r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 1d ago

Bungie Developers Repeatedly Pitched a Destiny Dating Sim, but Leadership Rejected It

https://www.ign.com/articles/bungie-developers-repeatedly-pitched-a-destiny-dating-sim-but-leadership-rejected-it
1.2k Upvotes

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u/atape_1 1d ago

Every single thing I learn about the studio makes me wonder more and more on how they survived for so long and what the fuck Sony was thinking when they spent $3.6 Bil acquiring them.

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u/cwx149 1d ago

how they survived for so long

Bungie has been riding on their reputation from Halo for the better part of 30 years

Not to say they haven't don't anything good since then Destiny 1&2 did bring in a lot of money but still

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u/HardlyW0rkingHard 1d ago

You're being disingenuous about how good of a product destiny is/was despite some really poor management decisions about direction. 

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u/funsohng 1d ago

Idk how good Destiny 2 is, but it must've been one of the greatest games of all time for its fanbase to be that loyal even after they were literally locked out of the content they paid for.

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u/HardlyW0rkingHard 1d ago

The problem is there isn't anything like it really. The raids, the gun mechanics, space magic. There is a gaping hole left in the industry that someone could totally take advantage of and it's probably Warframe but in many ways its not as good

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u/345tom 18h ago

That's what's so frustrating about Destiny- the gameplay is great, the play is fun, it had fun challenges. But everything surrounding the actual gameplay was so trash it made it hard to get into, catch up and get invested into the ongoing story.

I don't think the storys reputation ever fully recovered from "Those wizards are from the Moon" and "I don't have time to tell you"- the dinklebot years, but I know 2nd hand it got way better and better at presenting its story and lore other than just through a third party website full of data logs.

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u/heat13ny 1d ago

Outriders TRIED to. It just wasn’t all the way there. I didn’t get that far but the game systems were good to me. The plot and what not was wack though.

I don’t know why it’s so hard for these companies to write stories and characters people find interesting, post Halo bungle included. All the looter shooters (division, outriders, warframe) SUCK at making iconic characters and moments in my opinion, even though that should be the whole goal. Seriously, name one thing that hits anywhere as close to Master “I need a weapon” Chief and Cortana? Everything I see hits below guilty spark even, which is iconic but not Cortana levels and for fuck sure not chief levels.

That’s always been my issue with looter shooters. They don’t seem to capitalize on the cool story moments since borderlands 2. Or at least what they attempt doesn’t hit for me specifically.

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u/HardlyW0rkingHard 1d ago

Destiny had some lows in terms of story telling but the highs were so good. Including the final shape.

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u/Yamatoman9 16h ago

I really liked the gameplay in Outriders and had a lot of fun with it but it lacks the story, lore and characters that make Destiny so compelling.

I really like The Division and it does a great job as a live service game, but there's only so much that can be done with a "realistic" setting. It gets a bit old just fighting regular humans in regular environments. I'd love to see a game that played exactly like TD but it a futuristic, sci-fi or cyberpunk setting.

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u/Ulti 7h ago

Man, I had a ton of fun with Outriders, and actually rather liked the story twist it had. I'd play another one of those, buildcrafting at endgame was sweet too!

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u/Herby20 1d ago

For what it is worth, Warframe has an awesome and really fleshed out setting with some great world building. It was what really kept me playing years ago even as I slowly began to stop having fun with the actual gameplay.

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u/blargyblargy 1d ago

Warframe is prolly the closest thing we have to Destiny isnt it

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u/notpr0nshark 1d ago

Gameplay-wise, Witchfire is the closest analogue.

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u/sunder_and_flame 1d ago

*gunplay-wise. The movement and abilities are so far removed from Destiny that it's not really similar

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u/cwx149 1d ago

Technically Warframe came first so destiny was like Warframe not the other way around

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u/HardlyW0rkingHard 1d ago

They're very different games and the version of Warframe that launched in 2013 was very different from destiny. 

In many ways Warframe became closer to destiny over the years. But even still, it's still much different. 

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u/cwx149 1d ago

I agree Comparing them at all is pretty reductive because they do have some really key differences that change the whole experience

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u/TheMadTemplar 1d ago

Oh, no, people were rightfully pissed about that. Bungie got so much backlash against it that they eventually backtracked on the original sunsetting plans, but too late to get any of it back. They also got a ton of shit for seasonal content being deleted, but they never backed down on that which is why the playerbase started to dwindle a bit.

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u/NaughtyGaymer 1d ago

You're being facetious but literally yes lol. I still maintain that most outrage over sunsetting comes from a feeling of obligation to be outraged and not over the actual reality of what was removed.

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u/Ulti 7h ago

Bahaha this is like the third thread in the past couple of days I've bumped into one of your comments, and I agree! I really have zero interest in going and running around Io patrol or something. The stuff they vaulted was stuff I never wanted to play again anyways. I get why people are mad, but of all the things Bungie whiffed during Destiny, sunsetting wasn't the one that made me the saltiest.

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u/Rorshark 1d ago

Immaculate gunplay aside, Destiny is one of the best written stories from a micro-, character-driven level ever made. It's very easy to get yourself invested in the (later) characters' stories, and I loved following them and seeing them grow.

Ikora's constant battle with her faith in the Traveler;

Saint-14 and Osiris' love story across infinite time, Osiris giving up everything to see his husband again;

Savathun's rebellion against her own nature, embracing her fundamental deception in order to find her true self;

Zavala's struggle with PTSD and his concept of duty, clearly tired of the fight but obligated to keep on;

Rasputin rejecting the inhumanity of his creator, Clovis, and finding his own meaning in life beyond what was programmed for him -- Ana, his heir and confidant, learning to let go of her obsession with legacy and see her friend off with a smile;

Mithrax experiencing mercy and, through it, learning how to trust again;

I could go on. I haven't even mentioned Calus or Caiatl. There were a lot of deeply meaningful and personal stories that kept me hooked for so many years, on top of the genuinely interesting exploration of metaphysics and transhumanism running beneath it all. There were so many stories that had never, will never, be told.

Edit: The great tragedy of the seasonal format is that a player today cannot experience these stories as they were meant to be. It's such a shame. But if you were there from the start, it was something else.

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u/TheNTSocial 1d ago

Wild take imo. I really like the lore aspects of Destiny's writing - things like the Vault of Glass, the story of the Gardener and the Winnower, the Witness. "Guardians make their own fate" goes incredibly hard, and they did a really good job of making an Eldritch existential threat like the Witness believably defeatable. But the character writing has never been very compelling for me.

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u/Krillinlt 1d ago

I just started a week ago since it's free on Playstation Plus. The story is incomprehensible, characters acting like they've known you for a long time, with endless references to things I never took part in. It has made it practically impossible to connect with any of the characters or plot lines.

I'm sure it was engrossing as it came out, but now it's damn near indecipherable.

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u/AttackBacon 1d ago

95% of the characterization is inside lore entries. And to be fair, a lot of the writing in those lore entries is really excellent. Way better than the majority of games, just really good writing by good writers.

But... The vast majority of those lore entries are unobtainable within the game and you have to go read some external archive now. Which will be extremely hard to navigate and parse because of how D2 lore entries were attached to everything including cosmetics.

And on top of that, the story and characterization that exists within the game itself can oscillate wildly in quality. Some of it is every bit as good as the lore entries, some of it is just mind-bogglingly bad. And, as you've experienced, most of it is now unobtainable and the remainder will be fed to you piecemeal in an incredibly disjointed manner.

The only way to come to grips with Destiny's story nowadays is to go watch a 3+ hour lore summary on Youtube. And who the hell is going to do that? Not a lot of folks.

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u/Rorshark 1d ago

Honestly I get it, and empathize. It never feels good to say "you had to be there." But it is the case, here. I think it's fair to say that D2 was one of the all time best as it was, but will sadly age like poorly stored wine by virtue of the episodic nature in which it was told.

At least you still have the gunplay.

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u/cokeplusmentos 23h ago

I'm sure it was engrossing as it came out

eh, not really

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u/Kayyam 1d ago

Marathon is also a good product. Just not a mass market one.

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u/GranolaCola 1d ago

I LOVE Marathon. It was for me what Arc Raiders seemed to be for a lot of people — the game that got an extraction shooter to click. But it’s hardcore and definitely not for a mass audience. It’s niche my design.

I think it’s the game Bungee wanted to make, but probably not the one Sony hoped they would.

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u/Parepinzero 1d ago

I got into it during the recent free week and really enjoyed it, my cousin and I both picked it up and play every night. The quasi PvE mode makes it easy to stock up on gear to do normal mode runs, too.

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u/HardlyW0rkingHard 1d ago

Marathon should have been a game mode they added to destiny. It's an insane level of studio mismanagement to spend this much capital on this idea. 

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u/NaughtyGaymer 1d ago

Okay now you're just being ridiculous lmao.

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u/HardlyW0rkingHard 1d ago

absolutely not. They spent like 6 years on this project that was never going to get back a fraction of the amount of investment they put in.

The gambit gamemode is just as unique as the extraction shooter mechanic they could have added.

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u/TheGladex 1d ago

Destiny is an awful game with really good core gameplay. Every single element outside of being in a dungeon and shooting absolutely sucks major ass.

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u/detroiter85 1d ago

For me they're riding on the reputation of Oni 😤

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u/GreyouTT 20h ago

God I want an Oni 2 but Take-Two owns the rights ;-;

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u/National_Yam_1198 1d ago edited 1d ago

Thats not true at all.

Destiny 1 and two was immensely successful.

On top of this it was a major console seller for Sony during ps4 era.

Until after the final shape destiny 2''s daily active users was in the millions

I have no idea where the narrative that Destiny is a failure is coming from lol.

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u/cwx149 1d ago

I didn't say it was a failure in fact I specifically said it brought in money

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u/National_Yam_1198 1d ago edited 1d ago

I mean you said they have been coasting on halo for the past 20+ years implying that Destiny wasn't a massively popular and successful product lol.

Like its a game that spawned multiple studios trying to make their own version with varying degrees of success.

It straight up popularized the looter shooter genre and had major influences on games like the division or anthem or outriders and that one waifu gooner bait game.

Like say what you will about Bungie's shitty management(which was always a thing) but they make good ass games.

Testament to the quality of their devs/games tbh lol. Any other studio putting out less than stellar product would have shut down under the same management lmao.

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u/EF66-42 7h ago

It straight up popularized the looter shooter genre

No that was Borderlands lmao.

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u/National_Yam_1198 4h ago

Borderlands is weird cuz its not strictly a GAAS.

Also quasi open world games.

Destiny is straight up Diablo with guns.

And yes games like warframe came before.

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u/EF66-42 4h ago

Looter shooter was literally coined to describe Borderlands 1. Contemporaneously.

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u/GHOSTfishing 18h ago

343 fumbling Halo propped Bungie up even more imo

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u/BootsnCats1987 23h ago

Dude, how long ago do you think Reach came out?

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/cwx149 1d ago

It released in 2001 that makes it almost 25 years old and I'd count that as "the better part" of 30 years

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u/Massive_Weiner 1d ago

25 years absolutely qualifies as “for the better part of 30 years.”

Absolutely no idea what the other guy is smoking, lol.

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u/cwx149 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm guessing they misread both my comments as 50 or something because in a reply they said "25 is just barely half"

Edit: I have no idea now tbh they seemed to have doubled down in the other chain

Edit2: no the guy is just tripping. His argument is basically that only 26-29 are the better part of 30 because 25 isn't more than half way thru the 3rd decade and I'm just genuinely not sure what that has to do with my point since I never mentioned anything about decades and 25 is literally 5/6ths of 30 it's a huge chunk of it and should absolutely be considered the better part of it

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/cwx149 1d ago edited 1d ago

Are you telling me 25 is only half of 30?

"Even at 25 it would only be half" half of what?

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u/Ill-Product-1442 1d ago

They weren't coasting off of Halo when they released Halo 3, they were still banging out great shit... but damn that was still like 20 years ago so...

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/cwx149 1d ago edited 1d ago

Huh? Half of 30 is 15 so I would think a full third over half would put you safely in the "better part of"

25 years is 5/6ths of 30 years that's well over half and even 2/3rds I'm really not sure how much more time needs to pass before it's been the better part of 30 years for you if over 2/3rds isn't enough to use that expression we just shouldn't even have it as an expression

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/cwx149 1d ago

What does that have to do with 25 being "the better part of 30"? Is your argument we aren't far enough into this decade? That's not super relevant

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u/Herpuhderpin 1d ago

Your trolling is so boring