Kotaku, The Messy, True Story Behind The Making Of Destiny (Destiny)

by CruelLEGACEY , Toronto, Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 17:16 (3418 days ago) @ Cody Miller

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

I haven't read this yet, but thought people would like a place to discuss.

The team ultimately decided to focus it around a single major map—the Hive ship that had been cut from vanilla Destiny—as well as a new public space on Mars, complete with strikes and a new raid. (That entire last Mars chunk was later cut and passed to Activision subsidiary High Moon Studios to develop for Destiny’s full-sized 2016 sequel, a source said.

So Bungie is outsourcing parts of the sequel? What a terrible idea.

I would be concerned too, except High Moon does exceptional work. Their last Transformers game was one of my favorite 360 games. To me, this just means more awesome devs working on Destiny.

But now I have the same problem as Marty with regard to the marketing: what's legitimate? When I buy a Bungie game, I want a BUNGIE game. Will I have a way to know which parts of Destiny 2 are Bungie authentic, and which are farmed out? Will it matter?

There is a reason that lots of good directors do not use second units. The reason being, you need a second unit director. As Chris Nolan put it, if I don't actually need to direct any of that, then what's the point?

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Videogame development is already broken up across many "teams", even within a single studio. In some cases (Bungie during the Halo Reach days) the studio a actually spread out across several buildings. So in this case, High Moon can ostensibly operate as yet another team working on a portion of Destiny, reporting to the same leads all the other teams report to.

I think multi-studio development can complicate things or cause problems, but it can also lead to incredible results. Games like Mass Effect, GTA, or almost anything by Ubisoft wouldn't be possible without multi-team collaboration. Ultimately, it's Bungie's job to make sure everything in the game is up to the standard they believe in.

On a side note, multi-team development is also way healthier for the industry. It keeps more people working on a constant basis and helps avoid the "balloon-up during crunch then fire half your staff after launch" issue that makes life hell for so many developers.