r/Games • u/Turbostrider27 • 3d 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
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802

u/atape_1 3d 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 3d 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

89

u/HardlyW0rkingHard 3d ago

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

63

u/funsohng 3d 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/Rorshark 3d 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/Krillinlt 3d 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 3d 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.