Super Facinating! (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, January 05, 2017, 15:51 (2882 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

Yeah, by now we've had confirmations on multiple parts of the story. Off the top of my head we now have hard proof of:

• A somewhat late change from the Book / Chapter style mission selection to the Director map style.
  
• There being massive issues regarding the production pipeline with long and troublesome delays associated with changing even minor things within the game.

Still outstanding is a lot of the story stuff and shifting content from the main game to DLCs like The Taken King. At this point I suspect there's a large amount of truth to that section of the article as well. I do wonder if the story changes perhaps took up too much of the article's focus when it could take 2 - 5 hours to move a box or swap out a sound effect.

I think I've mentioned it before, but the Final Hours article on the 2013 Tomb Raider's development process really drove home for me just how massively a game and its gameplay and even its base story and setting can change (for the better in that case) during development. And it didn't seem like the Tomb Raider team was facing massive dooming development tools issues.

Ultimately, my big takeaways are:

1. Bungie probably nearly killed themselves and Destiny because the new tools they developed to build Destiny had horrible debilitating flaws. Some of which were the result of bad assumptions and some of which were the result of trying to support four platforms (including the always hilariously difficult to program for PS3).

2. It must have taken a massive effort to get Destiny out the door when even minor changes could cascade out to having to spend hours to read in and re-export entire level sections. (I'd love to hear more about how they kept their artist and programmers and level designers working when getting their assets into the game engine was so time expensive.)

3. Destiny 2 had better have, at the very least, a comparatively massive scope. I would hope for more Destinations and longer, more complex missions at the bare minimum. With more and better missions should (hopefully!) naturally come more in-game story.