Bungie pretty much destroyed Destiny’s story a year before its launch

The story that Destiny launched with last September was completely different from what it was a year prior. This is because the higher ups at Bungie weren’t happy with the original story that Joe Staten and Bungie’s writing team had been working on for years, and decided to completely overhaul the story at the last moment. Obviously if want to overhaul such a massive story with just a year to go before the game launches, there’s going to be some problems, which is why Destiny had such a massively disappointing story when it launched, and still does in a lot of ways. 

In the summer of 2013, months before they were supposed to ship their next video game, the game developers at Bungie went into panic mode. The storied studio, best known for creating the multi-million-selling Halo series, had spent the previous three years working on something they hoped would be revolutionary. Destiny, as they called it, was to be a cross between a traditional shooter like Halo and a massive multiplayer game like World of Warcraft. It was going to become a cultural touchstone. “We want people to put the Destiny universe on the same shelf they put Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter or Star Wars,” Bungie COO Pete Parsons said in an interview two years ago. Reports suggested that the publisher Activision had committed to a ten-year deal worth $500 million to make that happen. Two years ago, something went wrong. Destiny’s writing team, led by the well-respected Bungie veteran Joe Staten, had been working on the game for several years. They’d put together what they called the ‘supercut’—a two-hour video comprising the game’s cinematics and major story beats. In July, they showed it to the studio’s leadership. That’s when things went off the rails, according to six people who worked on Destiny. Senior staff at Bungie were unhappy with how the supercut had turned out. They decided it was too campy and linear, sources say, and they quickly decided to scrap Staten’s version of the story and start from scratch.