The Messy, True Story Behind The Making Of Destiny [Kotaku article]

Jason Schreier published a great in depth article on Kotaku today about what is and was going on behind the scenes of Destiny's development. I can only encourage anyone remotely interested in that topic to read it, I certainly found it to be extremely interesting. Here's a choice quote that stood out to me:

“Let’s say a designer wants to go in and move a resource node two inches,” said one person familiar with the engine. “They go into the editor. First they have to load their map overnight. It takes eight hours to input their map overnight. They get [into the office] in the morning. If their importer didn’t fail, they open the map. It takes about 20 minutes to open. They go in and they move that node two feet. And then they’d do a 15-20 minute compile. Just to do a half-second change.”

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

What do you guys think about this? I kind of want to see the original story supercut because considering how Destiny and TTK turned out it's hard to imagine that it was even more linear and campy.

That story about their tools and the reality of a yearly schedule is incredible. I couldn't imagine working under that kind of pressure with that kind of unreliable tool-set. It is cool to know that the outside perception of Destiny's development was largely true, though it sounds like the process really demoralized some Bungie staffers. Great reporting all around.

Crazy how that game made and is still making so much money, anything would have been better than the "story" the game shipped with. I mean anything, including just not having a story lol. I would have rather had more gameplay content and just cut that lame story out completely. Destiny is one of the few games i literally wanted a refund for (only other recent game was the last of us but atl east i wasn't mad at that game just wasn't for me), it seems like they did fix it some what but the fact they expect me to pay another 60 for a complete game i already bought i just can't do it.

Basically confirms all of the speculation and rumors about the development of this game, doesn't it? The non-story and jumbled together feeling, the reason that there were only 4 zones in the base game (and only 1 more with TTK), the characters that were teased and then never showed up in the game, the reason it's been so light on additional content. Also, seems pretty obvious now why Joe Staten left Bungie. I can't imagine writing a story for several years and then having my boss axe all of my work to throw together something new in a single year. It sounds like his and his team's lore mostly made it into the game, at least.

Here's hoping we'll get to see the other zones and the Mars raid they talked about, the game really could still use another handful of patrol zones and more endgame content.

I think what always bugged me about Destiny is that it isn't humble. It bills itself as the greatest game ever made, even during troubled development and charges a premium price to boot. Seeing all this behind the scenes turmoil enforces that. I mean, they shot high and they fell short. That's fine, it happens! By they still talk about the game like it's on the level of Star Wars and they can't just say that... they gotta earn it!

Great story by Kotaku.

Great story. If that stuff about their development tools is still true, I can't imagine Destiny 2.0 will be the great leap forward many people expect it to be. A two-year development cycle coupled with a belligerent toolchain and a heavy handed publisher do not a revolutionary sequel make.

Awesome read.

So they did pull a bunch of stuff out of the game...Whole planets and playable areas....and then they charged people extra for them....and the article ends by saying that Destiny has redeemed itself like Diablo III....bullshit! They seem to be just using most of the stuff from the original vision in all of this "new" DLC. That just feels flat out wrong.

I find Destiny more insulting now.

Shameful disgusting business.

I know a lot of this was rumored, but its still fascinating to me to read a lengthy, well sourced article about it. There are a few "wow" quotes in there from Bungie sources. The quote on the tools stood out to me as well, if only because it casts some doubt on their ability to produce enough content going forward, which is concerning since that's the biggest single issue remaining with Destiny at this point to me...

I always assumed something went badly wrong in development because I found it hard to believe Bungie just forgot how to tell a coherent A to B to C story. I want to be fair because opinions of Bungie sources quoted in the article are mixed about the quality of the original story, but it certainly sounds like there would have been a lot more story in the original version (introductions before each mission and sizeable cut scenes after each) which I can't imagine being worse than what ended up in there. Also its a massive bummer that it's now confirmed the European Deadzone on Earth and the Dreadnaught were supposed to be vanilla content. Even with the messed up story I would have felt a lot better about my purchase of vanilla Destiny if that content had been in there. The article also makes continues to give me mixed feelings about Destiny going forward, apparently the Deadzone is going to be in Destiny 2 and while I'm sure a lot of work is going into it, it makes me uneasy to think people will still be spending money on cut content that long after the game is out.

I don't know enough about Destiny lore to make a judgement on the original idea for the story. Does the original story (trying to rescue the warmind Rasputin who has been imprisoned by the Hive on the Dreadnaught) appeal to anyone who's way into the lore of Destiny?

I finally think I have a satisfying answer to "what the hell happened with destiny?"

The part about it taking 8 hours to load levels to make small changes was surprising to me and it sounds like a nightmare. I wonder if they're still affected by this

Man, that story of deadlines and the tools brings back bad memories of my first job out college working QA for a medical software company - "So you want to check that bug fix? Sorry, you have to wait overnight for a compile. Oh, by the way, your deadline is 8:00 am. Just remember, people's lives are riding on this stuff. No pressure."

It would seem the article confirmed a lot of what everyone suspected, but now I have even more questions about the processes of the dev team:

(1) Did the writers and leads just not talk to each other? Like, at all? The article kind of gives the impression that the leadership team was shocked by the low-quality of the supercut, but it would seem like they should have at least had some idea of what was going on with the story long before that point. For example, the way the originally planned plot was super linear was completely at odds with the design philosophy of "let players go anywhere." It doesn't help that the lead team seems to contradict themselves a bit on that point:

"Everyone I spoke to agreed on one point: Bungie’s senior leadership, including Jason Jones, didn’t like what they saw. Some in the studio took issue with the rhythm of progression, which would have shown players all four main planets—Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Mars—within the first few missions of the game. (Obviously the moon isn’t technically a “planet,” but in the parlance of Destiny, the two are interchangeable.) According to one source, Jones also told the team that he wanted a less linear story—one in which the player could decide where to go at any time. That became one of Destiny’s key pillars."

I mean, opening up all the planets in the first few missions would seem to meet the goal of "player's deciding where to go at any time" and since there would need to be some form of mission progression for the story to make sense, so I can easily see how the story team would have decided to write the narrative this way. To me, that feels like a major miscommunication that could have been done away with if there had been a little more direction from on high about just what was wanted.

(2) Regardless of the quality of the supercut, it seems like a really panicked decision to throw out nearly everything just a year before release. On top of that, the article implies that the story was re-jiggered by technical people without a lot of writing experience. After that, it's easy to see how the chief writer left on bad terms and the rest of the staff became pretty demoralized. That supercut must have been epically bad.

(3) I'd be interested in learning more about just how difficult it is to improve a tool set. If it really does take an entire day to make little tweaks to a level, I would think stopping the presses to make the tools more manageable would have been a worthwhile investment of time and resources. Then again, I know next to nothing about programming and development, so maybe that's next to impossible.

8 hours to load a fucking map..... wtf.... whoever is behind the engine and tools have no idea wtf they are doing.

I mean seriously dude, I know this may sound like a joke, but if destiny was running on fucking unity it would look pretty much just as good, I don't see a single fucking gameplay feature that could not be implemented, plus any changes needed can be done ridiculously easy, it's pretty much brain dead (of course considering all the asset and script structure is well constructed and laid out within the project)

Why the fuck did they spend as much time and money as they did to build all the tech in-house if it's going to be this level of garbage to develop for?? somehow they still managed to deliver a half decent game but it's apparent why there are so many shortcomings.... fuck me...

@drainbamage: Well, it would have helped the vanilla story quite a bit. You did a couple of missions relating to Rasputin initially, but the plot thread never really went anywhere after that. Bungie seems to be trying to bring it back in a little bit with the subsequent expansions, but right now Rasputin just functions as a big MacGuffin - "Quick we need a mission idea! I know, something something Rasputin-in-danger-super-weapon-mega-threat! Sounds good!"

It just makes me sad that a game can be made in this state and still make so much money.

Sounds like a classic case of micro-management. That story that was developed over the course of two years by the writing team you pay six, if not seven, figures for? Totally disposable, just do it yourself. Even that sounds fishy as there's no way Bungie's upper management didn't know the details of the story for two whole years.

That nightmare tool chain scenario that is described is the reason why really good, efficiency-minded programmers decry things liked bad build tools, scripting, managed languages and object-oriented programming principles. And it's not a problem you can just throw resources at as adding more people will likely just make the problem bigger.

I dont see how this "explains" anything. They made a shit story and then scrapped it for another shit story, they made a shit engine and they had a deadline they couldnt work under.

Nothing of this explains how Bungie went from making good stories and good game engines to this.

Fantastic read. It's amazing that the first-year iteration of the game came out the way it did with the time Bungie had, even with the extension. With the year two release of The Taken King, I began to draw parallels with the quality of the game increasing over time, like with Diablo 3. Great that the article validated this by mentioning Diablo 3's director and some team members talked with some of Bungie's crew.

Great reporting by Kotaku. I'm not surprised at this in the broad strokes, but some of the specifics are still pretty incredible. Also, they're getting closer all the time, but Destiny still has a long fucking way to go before it reaches Reaper of Souls status.

They have no respect for their fans if they charge for the European Deadzone. They'll continue to take advantage of their users and it seems like the press now feels like Bungie is out of the mess they buried themselves in because of The Taken King. It's re-purposed content! They're thieves!

But...they're working with horribly inefficient tools and maybe that means they have to cut corners and we pay for those cut corners. it just sucks that they charge people for things they originally couldn't deliver on. They're actually benefiting immensely from their original inadequacies.

@lawgamer: Yeah that seems like a fair assessment. Based on how much some people seem to love the lore of Rasputin (I guess from grimoire cards?) it definitely seems like they could do better than how they're currently using him. I guess now we know those early missions were in there to set up the old main plot of the game, just now it now doesn't go anywhere besides the "oh shieeeeet Rasputin's in trouble!" scenario you mentioned them using for a bunch of missions/strikes. Oh wellll... maybe blue hologram ladies are the only type of AI Bungie's really interested in :P

@lawgamer: That was the part that blew me away the most. Like, there seemed to be no discussion between the writers and the project leads as to how they wanted the pacing and progression to go. Seems like a HUGE oversight. There must be more to it than that, but the result and the anecdotal evidence sounds like they just made the most rookie mistake ever.

I was perfectly content to be disgusted with my experience with Destiny. The gameplay experience at launch was extremely unpleasant, and it was exacerbated dramatically by the narrative from Bungie of Destiny being a huge success. Millions of players putting in many hours a day, they gleefully reported through the smug and smarmy DeeJ's blog posts, as they willfully ignored the fact that this gameplay time was a result of required grinding time in order to access new content (the raid and Nightfall strikes), not the pure pleasure of the game itself.

This article has provided some perspective on their community management. Bungie was (and is) incapable of publicly acknowledging problems due to their strained relationship with Activision. This doesn't validate the game's total shitiness and inexplicable disdain for the player at launch, but it does help me remember that Bungie's developers are people who had to put on a shit-eating grin in the face of public - and their own - dissatisfaction with the game. They were simply unable to issue fixes with a response time that allowed for them to be honest about the game's faults, because acknowledging them as soon as ire is drawn would leave the question of "well, when are you going to fix it?" until their engine finally allowed them to. The language around the Loot Cave's removal was an especially clear example of this: they (DeeJ) basically described it as having been willfully left in place until it was removed because it was super cool and fun.

At any rate, this was a great article.

Ha, too bad the Bombcast is already recorded. Would love to hear Jeff's comments on this story.

I've said it before, but to call what shipped with Destiny "A Story" is giving it too much credit. It's a non-story. It's an endless flood of meaningless exposition from Dinklebot with no real characters, stakes or payoff. Hearing that it was slapped together in a year by people who were not the writing team explains a lot, among other things.

I'm really glad I jumped in with The Taken King because I'm actually really enjoying it. But if I had played it a year ago I would've been pissed.

This was a fascinating read and sort of depressing that most speculation was right. How did it get to the point of only a year out with none of the higher-ups signing off on the story? That just seems like really poor scheduling.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that. Holy shit.

What a goddamned mess.

Great read, Jason Schreier continuing to prove why he's one of the better actual game journalists out there. And man, just hearing more stories about crunching in the game industry is just super depressing. I really don't know how much longer it will take for things to change before AAA games become even more sterile and risk-averse just to avoid losing money with the growing churn rate the big developers probably face.

I felt ripped off with vanilla Destiny but there was enough there to keep me hoping for more. Glad I stuck around. The game in it's current state is fantastic fun either doing quests co-op with friends or wrecking fools in the crucible. Game just has so much stuff to do and all of it's pretty fun if you can handle some repetition with your breakfast, which is ultimately what gaming is anyway.

Grind, rinse, repeat. Gaming in 2015.

Yea whoo charging 40 dollars for content that was supposed to be there in the first place "Fixed" I own the base game and my options are to go buy a whole new game for $60 or pay for $80 in DLC, how this isn't a bigger deal I will never fucking know.

Stuff gets cut all the time during game development, that doesn't mean it was some nefarious scheme to screw over consumers. Just because there was a plan at some point in development for The Dreadnaught and European Deadzone to be in the vanilla game doesn't mean they were finished or had any actual completed content associated with them.

Tons of games have things cut during development that are eventually used in a sequel, it's just a reality of game development that not everything comes together in time for release. It only makes sense for developers to use whatever cut content they can in future releases rather than have it go to waste.

Talk to any game developer and they will most likely tell you this is pretty normal. Games initial designs rarely make it to the official release. Features are consistently cut and dropped during the course of development in order to meet a schedule, budget, or conform to a revised design plan. Sometimes those things are realized later on in sequels or DLC, and sometimes those things are completely dropped and never seen again.

This wasn't a situation where they are trying to get one over on the consumer. This was a "everything is on fucking fire" situation. They cut and restructured large portions of the game within a year. I am honestly amazed the game came out as well as it did.

On topic: When I first read about how they cut the story it seemed pretty shitty. Then after seeing what the story was, and how it didn't lend itself to the open structure Destiny currently has, I think it was a good decision. Also the fact that they restructured the story as best as they could and then focused completely on how the game played was a saving grace. Destiny has a dog shit story, but it is incredibly fun to play. If it didn't play so well I don't know what would of happened to it after release.

I feel like this article gets more interesting towards the latter half. Having played the beta and only just purchased The Taken King recently, what kept me away from the game prior to the expansion's release had very little to do with the story. I think the core of Destiny, basically a shooter with streamlined MMO mechanics, still has a ton of potential, but it's all been mishandled to a pretty incredible degree.

While I've enjoyed TTK thus far, the game still feels like a shadow of what it could be. None of the zones are particularly interesting; they're small, yet convoluted and feel incredibly lifeless. If the zones were larger, with major landmarks and maybe even some kind of NPC presence (ie a camp/town equivalent), they might be a lot more enjoyable to muck around it.

The quest structure is still dull. Most MMOs are derided for their numerous kill quests/gathering quests, but games like WoW have improved on that drastically over the years. Destiny, on the other hand, still basically has you killing dudes from point A to point B, killing waves of enemies at point B while your ghost scans some shit and then killing everyone up to point C where you fight a boss. In just about every mission. Over and over again.

Then there's just basic issues with features and mechanics. Why the fuck is there no in-game map? Why do you have to do so much fucking grinding just to max out all of your subclass abilities? Why is it that they only managed to effectively emulate the some of the most egregious and time-consuming elements of MMOs (ie faction reputations and need for various reagents and currencies) while fumbling the rest?

Also, I've yet to experience any raid content (which I understand to be the Destiny's saving grace), but I feel as if the game's loot system runs counter to Bungie's desire to have players raid with consistent groups of friends. I'm not clear on whether bosses have unique loot tables (if they don't I think that kind of takes away from the uniqueness of reward with each encounter), but I feel like some sort of group loot system might have been good for raids. I hear a lot of grumbling about players going through the same raid multiple times and getting nothing but shards. You'll never be able to account for RNG entirely, but some kind of group loot system on boss drops would at least allow players to distribute gear more evenly amongst their selves. You wouldn't then have Player X getting the same loot that Player Y needs over and over again, while Player Y comes up empty handed every night.

Knowing that the engine's tool-set is such a shitshow at least explains why the game is in the state it's in. By and large I still have enjoyed Destiny, despite its flaws, and knowing what's gone on behind the scenes makes things a little bit more forgivable.

@lawgamer said:

This is the part that I have trouble comprehending. How was it that it took them 3 years into development to realise that the basic structure of the story being written for the game was completely unsuitable for the structure of the game that they were supposedly trying to make? It just doesn't seem credible or make any sense. It can hardly be possible that it was the writers who unilaterally made the decisions about how the narrative was structured, nor would any story decisions be made in isolation from the rest of the organisation either. It must have been the development leads themselves that directed them to write a linear story in the first place. I would imagine that the story would have to be continually iterated upon throughout the dev period so there must have lots of opportunities to alter things accordingly as development progressed. It just cannot have been the case that the writers were sequestered away somewhere until 1 year before release and it was only at that point that the leads saw the story for the first time and suddenly realised that it was no damn good.

The most amazing part is not that it was a damn mess (which I think we knew) it is that it seems to be still a damn mess

Everything about that article just reads like "upper management fucked the game to death and now bungie is screwed, screwed, screwed"

They'll be spending 10 years in crunch time, that 500 mil is not gonna cover having to remake their engine again, and they ran off their talent before it even shipped. Like it's good they picked an MMO for their big foray because those generate good will due to addictive behavior and abusive design, but still... yikes.

I agree. From what I understand, they spent 3 years writing a linear story and developing a game. Then the lead guy watches the super cut and didn't like the story, without somehow checking on it over the 3 year development. Then they also want the story to be partially non-linear and decided that after 3 years. So for the next year, they remove a bunch of story that doesn't fit anymore and just piece together 3 years of work into a frankenstein monster.

I really want to see Destiny 2 crash and burn.

And Diablo 3 is still just a grindy-ass grind, just with less randomization. It might as well be a flashy version of RuneScape.

That sounds like a truly horrific engine, and how could you judge a games story so harshly based off of a supercut?

Why would you use an engine like that in the first place? Why does that engine exist? Who developed it? Aren't those sorts of issues the kind that you see coming from a mile away so you can just go use something else? It seems like Destiny was basically brought down by terrible management.

Why? For one, that will cause lots of headache and problems for a lot of good employees, no one wants that. For two, Destiny doesn't have a bad foundation. The controls generally feel great and there's a really good balance between the player and the enemies he's fighting. I played vanilla Destiny on the PS3 and enjoyed it a lot just because it's one of the few shooters I've played where the actual shooting mechanics themselves make the game worthwhile, which is great in a world where story, graphics, and set pieces rule AAA gaming. I also bought the Taken King version on Xbox One and enjoyed it there, for largely the same reason, and I haven't even started playing the Taken King stuff yet.

That certainly explains a lot, both why the story felt chopped up and like most of it was missing (which actually was the case!) and why there was a lack of meaningful content. Still it plays very well and that it is saving grace.

I wrote some stuff but the forums are eating posts again.

In short, all the nasty development stuff aside, I think this is the first piece of honest to God video game journalism I've ever read. It's not another flimsy opinion piece about a highly subjective and often largely unimportant subject matter - it's objective reporting on a story how it happened. To see it come out of Kotaku is pretty shocking.

@humanity: Jason's not a bad guy for some of this stuff. Him and Patrick are a bit wasted over on Kotaku.

It's a good piece. It gives me the opinion that the upper seniors at Bungie are fucking lunatics and that all of what happened with Destiny is their fault. That Activision let them get away with a lot considering how much money Activision was giving them. That it's nuts to think they thought they could redo 5 years of work in one year and make a story less confusing. They made it less linear sure, but it's pretty easy to make a story non-linear when the story is just threads of something.

@jesus_phish: I don't know any of the people working at Kotaku but each time I go over there it seems to be a bunch of memes, anime and occasional game related news, all in a highly unorganized format. Most of video game 'reporting' these days comes in the form of editorials that seem to concern themselves with buzz words and hot topics. Thats not to say they aren't penned by good writers, but the subject matter is usually uninspired. You hardly ever get these sort of stories that give us all a lucrative look behind the curtain of games development, which I think is something way more interesting than discussing the moral implications of a video game characters wardrobe.

@humanity: Everything you say is true.

Really great article, just fascinating stuff.

I think it's easy to point the blame at Bungie managment for scrapping the original story considering how terrible/little story there was in the main game, but I can only imagine that supercut had to super dissapointing for them to just throw it all over and start over, when the game, at the time, was suppose to release in just 6 months.

That being said, if they don't completely rework that engine or go to something else, it's pretty much moot in the end. Destiny is never going to be able to live up to the potencial with tools like that, especially when they constantly have to be releasing updates per their deal with Activision.

Jason Schreier is one of the best in the business without question. His pieces on crunch and layoffs in the industry are other good examples of that. I don't always agree with his opinions but he absolutely knows his shit. To be fair though, these stories take a really long time to write because a lot of research goes into them. I think he worked on this Destiny story for about a year. That's just not enough content for a site in general regardless of what you think of Kotaku specifically (don't much care for it myself personally) but at least they do have pieces like this at all. Weirdly enough the most interesting long form articles tend to come from Kotaku and Polygon these days, both of which I usually avoid. Still, credit where credit is due.

As someone who has not bought into Destiny yet, I can't see myself buying it at any point. The things Bungie had to deal with because of activision in the past does not make me confident in the franchises future. Restructuring essentially the whole game in just a year; wow.

@altairre: I'll have to keep an eye out for him! It's hard to find good writers in this industry that actually write interesting articles - or articles that are interesting to me.

@ll_exile_ll: I understand things get cut all the time when making a game. Just because that's a normal process in game development doesn't mean that it can never be nefarious. I stopped giving Bungie the benefit of the doubt when Destiny proved to be the opposite of what it was marketed as. The pitch they were using up to release (when they became the highest preordered new ip of all time) was not the game they were selling for $60 but actually the game they were eventually going to attempt to sell for $200-2000. That is nefarious and not okay. If these were their problems a year before release they should have also completely overhauled their marketing strategy. They didn't.

The marketing for the game claimed you could go anywhere on a planet so even with European Deadzone and the ship they're still miles away what they publicly stated they were selling. Nefarious or stupid or clever or cowardly or whatever you call it they never owned up to the fact that they lied. This article, if accurate, proves that they lied to their fans in a majority of their marketing! And they're going to continue to profit off of those lies with each expansion! Now they have micro transactions too! Bungie and Activision have been being almost exclusively nefarious in my opinion. Destiny is one of the biggest cons in video game history.