I will never forget the hype and anticipation surrounding Bungie after the developer walked away from Halo. Upon concluding its time with Master Chief in Halo 3 and keeping the ball rolling with ODST and Reach, the studio desperately hoped to strike out on its own and do something new. Its aim was to redefine the first-person shooter genre all over again, even if this meant leaving everything it ever built behind. Was that risk worthwhile? Well, it’s complicated...
To embark on this mission, the studio signed an extensive deal with publisher Activision as it began development on Destiny. It was conceived as a living, breathing MMO shooter that, in the beginning, was intended to have a ten-year lifespan buoyed by updates, expansions, and perhaps most importantly, no sequels. Looking back, we can safely say this plan didn’t really work out or get off the ground, but that doesn’t mean Destiny wasn’t a success. It just took a while to get there.
Despite acting as the needle drop for major E3 press conferences and having several alpha and beta periods ahead of launch, Destiny wasn’t exactly well-received when it first arrived. It was an incredibly short experience, with the beta covering roughly a third of its overall content, and many of the missions involved following a Peter Dinklage-voiced Ghost around as you tried to defend him from endless waves of repetitive enemies. The shooting, visuals, and overall world building were incredible; but everything else needed a lot of work.
Jason Schreier wrote a comprehensive report during his time at Kotaku about exactly what happened to Destiny during development, and how many of its guts were either pulled out or hastily rearranged right up until the last minute.
That Wizard Came From The Moon
But there was enough brilliant stuff going on throughout the base game that a community of hardcore players — myself included — stuck around. We hung on tightly during the first duo of expansions, which underwhelmed with a lack of content and quality of life additions, only for public opinion to finally shift when The Taken King came along. This expansion essentially felt like Bungie pushing the reset button and offering what many hoped the base game was going to deliver. A sizable campaign, a compelling villain, and reasons to continue playing either alone or with friends to take on raids or hunt down legendary gear.
Destiny was slowly but surely cementing itself as one of the best shooters on the market that gave the likes of Halo and Call of Duty a run for their money when genre newcomers like the excellent PUBG and Fortnite were still finding their footing. Taken King put the MMO shooter on a positive trajectory that would remain buoyed by worthwhile updates and another stellar expansion with Rise of Iron in 2016. Over the course of two years, Destiny redeemed itself and laid the groundwork for a sequel. This came as its own shock though, because Bungie was leaving behind everything it had built once again just as things were starting to solidify.
Putting many of its missteps aside, vanilla Destiny was still filled with highlights. I will never forget teaming up with friends to spam the loot cave for rare weapons or finishing up our first raid together. Triumphant moments like this override the game’s flaws.
This time around, however, we knew that Bungie could deliver on its potential. That a sequel with a new hub world, a more confident single-player campaign, and concrete plans for years into the future could be something truly special. And for a while, it was. I stuck around for the first few years as I blasted through The Red War campaign, Curse of Osiris, and Warmind. It was fascinating to see how quickly Bungie was willing to respond to our feedback and morph Destiny into a worthwhile experience within a still evolving genre.
Forsaken was incredible — especially as it was willing to kill off a fan favourite character like Cayde-6 and expanded on characters and locations we’d come to care about — while other expansions like Shadowkeep and Beyond Light were decent excursions that made way for the excellent Witch Queen. Bungie was finding a consistent flow and realised it needed to build towards a satisfying conclusion to its Light and Darkness saga that actually imbued things with tangible stakes. But then Lightfall appeared and turned the loot shooter into our worst enemy all over again. Well, at least for a little bit.
The Beginning Of The End
Right as Destiny 2 was approaching the finish line, it flipped the car, ran over several random bystanders, and set the wreckage on fire for good measure. How was Bungie going to get it back on track and ensure The Final Shape was not only a worthwhile conclusion to a decade-long story, but also a confident sign of things to come? A tall order I don’t think anyone really expected it to meet, but somehow, Bungie went and did exactly that.
It was a confident final chapter for Destiny that delivered another, somehow more threatening villain, believable stakes, and missions that felt truly massive and consequential in scale. Told in a number of different acts, even lapsed players who didn’t play previous expansions could still jump in and get swept up in its drama.
Bungie would make an effort to catch up with lapsed players with free-to-play initiatives like First Light until the entire game came to eventually embrace this business model.
But it never truly felt like The Final Shape was the beginning of a new chapter despite having so much potential. Sony acquiring Bungie likely had something to do with that as its priorities shifted to new releases like Marathon as Destiny began to receive smaller, more incremental updates. The Edge of Fate underwhelmed while the Star Wars-themed Renegades felt like just a glorified crossover rather than a worthwhile expansion in its own right. Destiny isn’t dead, but I don’t think it’s very much of a stretch to describe it as being on life support.
Sony isn’t willing to give Bungie the faith and resources it needs to revert Destiny back into the juggernaut it once was, especially when it is still trying to keep Marathon afloat and put money into a number of other single-player and live service projects across its portfolio. Its acquisition of Bungie was an ill-valued mistake I think both companies are publicly kicking themselves for, and right now I’m hoping it doesn’t lead to the complete closure of Bungie within the next couple of years.
This brings us to the Destiny announcement made earlier this week which confirmed that the loot shooter is finally coming to an end. And no, it’s not being replaced by Destiny 3.
Farewell To My Fellow Guardians
In a heartfelt blog post this week, Bungie talked about the 12-year journey Destiny has been on and how it will soon be coming to an end as internal focus shifts to other projects. As I’ve long suspected, it became clear after The Final Shape that the runway simply wasn’t there in terms of time or development resources to drum up the beginnings of an equally vast story. It didn’t have the active community it did back when both of the vanilla games launched, not to mention the wider landscape has changed so much in the past decade in favour of several immovable giants. Bungie needs to adapt and survive, not go back to old habits.
No matter the reasoning though, Destiny coming to an end in such transparent terms is a fate I don’t think any of us expected. It’s become such an ingrained part of the video game ecosystem that I foolishly thought it would be around forever, continuing to get updates as long as a hardcore community remained to consume them. But in a business where the major players like Sony and Microsoft are all about going big or going home, it wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
Destiny will be receiving a handful of major additions in the coming weeks and months as full-time development winds down, but these feel like a reward for those who stuck around for all this time rather than the start of something new. Instead, it’s the beginning of a farewell even if the servers will remain online for the foreseeable future. I’m going to jump back soon to let myself bask in the nostalgia of a game that defined a large amount of my early adulthood. A deluge of evenings at university spent running raids and strikes with friends when I should’ve been finishing up assignments or chatting with former colleagues about what I missed in the story after returning for a couple of missed expansions.
What worries me about Bungie’s future is whether it will truly have the opportunity to chase the new ambitions it has in the future. As the final line of its blog reads: ‘Destiny 2 has been our home for many, many years. The unknown can sometimes feel wild, even a bit scary at times, but these opportunities to explore the future are invigorating. As we look ahead, our commitment remains the same: to make games we, and you, are excited to play.’
The reason I’m bringing this up is that Bloomberg reported shortly after news broke of Destiny’s sunsetting that Bungie is planning extensive layoffs after Destiny’s development comes to an end. I have to imagine only so much of that talent will move over to Marathon, while it remains to be seen whether any of its incubating projects will enter full production.
It is leaving a pit in my stomach that the end of Destiny’s journey won’t be one final great expansion or a celebration of everything it did so well, but people losing their jobs and an assortment of projects being cancelled in the name of capitalism. On the very same note though, I don’t think this fate should take away from the value Destiny holds as both a piece of art and a personal relic of your own existence.
The adventures you went on alone in the vast reaches of space, the raids you managed to conquer with friends after hours of grinding, and even the frustration you felt at Bungie for failing to deliver again and again. All of these feelings and experiences are real, and all of this will ring true when Destiny’s servers have been switched off a decade from now. But I think there are a lot of important lessons to be taken from the many successes and failures of Destiny and how it has come to inform the current live service landscape.
How so many different games wouldn’t exist without all the steps it took forward, and how its own space in the medium is coming to an end because it either failed to adapt, lacked all the resources required to push forward with a fully-fledged sequel or simply fell victim to an increasingly tumultuous industry that doesn’t care about how big you are. Destiny might be coming to an end, but when you really stop to think about things, it isn’t going anywhere.
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