How does a company like Bungie, that seemed to want nothing more than a fresh start after Halo, come out of the gate and create a game with so many parallels to it's previous game? The Traveler vs Halo. The fallen vs the covenant. The ghost vs guilty spark/Cortana. The game play feels similar, although updated and improved.

The same arguments can be made towards Respawn and Titanfall. Why does this happen so often? To me, it comes across as a negative commentary against the intelligence level of people that play the games.

People point to the never ending sequels as a sign of dark times, but this trend may be worse for the future of "big" games.

It is sometimes easier to experiment with smaller titles than the big ones. Destiny hopefully isn't the only thing Bungie will work on for the next 10 years and they'll have a chance to establish themselves as something bigger than a couple of IPs.

Though Bungie has always done the space shooter. Oni was their best known title before Halo.

I'm hoping they'll get a chance to spread their wings some as a studio and not be saddled with one franchise. Then again if the one franchise does well for them I wouldn't look at it as a failure or bad thing.

And before Oni, they did the Marathon games. (Which naturally involved an AI going insane and trying to kill everyone.)

How does Bungie and Respawn make similar games to their previous successes? Easy. That's what they sold to the respective companies that made deals with them.

One, they have more experience or design documents to reference for the new games. Two, during the meetings that ultimately sold them they had to sell their previous ideas in a new light.

Video games are highly iterative. It makes sense with so much money on the line. Movies, TV shows, and books are pretty similar in that regard. It's pretty much the reason when something that is innovative but palatable to the mainstream catches on. People in general love variety but dislike anything that is too different.

Its a lot easier to go to something familiar than make something entirely new. They already know how to make shooters (if I remember correctly the Respawn guys worked on military shooters even before CoD), and their fans know what to expect from them in that area. Destiny specifically feels like a game that Bungie would make even if not all the mechanics are in place from Halo. Its ultimately the safest thing they could do.

I think Edmund McMillen had similar things to say about why they chose to do Super Meat Boy coming off of Meat Boy for Newgrounds, I just can't remember where.

Hold up there, Marathon, Oni, and Halo are all very different games. Oni isn't even a shooter (and was actually developed by Bungie West, not Bungie proper). Marathon, in particular, is a rather interesting case. It's a classic shooter in every sense of the world - hunting around a level for secrets and stuff, speedy and weird movement, etc. - but it also delivers a hell of a lot of story. Is it good story? I don't actually remember much of it. I played it co-op with my brother while listening to Underoath in high school, so I don't remember much of it, but there's a whole lot of reading to be done in what is supposedly a dumb first person shooter.

Marathon, Halo, and Destiny all have some similarities but none of them are really "the same thing" apart from all being shooters. In the case of Destiny, it seems more like a case of Bungie taking what they know and doing something very different with it. The moment-to-moment combat had a comparable feel in the beta but it was "comparable", not "the same". There's definitely a bigger chasm between Destiny and Halo than there is between Titanfall and Call of Duty.

@believer258: They're similar in theme. Very science fiction and much less varied than other studios. Again I don't think they're just alike but the themes across the board are close.

Maybe people are geared towards things they are good at or feel most comfortable? Never-ending sequels play a part in that, since an established franchise is less risky than a completely new IP, hence why you have studios making them and why AAA games are mostly what you've come to expect. They're good at it and it's a safer bet. Certainly there are developers who follow a certain pattern, sticking to mechanics and genres they're familiar with, but there are other developers who like to challenge themselves and create things that are completely different. It's a shame that Bungie didn't seize this chance to create something completely different from what they've done before, but with a purportedly $500 million budget (including marketing), it's no wonder they wanted to keep it on the safe side.

It seemed like trying new stuff with design made them revert to what they know on the universe-building side. Doing brand new everything was a tall order so I guess some parts didn't get as much brainstorming as others.

According to Game Informer, they were originally doing work on a fantasy RPG. "According to our cover story on Destiny in 2014, Bungie reveals that the game began development five years prior to our story. The game was originally going to be a fantasy RPG." I guess at some point they said "fuck it, we're a studio that does sci-fi shooters."

It seems like they took the story from their original version of the game but then put it in space. It has a lot of stuff you would expect from a fantasy rpg at least.

I wouldn't doubt they wanted to make a game like this in the halo universe, but Microsoft didn't want to dish out the budget so they went to activision and started a new IP.