Destiny Podcast Version 0

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Thursday, May 16, 2013, 01:38 (4218 days ago) @ Miguel Chavez

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.

Right. The game industry has grown and gotten more competitive since 1999. I think that as Bungie has gotten more ambitious, they've gotten more cautious, too, at least in terms of setting expectations. They're avoiding setting a trap for themselves.

Which is a shanda.

A related point: I get this feeling that one goal for the mature Bungie is smart project management. Specifically, figuring out how to achieve their visions while retaining and not crushing the souls of the talented people they've attracted, in part by allowing them to have lives outside of their work. That's quite the hat trick in an industry that's infamous for grueling schedules.

I would love to see evidence of any of that. It is a great goal, I just don't think I've ever seen it mentioned even in passing. But maybe what you mean is mature=older and so yah as Bungie themselves gets older (the folks in the upper circles being parents and just older in general) then their sensibilities trickle down to the rest of the company's vision.

Don't tell Activision that. ;-)

I'd say we have seen one very important piece of evidence for that: the decision to become independent, own their own IP, and set their own release schedules.

Looking at Halo 2, you could say that a big part of the problem in that game's development cycle was spending so much time and effort on the Earth City demo that ended up not resulting in an enjoyable gameplay experience, and then having to refactor in order to keep going. The smart choice at that point would have been what Bungie wanted to do-- take another year, make the game right, and release later. MS doubled down on the release date instead, and as a first party developer, Bungie had to stick to the schedule.

All the release dates in the Activision-Bungie agreement that was revealed were tentative. Activision is acting as the publisher. They don't own the IP. There's no indication that they control the release schedule.

I think it's not too hard to make a guess that, in general, with Halo materials, the game was actually not as close to being "done" as the promotional materials would indicate at the time those materials are released (even if you factor in the knowledge that most materials were released weeks or even months after their creation, or were created with stable builds of the game that were much older than currently being worked on.)

I don't think it's too hard to believe that even if it's a year or more out, Destiny is still closer to being "done" than what we've been shown so far, which is relatively little. I do think Bungie is being very, very smart about managing expectations at this point.