To be fair, 'sources' at Bungie don't know the plan. That doesn't mean there isn't one. For all we know their 'sources' are in the QA department. They even point out that some of their sources hadn't heard about the supposed delay.

That's pretty much my point. I've never worked in a large studio environment like Bungie, so I don't know what level of company-wide communication is "normal". Kotaku is making it sound like the future of Destiny is in a state of flux at the moment. If the team within Bungie is not all informed of the current plan, there's no way Bungie will be announcing anything quite yet.

I work in company several orders of magnitude larger than Bungie, but once you get past a certain threshold very similar things happen, for one; company-wide communication is EXTREMELY difficult. In some cases it just plain sucks. It doesn't surprise me AT ALL that certain corners of Bungie had zero clue about goings-on in another, relatively unrelated, corner. Case in my point; sometimes I hear news about my company from friends who watch the news before I hear about it from my upper management. :-/

To be fair, 'sources' at Bungie don't know the plan. That doesn't mean there isn't one. For all we know their 'sources' are in the QA department. They even point out that some of their sources hadn't heard about the supposed delay.

That's pretty much my point. I've never worked in a large studio environment like Bungie, so I don't know what level of company-wide communication is "normal". Kotaku is making it sound like the future of Destiny is in a state of flux at the moment. If the team within Bungie is not all informed of the current plan, there's no way Bungie will be announcing anything quite yet.

I was trying to form an argument that it's important that we know whether we're getting a full blown Destiny 2, or just 9 more years of TTK style expansions, but I don't actually think it's all that important. It just feels odd that they don't just come out and say it. I get that saying something publicly, and then doing something different because plans change can get the internet fired up like just about nothing else can, so I sort of get why they don't just tells us what is going on, but it's still really frustrating.

The article makes the point that Bungie themselves (as a collective) might not know what is happening. Some sources are saying Destiny 2 has been pushed back to 2017, other sources have not heard anything like this. We can't possibly hope for clear communication if the studio as a whole doesn't fully know what is going on.

The initial tentative schedule was like this:

Destiny 1 Fall 2013
Destiny 2 Fall 2015
Destiny 3 Fall 2017
Destiny 4 Fall 2019

Since Destiny slipped a year, it would look like this:

Destiny 1 Fall 2014
Destiny 2 Fall 2016
Destiny 3 Fall 2018
Destiny 4 Fall 2020

So that's where people are getting their Fall 2016 expectation from.

Yup, and of course "Destiny 2" could slip as well. Probably that will happen less and less as Bungie gets better at planning Destiny development, but it's still possible. Also, Bungie decided to do away (or delay, I guess we don't really know) the DLC (and presumably Comet) for year two in favor of these smaller/more frequent "events," so the whole schedule is a big question mark at this point.

Nothing in it grants Bungie creative control of advertising and promotional materials.

Well, that explains a few things.

I was trying to form an argument that it's important that we know whether we're getting a full blown Destiny 2, or just 9 more years of TTK style expansions, but I don't actually think it's all that important. It just feels odd that they don't just come out and say it. I get that saying something publicly, and then doing something different because plans change can get the internet fired up like just about nothing else can, so I sort of get why they don't just tells us what is going on, but it's still really frustrating.

It is EXACTLY because of stuff like this that they don't. They're having their feet held to the fire for failing to meet the tentative release schedule in an old contract leaked by legal action.

If they aren't saying now how many more DLCs there are, or when the next title launches, or whether the whole thing is going to be done differently from now on, it's because they don't exactly know the precise answers to what and how and when. When they do, with probably more than a reasonable degree of confidence, I expect they'll do so, but if they come out now with parameters and release dates and then fail to hit them, it's just inviting the press, Reddit and others to pile on.

Most people were expecting a new game this fall. I think they'd expect some sort of announcement or confirmation before that.

Destiny was announced in February 2013 for an initial expected release for the end of that year-- a release they did not make.

So if Destiny 2 was on the current schedule, but slipped a year, and Bungie was as confident now as they were then, then they might announce Destiny 2 next month. Of course, Destiny 1 did NOT ship that year, it shipped a year later. Which may just mean they were a year behind where they thought they were, which puts the schedule back a year, or that every phase in the schedule underestimated the time required by a year.

That would make the revised schedule look like:

Destiny 1 Fall 2014
Destiny 2 Fall 2017
Destiny 3 Fall 2020
Destiny 4 Fall 2023

So that's where people are getting their Fall 2016 expectation from.

The Comet releases were scheduled for the in-between years:

Comet 1 Fall 2014
Comet 2 Fall 2016
Comet 3 Fall 2018
Comet 4 Fall 2020

Again, to compensate for one more year development time for each main title, it would be:

Comet 1 Fall 2015
Comet 2 Fall 2018
Comet 3 Fall 2021
Comet 4 Fall 2024

In this case, we might not expect any news about Destiny 2 until next year, but realistically, since people are expecting it out this year, they'll probably have at most until late summer to say whether or not something is coming out this year before the whining becomes deafening.

I sort of like the idea of the tight initial schedule that provides a constant stream of new content, such that when you're done with one, the next one is already up. The gap between House of Wolves and Taken King felt like that to me. It's okay to take a break and play something else for awhile, though.

There's been a lot of salt recently on reddit and other forums to the tune of "looks like Destiny 2 isn't happening this year." This sentiment (that it's not happening) seemed to just morph out of thin air these past couple of weeks. Before then, i had never seen any assumptions that it would happen.

When is the last time that bungie announced a new title (not expansion) in the same calendar year as release? I didn't follow Bungie during their Mac days, so I don't know. They definitely haven't done that with console releases.

Halo 1 - 1999, released 2001
Halo 2 - 2002, 2004
Halo 3 - 2006, 2007
ODST - 2008, 2009
Reach - 2009, 2010
Destiny- 2013, 2014

Unless they change their MO, I had personally assumed that a Destiny 2 announcement would come this year, with a 2017 release date. If Destiny is supposed to support a 10-year cycle, i would assume that major releases would be more than 2 years apart, otherwise we'd be looking at "Destiny 5" in ten years.

It came from 2 places.

1. the original contract that came out as part of the infinityward lawsuit. That contract specified alternating year full title releases/ large expansion packs (like TTK).

My copy of the contract specifies the "tentative" schedule in an appendix, but I don't have it, and neither do the other "leaked" sources I've seen. It mentions "Destiny Game #2" and "Destiny Game #3" and even "Destiny Game #4" as well as "Comet #2" and "Comet #3" and "Comet #4" but as hypotheticals, as indicated by the phrase "as applicable" when referring to them. Beyond the games specified in the contract, Activision has right of first negotiation on further titles.

The document describes the full releases as games, the major expansions as Comets, and smaller "DLC releases" as well as Conversions (presumably, anything for platforms other than PS3/4 and Xbox 360/Xbox One, referred to in this document as Xbox 720-- in other words, Windows PCs.

The initial tentative schedule was like this:

Destiny 1 Fall 2013
Destiny 2 Fall 2015
Destiny 3 Fall 2017
Destiny 4 Fall 2019

Since Destiny slipped a year, it would look like this:

Destiny 1 Fall 2014
Destiny 2 Fall 2016
Destiny 3 Fall 2018
Destiny 4 Fall 2020

So that's where people are getting their Fall 2016 expectation from.

The Comet releases were scheduled for the in-between years:

Comet 1 Fall 2014
Comet 2 Fall 2016
Comet 3 Fall 2018
Comet 4 Fall 2020

Again, to compensate for the one-year slip, we'd get:

Comet 1 Fall 2015
Comet 2 Fall 2017
Comet 3 Fall 2019
Comet 4 Fall 2021

So far that makes sense if The Taken King is Comet 1, which is pretty much what everybody considers it to be. That would make Dark Below and House of Wolves the other two DLC releases, with two more of those expected to come before Destiny 2.

However, this contract was old even when it was leaked, and it's possible that this was revised even before Destiny 1's release slipped a year, and was altered further when DLC plans changed.

There's also some weird stuff where at the top of the page it says Destiny 1 should be out Fall 2013, but then specifies that the PS3 version of Destiny 1 was expected out in Fall 2014. So perhaps the slip was already anticipated in this draft, but was only to affect Sony platform(s), or else parts of the contract were revised to reflect the new schedule, but others were not.

There is some other choice stuff in there, too, though. Like this:

Activision and Licensor shall mutually agree upon a budget to support the continuing operation of the
Products for a period of three (3) years following the commercial release of Comet #4 ("Support Term").

So there you have it. According to this, Activision is obligated to fund Bungie's continued operation of Destiny until Fall 2024.

Think my Xbox will last that long?

Also, Bungie has to finish the 2nd full Destiny title and make $375M in revenue before they can work on Marathon. So Tess Everis is actually running the Marathon kickstarter.

Final note, with relevance to the later dispute between Martin O'Donnell, Bungie, and Activision: Under Section 7.1 paragraph xii, Bungie was obligated to:

delivering Product art and style bible (and appropriate updates thereto) (which such style bible
shall be subject to the approval of Activision, such approval not to be unreasonably withheld) and
other w i se providing Activision staff (and/or its designated agencies) with reasonable and regular
access to and review of subject matter experts, game assets and other related materials such that
Activsion is sufficiently able to create and generate customary (i.e., consistent with other AAA
interactive software entertainment products published by Activision) events, marketing, advertising,
promotional and packaging materials for the Products;

The indication here is that control of "events, marketing, advertising, promotional and packaging materials for the Products" rested with Activision, with Bungie obligated to provide raw materials. Nothing in it grants Bungie creative control of advertising and promotional materials.

WoW never got a WoW 2. And look at how long it's been running. I'm not convinced we will see a destiny 2. The only reason I can think that they would do that is if they revamped the engine so drastically that it was a clean break between the current game and the new one. Probably when they support a new generation of consoles.

Right, but I don't think you can necessarily equate a 2.0 version number with a sequel. Destiny version 2.1 or whatever is the 2.1 version of that specific codebase. It represents certain updates and revisions, to the first release of Destiny. If the sequel we'll refer to for now as "Destiny 2" comes out and is an actual new game with new code, the version of "Destiny 2" that ships on release day should be version 1.0*, of that particular software.

Why would they ever do that at this point.

Do you want a new game that starts over from scratch the way vanilla Destiny game would? Or would you want to keep access to all current content, but continue to get new stuff?

Yeah. And maybe the Mass Effect plan would work but nothing official has even hinted at that. The thing I'd point to are the weekly updates near the end of the Destiny beta where Bungie was talking about never having to lose or reset your character again. Even in Mass Effect you sorta changed characters since each game changed the combat systems so much.

With no real proof for it, I just can't see Destiny doing that, ya know? Like Mass Effect 1 was ground breaking in a lot of ways, but its actual gameplay is "unsmooth" at best... Where as Destiny's moment to moment gameplay was pretty darn excellent right out of the gate.

Yeah, going back to ME1 is *rough*.

That being said, Destiny's gameplay was amazing out of the gate, but then in mission two I had to go through that same gate backwards. And so forth. I'm being overly negative here on purpose, because the actual movement and gunplay is awesome, but the enemy AI, the lack of a sense of a living world or any player impact on it, and the incredibly repetitive early missions all detracted quite a bit. The early reviews of 6's and 7's were pretty spot on.

You're welcome.

They also point out the whole "skill matchmaking thing" that was denied in December happened without Derek Carroll's knowledge from Derek's own Twitter feed. I took the article to imply that Bungie's left hand has no idea what its right hand is doing, where the game(s) is going, or anything else at this point.

That's was part of what I was getting at when I said Bungie is either being coy or downright deceitful. Either that's a lie, or Bungie as a company is so utterly messed up that it's almost hilarious that they can accomplish anything, much less launch and support such a great game. It's not the first time Bungie's explanations and communication have been suspect.

And don't get me wrong, I don't think Bungie actually owes us an explanation about anything. It's their game, they can do whatever they want to it and with it. I don't particularly care how they do their matchmaking as long as it works. I do care what the plans for the future are, just as a fan and wanting to know at least some sort of what we can expect, but I understand that they are absolutely under no obligation to tell us.

I was trying to form an argument that it's important that we know whether we're getting a full blown Destiny 2, or just 9 more years of TTK style expansions, but I don't actually think it's all that important. It just feels odd that they don't just come out and say it. I get that saying something publicly, and then doing something different because plans change can get the internet fired up like just about nothing else can, so I sort of get why they don't just tells us what is going on, but it's still really frustrating.