Report sheds light on Destiny's troubled development
Cut content, a scrapped story and changed characters.
Kotaku has published a report into the development of Bungie's shooter Destiny that confirms what many players had suspected: drastic changes were made to the game's story.
Destiny's story was scrapped in the summer of 2013, according to Kotaku. Joe Staten, chief architect of that pre-reboot story, quit Bungie soon after to join Microsoft. Bungie then had to scramble together a new design for Destiny's story for what was then a planned March 2014 release.
Destiny eventually launched in September 2014 and enjoyed commercial success, but most agreed it had big problems, chief among them a cobbled together story that made little sense.
There's loads of great detail on the Kotaku report that will be of interest to Destiny players, including revelations on cut content, re-jigged characters and locations that were re-purposed.
After Destiny came out, Blizzard's Diablo 3 development team visited Bungie to talk about its own process of redemption with the launch of expansion Reaper of Souls. Destiny expansion The Taken King has since been well received by players. The parallels between Destiny and Diablo 3 are clear.
Bungie recently scrapped plans to release mini-DLC expansions for The Taken King in favour of a free update model fuelled by money made by microtransactions. But it won't be long before thoughts turn to Destiny 2, which is expected to come out autumn 2016.
The game engine Bungie uses to build Destiny, the report says, hinders speedy development, and Kotaku's sources suggest some within Bungie are concerned the studio may struggle to cope with the annual release schedule it's committed to.
Kotaku's report is well worth a read.