Before Destiny even came out, we were told, it was one of the biggest games in the industry. Documents that came to light as part of the bitter legal battle between Infinity Ward and Activision alluded to a ten-year long agreement to create a new shooter. Dots started to get connected, and people figured that this shooter was Destiny, the new project from the creators of Halo and, judging from the wild numbers that had begun to be thrown around, one of the most ambitious projects in the industry. There was something about it that sort of made sense, especially when viewed at the time in the light of Call of Duty. Activision was pursuing a publishing strategy that had no room for small games, and Destiny was their latest moonshot.
Once the game came out, the ten year figure stuck around, and we all began to think about the game in terms of that number. Could this game last ten years? We asked ourselves. What's Bungie's plan to evolve this title over that long lifecycle? As it turns out, however, Bungie never quite had what we could consider a ten year "plan" with this game, just an agreement with Activision. A sort of humorous interview with Bungie community and marketing relations manager in the latest issue of Edge (via Gamesradar) talks about that disconnect between the way everyone was talking about the game and the reality at Bungie.
"It just became the narrative. I mean, I drive a Honda Civic. I don’t know s**t about $500 million. A ten-year plan? It’s a ten-year partnership agreement. It has nothing to do with the development of the game proper. To think that somehow, before Destiny had shipped, we had some ten-year plan written down somewhere? It’s comical. We allowed the narrative to get constructed that Bungie is just a corporate entity and not a bunch of humans, a collection of people who are just trying to make a really great game."
Of course, we all knew on an intuitive level that nobody would actually chart a ten year long development timeline for a video game, but that number shaped our thinking surrounding Destiny regardless. It's funny how at the beginning, it was sort of a joke: nobody could actually imagine playing the game as it stood in september of 2014 for ten years. But three expansions later, even that large number begins to make a little more sense. I could easily see this current strategy playing out for a long time. Of course, it's all bound to change next year with Destiny 2... but we'll have to wait a bit to find out how that's going to work.
