Essential reading (Destiny)

by Fuertisimo, Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 14:15 (3561 days ago)

http://kotaku.com/the-messy-true-story-behind-the-making-of-destiny-1737556731

Finally a behind the scenes look at what happened. It basically went down like we thought; Staten's story didn't fly with management, he left because they were scrapping his story and wasn't happy about it. They totally rewrote everything on the fly and had to cobble together something that was baseline releasable by the ship date. Massive content cuts and things shunted over to the DLCs.

It's a long article but it is absolutely worth the read. The most interesting part to me is how cripplingly bad the tools are for making the game, especially considering the hype about Grognok early on. Also, FWIW, I think the cut story content sounds awesome and I have no idea why they decided to scrap all that work and start over. Just a bizarre decision.

Here's some quotes I pulled for those who don't want to read the whole thing or want a quick look at what I think are important points.

Senior management overruling Staten: "The decision was made against Staten’s wishes, sources say. Destiny project lead Jason Jones and the rest of senior leadership were unhappy with the writing team’s supercut, and their reaction was to scrap it all."

On Staten leaving: "Joe Staten left the company during the mid-summer reboot, although Bungie didn’t announce his departure until September, 2013. Two sources say the parting was not amicable"

Quote about extending the release date: ”The extension actually made it so we could get things to the base level of acceptability, and that’s what we shipped.”

On the Dark Below: They rebooted the first DLC pack, December 2014’s 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.)

Confirmation that there was originally going to be more than 4 planets in vanilla Destiny (correction: 4 locations): 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).

How microtransactions came into the picture: 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 “Destiny 2”—or whatever they wind up calling it—in the fall of 2016? ... “There was a bet that was, ‘Hey if we did microtransactions, I bet you we could generate enough revenue to make up for the loss of DLCs,’”