My takeaway: (Destiny)

by EffortlessFury , Thursday, June 01, 2017, 16:33 (2822 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Yeah, but dig into the behind the scenes of a lot of great creative projects and you'll see the same kinds of things. For instance:

• Tomb Raider 2013 very nearly fell apart multiple times before it shipped and successfully relaunched the franchise. One of the key lead people had significant heart problems that kept him away from development for several months. Their story originally involved Lara fighting tribal spirits and having to escort some little kid. They didn't hit on the feel of combat until something like a year before they shipped.
  
• The new Beauty and the Beast movie (which I loved) was originally planned as a drama only somewhat inspired by the 1990's animated movie and would have had no songs. The original Disney Beauty and the Beast had Be Our Guest sung to Belle's father much earlier in the film and they had to redo it when they realized that it was Belle the song should have been sung to.
  
• The original Toy Story saw all sorts of different ideas not make it. At one point in production, executives at Disney kept demanding that Woody be made meaner and meaner but when they saw their first screening they literally cancelled the project. Pixar scrambled and rewrote the entire movie in something like a weekend to save their first movie from never being made.
  
• Inside Out, which I consider one of the smartest written movies ever, had significant production problems and did not hit on its core concepts of: "you can't always be happy and that sometimes sadness is a necessary part of life" until multiple years of work had already been done and it took a decent size rewrite (along with all the reanimating that entails) to make it into the brilliant movie it became. The director Pete Docter who had been a part of Pixar from the beginning only stumbled upon this core theme when he was out jogging in the woods trying to reconcile the fact that he had probably failed his studio and team and would probably be fired from Pixar because of it!
  
• And, now we see that most of the Halos, which are beloved and all of which sold several million copies and made the Xbox platform viable, were themselves trainwrecks that mostly came together in the end.

Over the years I've come to realize that a studio's programming, graphics, and story talent is only the starting point. It's having those massively talented people overcome all sorts of real and idiotically self inflicted challenges that makes a studio great. And for better or worse, Bungie seems pretty darn good at having to overcome challenges...

Don't get me wrong, I understand that not every decision will be a good one and that failures inform growth and better future decision making. What I guess disappoints me is that it seems that the company has repeated similar mistakes with almost every game dev cycle. It doesn't inspire confidence.