, Joe's departure was not with warm feelings.

I never got the sense Alex Seropian left on bad terms for example. Something is in the air that wasn't there before. It might not apply to CJ, but there is a trend here so the assumption is not unfounded.

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What bothers me is that he was just featured in a streaming event discussing his new role.

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What bothers me is that he was just featured in a streaming event discussing his new role.

Yeah, that seems like cause for concern. You don't usually leave a role you're so excited about getting until you've had it for a while.

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What bothers me is that he was just featured in a streaming event discussing his new role.

Yeah, that seems like cause for concern. You don't usually leave a role you're so excited about getting until you've had it for a while.

That's really not true. Right up until you give notice you act and work exactly as if you intend on working your job until the day you drop dead. Maybe if you have an extremely cool manager that you trust you can break the news to them, but even that doesn't mean that everyone in your department will know that you intend on leaving.

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Maybe he was ready to move on, but also maybe something bad is going on and now was the best time to get on with that moving on. Who knows. I definitely feel Cody's and Kermit's vibe on this one.

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I actually agree with you. Something is weird about this. Not sure what's going on, but yeah. He done just got promoted.

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I'm not sure it's that surprising.

What we've gotten in Destiny so far is a game that mostly eschews the structure Bungie set up with Halo: Cutscene, level, cutscene, repeat.

For a game mostly meant for its campaign to be repeated only occasionally, possibly in linear order, this makes sense.

Destiny's structure as a kind of random access collection of various activities meant to be repeated far more often, in any order, without story continuity linking them, isn't really compatible with that sort of structure, or investing in cutscenes the way Halo did.

Most Destiny levels don't have them, and the ones that do have much shorter ones. One would probably expect players to skip them more often during replays than with Halo, and once you start playing coop, if any of the players can skip them, somebody will, and if they can't, they'll probably be miffed.

So I can easily see confict arising between whatever group or individual it is who is specifying that this is what Destiny's design is going to be, and those attempting to arrange these activities into a logical linear narrative and assemble the resources necessary to script and animate that narrative.

I'm sure there may be many, many other causes, but it seems to me as if the Director-centric nature of Destiny's current design is sort of at odds with the idea of Staten and Cowan doing the jobs they did on Halo the way they did them with Halo, and possibly with the way they feel they should be done.

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I'm sure there may be many, many other causes, but it seems to me as if the Director-centric nature of Destiny's current design is sort of at odds with the idea of Staten and Cowan doing the jobs they did on Halo the way they did them with Halo, and possibly with the way they feel they should be done.

But it's not. Taken King was a large step towards the Halo style of storytelling.

You had a reasonably linear main campaign with cutscenes, then after that tons of side missions that were shorter and less substantial. That's the best of both worlds.

I see no reason why Destiny 2 can not have a finely crafted 'story' campaign, with lots of small missions on the scale of what we have now littered in on sidestory.

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I'm sure there may be many, many other causes, but it seems to me as if the Director-centric nature of Destiny's current design is sort of at odds with the idea of Staten and Cowan doing the jobs they did on Halo the way they did them with Halo, and possibly with the way they feel they should be done.

But it's not. Taken King was a large step towards the Halo style of storytelling.

Only because vanilla Destiny was so far away from it. TK is still pretty darn short on cutscenes compared to Halo. I'm not convinced this is a bad thing.

You had a reasonably linear main campaign with cutscenes, then after that tons of side missions that were shorter and less substantial. That's the best of both worlds.

And as is true with so many compromises, it may be something that makes many players happy and makes other people unhappy.

I see no reason why Destiny 2 can not have a finely crafted 'story' campaign, with lots of small missions on the scale of what we have now littered in on sidestory.

You seem to be assuming that I'm suggesting that Destiny's structure can't be good or finely crafted and that isn't so.

To expand... I think it would be fair to look at some things that happened during the development of Halo that you could describe as story-driven design.

For instance, I think many players would agree with the broad assertions, from Halo 1 & 2, that brutes are uninteresting bullet-sponges, not as smart or interesting as Elites, and that Flood levels are generally less interesting than others because they are also less interesting to fight than Covenant.

A completely gameplay-design driven approach to solving that problem would have been to dustbin those enemies; go back to fighting Elites, to heck with the fracturing of the Covenant, and make the game about the Human-Covenant war and forget about all this Flood nonsense.

That didn't happen. Brutes got revamped, Flood got revised, and Elites didn't come back as enemies except in the games that took place at the parts of the story where that made sense (Reach and ODST).

Destiny content, at least to me, I think is being authored from a gameplay-centric rather than story-centric perspective. I get the feeling that people are choosing the kind of encounters they want to have, and choosing enemies for those encounters, and then those encounters are being wrapped in the lore for the appropriate units later.

Each of Destiny's initial environments was designed to provide at least two kinds of units to choose from, and the Taken King expansion's fictional construct basically allows designers to throw out those constraints and mix units from all factions in single encounters (albeit in their Taken variants).

So while you and I might definitely see TK as a step towards more Halo-like storytelling in Destiny, it may be that as an institution there is not enough commitment to that style to satisfy those at Bungie who were most dependent on it for their role in development.

Just a conjecture.

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I agree, but I find him leaving abrupt. Why would he take the new job if he was unhappy with how the story went? Destiny's been out for a long time; Taken King's been out now for 7 months. Seems like he had ample time to figure out he wasn't a good fit for this game.

There's probably assloads of good reasons and we're not privy to them. I'm just going to leave it with this:

It's too bad he left. I liked him from what I knew of him over the years. I think he did a good job. I hope his career goes well in the future.

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I agree, but I find him leaving abrupt. Why would he take the new job if he was unhappy with how the story went? Destiny's been out for a long time; Taken King's been out now for 7 months. Seems like he had ample time to figure out he wasn't a good fit for this game.

He may have known that for a long time, but being willing to take a drastic step is something else.

Marty said something similar in a recent interview to the effect that he felt something was wrong for quite some time, but was hoping it would work itself out-- even after his termination.

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Marty said something similar in a recent interview to the effect that he felt something was wrong for quite some time, but was hoping it would work itself out-- even after his termination.

I can only imagine that's true. Especially for as long as either of them have been at Bungie--they're probably willing to deal with (and hopefully try to fix?) a lot of bullshit before they finally call it and move on.

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While I think everyone now can see it was false, I remember PLENTY of people saying Seropian left on bad terms because Halo was a doomed project.

This is odd, but a curiosity is only that until you know more. everything else is bringing your feelings to bear.

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That was basically my point. We just don't know, one way or the other.

He could have left because Bungie is currently a raging dumpster fire, or he could have just wanted to move on to something else. We don't know. And while it seems obvious that something drastic is happening at Bungie, we don't actually know that (or at least I don't), and everything is just an assumption at this point.

I guess maybe it's still worth looking at from both angles, but at the end of the day it doesn't necessarily change anything.

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While I think everyone now can see it was false, I remember PLENTY of people saying Seropian left on bad terms because Halo was a doomed project.

This is odd, but a curiosity is only that until you know more. everything else is bringing your feelings to bear.

Really? I don't remember anything of the kind.

What seemed obvious to me at the time was that in the Jones-Seropian partnership where Jones made the games and Seropian handled the business side, Microsoft had need of Jones and no particular need of Seropian. I wasn't surprised at all that he left to do another startup.

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While I think everyone now can see it was false, I remember PLENTY of people saying Seropian left on bad terms because Halo was a doomed project.

I don't really remember much of this.

This is odd, but a curiosity is only that until you know more. everything else is bringing your feelings to bear.

I tend to be optimistic about Bungie. I strongly spoke out against the chicken littles raging after Staten left, for instance. I know there have been problems behind the scenes, but there are always problems behind the scenes. A large enterprise like Bungie is going to accrue issues, things get worse before they get better, and then they get better until they get worse again. You tack this way and that, with luck keeping everything going in the right direction. I still think Destiny is going in the right direction.

There a still many talented people at Bungie I admire and respect (great to see Lars stage center this week). CJ's been a public face for a long time, and if I hadn't heard from him in a while and he quietly left, I wouldn't register much concern. Leaving mere weeks after being a guest on the stream in a new leadership position, and what strikes me as a very aggressive passive-aggressive statement (even Bungie's logo is unhappy!)--these things alarm me. I don't know what they mean, but they alarm me.

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Yes! That's how I want to spin it, yet ...

"How am I just now realizing the logo is a sad face?"

implies that the logo has always been a sad face, as if there's something inherently sad about Bungie that he's now seeing.

I'll stop with the tea leaf reading. I generally hate this kind of stuff. His departure and departing statement left me feeling queasy.

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While I think everyone now can see it was false, I remember PLENTY of people saying Seropian left on bad terms because Halo was a doomed project.

I don't really remember much of this.

It was a core belief of the Halo 2 Sucks Brigade. Microsoft demanded Halo 2 be crappy so they could sell more copies to soccer moms and other filthy casuals, Bungie meekly acquiesced because they were all stupid and incompetent — except for Alex and a handful of old-timers, who walked and took the precious Halo 1 Physics with them.

I'm not sure how much of that bled into the Halo community as a whole, but a number of those tools emailed Wideload to offer their support — until they discovered we weren't making a new space marine franchise and lost interest.

Reading their fever-dream versions of reality (wherein Alex coded most of the Halo engine himself, and founded Wideload out of sheer spite) was always entertaining in a ha-ha-look-at-the-insane-conspiracy-theorist way.

– Matt

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I remember the Halo 2 sucks brigade fondly, and I always feel sad thinking about them leaving. In hindsight, it does seem childish, and I never thought about it from your perspectives as Bungie employees and alumni.

I'm sorry you had to deal with the "tools," but this post has made me feel so much better about the small but notable community schism that occurred. Life changer, right here.

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It was a core belief of the Halo 2 Sucks Brigade. Microsoft demanded Halo 2 be crappy so they could sell more copies to soccer moms and other filthy casuals, Bungie meekly acquiesced because they were all stupid and incompetent — except for Alex and a handful of old-timers, who walked and took the precious Halo 1 Physics with them.

I'm not sure how much of that bled into the Halo community as a whole, but a number of those tools emailed Wideload to offer their support — until they discovered we weren't making a new space marine franchise and lost interest.

Reading their fever-dream versions of reality (wherein Alex coded most of the Halo engine himself, and founded Wideload out of sheer spite) was always entertaining in a ha-ha-look-at-the-insane-conspiracy-theorist way.

– Matt

If only someone were to interview tons of old Bungie people, and write a book about the people and history of Bungie… :-)

These stories are somewhat amusing to me in their insanity, but then again I wrote Bungie off after they were acquired by MS. Until I actually played Halo. So I might be just as guilty.

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From the outside, all my posts here must sound like I'm a depraved lunatic.

Who said anything about the outside? :D

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While I think everyone now can see it was false, I remember PLENTY of people saying Seropian left on bad terms because Halo was a doomed project.

I don't really remember much of this.

It was a core belief of the Halo 2 Sucks Brigade. Microsoft demanded Halo 2 be crappy so they could sell more copies to soccer moms and other filthy casuals, Bungie meekly acquiesced because they were all stupid and incompetent — except for Alex and a handful of old-timers, who walked and took the precious Halo 1 Physics with them.

I'm not sure how much of that bled into the Halo community as a whole, but a number of those tools emailed Wideload to offer their support — until they discovered we weren't making a new space marine franchise and lost interest.

Reading their fever-dream versions of reality (wherein Alex coded most of the Halo engine himself, and founded Wideload out of sheer spite) was always entertaining in a ha-ha-look-at-the-insane-conspiracy-theorist way.

– Matt

You would know. I don't remember that much negative talk right after his departure. Regarding the Halo 2 sucks brigade, I may have chimed in more on that side (the non-ending really disappointed me) if I weren't so busy playing Halo 2 over XBL. I've managed to avoid the hate brigades for the most part.

Kerm

P.S. obligatory loved Stubbs! postscript

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Reading their fever-dream versions of reality (wherein Alex coded most of the Halo engine himself, and founded Wideload out of sheer spite) was always entertaining in a ha-ha-look-at-the-insane-conspiracy-theorist way.

[image]

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It makes me sad when long-timers leave. "How am I just now realizing the logo is a sad face?" Makes me wonder what is going on over there.

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How I imagine most people see departures from a video game company from the outside:

"I'm sick of this ****! **** all of you!"
"**** you too! We never needed you!"

How I imagine it happens in the company:

"I took me a long time to decide, but I want to work on other projects, and that's not really possible here right now."
"Sorry to see you going, but best of luck!"

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How I imagine most people see departures from a video game company from the outside:

"I'm sick of this ****! **** all of you!"
"**** you too! We never needed you!"

How I imagine it happens in the company:

"I took me a long time to decide, but I want to work on other projects, and that's not really possible here right now."
"Sorry to see you going, but best of luck!"

I appreciate this post, but we both know the first view can be exactly right. And to be honest, I would expect a different kind of statement from the person leaving when the second view is true.

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Creative Lead CJ Cowan departs Bungie. (Destiny)