A rumor has resurfaced regarding Destiny 2‘s development, with Kotaku’s news editor Jason Schreier suggesting that the game was “rebooted” in 2016 and forced to release despite having spent little time in development.
Schreier made the comments on the DestinyTracker podcast, shedding some light on the alleged problems the game faced that caused its direction to change hands. “I think that it (Destiny 2) was made in a relatively short period of time. There was a big reboot of Destiny 2 at some point in early 2016,” Schreier said. “There had been a previous director who was directing the game before Luke Smith, who’s the current director, took over. So that guy was kind of put aside and Luke Smith took over.
“I believe that was in April of 2016 but I might be misremembering. Don’t hold me to that exact line. So if you think about it that way then they didn’t really have a ton of time to work on this game. It had been a 16 month period between the reboot and when the game actually shipped.”
Schreier continued: “They didn’t have the advantage of Destiny 1, which was something like five years in development if you count all the pre-production time, They made the decision that they were only going to add new content and not keep any of the older planets and whatnot, which I think hurt the game. ”
Schreier’s comments follow a 2016 report from Kotaku, which claimed that a Bungie staff reorganization had caused Taken King director Luke Smith to take the helm of the sequel. While Smith is now the director of the Destiny franchise, the circumstances behind him moving into his role haven’t been officially revealed, though he has received much of the flack for a number of Bungie’s questionable decisions regarding the game.
One such decision is the Eververse, Destiny 2‘s microtransaction store that has been heavily criticized by its community. Schreier went on to add that the Eververse was initially intended to replace the frequent major expansions of the first game, though this hasn’t exactly gone to plan.
“What Bungie decided was we can’t do this (releasing DLC every few months) anymore, this is too hard for us to do, the tools that we work with are really hard to deal with. It’s hard for us to make this much content. It’s just hard making content in general,” Schreier said.
“And so they said we’re going to do a drip feed of smaller stuff and we’re going to put up the Eververse, sell microtransactions and make money that way, and Activision said okay,” he added. “It was a part of their renegotiated deal and they got to a point where they didn’t have to be cranking out as much content, and now they’re back to this same pattern where they have to crank out these DLCs and just be making content constantly.”
Schreier’s comments on the podcast offer an interesting insight into one of the more controversial games in recent years, providing some context for Bungie’s more widely criticized design decisions.
You can listen to the podcast below:
