Destiny Podcast Version 0

by Stephen Laughlin , Long Beach, CA, Friday, May 03, 2013, 13:39 (4231 days ago) @ Miguel Chavez
edited by Stephen Laughlin, Friday, May 03, 2013, 13:52

As Cody said right at the end, it only really got interesting when I came on board. ;-) Before that it was like being forced to attend an economics lecture and two TA's were debating supply-side vs kenyesian.

"Ass kissers, the lot of them!"

Now that's an entrance. :)

You can claim the Halo reveals were fake at their core, but what they were *not* was imprecise setters of 'tone'.

I definitely appreciate that argument, but I'm saying the process of creating each of those demonstrations was also a pretty big timesink that may have been better spent actually working on real game mechanics rather than what amounted to an internal goal-setter. One could question whether the reveals created even more drive to push further and create a better final product than they would have otherwise, but who knows? It seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Down the line, after release, there was always that point where they declassified the insanity that went on behind the scenes during the development process and we found they were NOWHERE NEAR the level of progress that the reveals implied, which would have been a major letdown if the public didn't already have the game in their grubby little hands by then. With the current size of the development team and all the leaks these days, I actually wonder if Bungie could have pulled off another "fake it 'til you make it" demo without facing down an embarrassing media shitstorm.

I give Bungie props for peeking out of their comfort zone during this whole new marketing mission of theirs. The post-mortem on all this (the real post-mortem, not any manufactured spin) will be very interesting to read about in a few years.

The bottom line is I'm looking forward to hearing about/seeing this game. It hasn't happened yet. I'm a patient man though, I ain't going anywhere.

I hear that. I'm sure there will be some interesting backstory to this whole piece. I'd wager that Bungie found themselves in an all too familiar situation, pressured to make a public entrance at a point where they weren't quite ready, and simply made a tough call: to repeat past mistakes by spending valuable resources on producing a dishonest bombshell demonstration, or gather genuine materials from their current build and just show the world a bit of what they're actually working on. I guess time will tell.