I always tell people that I’ve been with Destiny since the first alpha test. For some reason, it’s always been a point of pride for me. My own way of saying, “Hey, I’ve been behind this vision since the beginning. I’ve been there through the highs and the lows, and I’m still here.” But following a second round of brutal layoffs that have seemingly gutted Bungie and most of the teams working on Destiny 2, I’m not entirely sure what’s going to be left to be “here” for.
The majority of the cuts at Bungie this week have raised several alarms. Not only do they come nearly two months after the hugely successful launch of The Final Shape, Destiny 2’s conclusion to a decade-long story, but they have also torn aspects of the team down to studs. The player support team is almost entirely gone, raid designers have been laid off, sound teams have been eviscerated, and QA seems like it’s going to largely fall on Sony rather than Bungie’s internal teams. The narrative team has been all but eliminated. There are still tons of people supposedly left behind to continue working on Destiny 2, but these cuts signal shifting priorities at Bungie, and suggest that this game is going to be radically different moving forward.
According to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb, “different” is going to look like an entirely new content delivery method that might rub the Destiny community the wrong way. The cuts at Bungie appear to project a new vision of the live-service game’s future, a vision that moves away from large-scale expansions full of new areas, assets, and so on that have historically come about once a year. Instead, new content will dip into the studio’s existing resources—which appears to be in line with the planned updates for the rest of the year—and be released in smaller “content packs.” In other words, the team is moving away from growing the game to simply keeping it running.
Bungie will continue supporting Destiny 2 with smaller releases while it gets Marathon (due in 2025) off the ground and spins off an in-development title in a new franchise into a full-fledged studio under the PlayStation banner. But with a dwindling headcount—Bungie still has over 800 employees, but is down several hundreds since this time last year—and all these new projects, Destiny 2 is now just sitting in a sort of vegetative state, and it doesn’t feel like one it’ll stir from anytime soon.
Read More: Bungie Devs React To More Mass Layoffs: ‘My Whole Team Is Gone’
The hope appears to be to continue producing content for the live-service treadmill, but cut back on spending, which will be reflected in the size of future updates as well as the number of people actually working on Destiny 2. Despite repeated calls for Bungie to drop the game in favor of producing another numbered sequel in the franchise, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has confirmed that Destiny 3, which was believed to have been canned as part of these layoffs, was never in development in the first place.
To be clear, most fans assumed that after The Final Shape, Destiny would slow down as it ramped up new narrative arcs or a potential new game. Following the latest expansion, the studio reworked its seasonal model into an episodic one, cutting back from four seasons a year to three episodes. The episodes are divided into three acts each, which Bungie suggested would translate to even more content. But considering the tepid reaction to the relatively thin episode that’s in progress, players are already beginning to feel like they’ve been led on by the studio and we’ve barely gotten outside of The Final Shape’s launch window.
Now that it’s been confirmed that no new game is on the horizon, the community is left with an increasingly convoluted and quickly aging game, a disappointing evolution of a busted content delivery model, and no promise for something better in the near future. They’ve been stranded.
Moreover, discontent with Bungie continues to foment in the community over a lack of communication about this uncertain future. The studio has refused to outwardly commit to any future plans beyond what’s been announced, which consists of the next year’s episodes, and a content pack codenamed Frontiers. People want to be excited about the journeys to come. and more importantly, they want to know that Destiny is a thing they can continue to come back to. They want to feel like their investments in the series aren’t completely wasted. In return, Bungie’s leadership seems content to string them along in the hope that nebulous promises make good while they tear the studio apart looking for any remaining stones to bleed for a bit more money.
Paired with the confirmation that there is no numbered sequel in the works, the severity of these layoffs, the lack of meaningful communications, and a move away from expansions portend a grim picture for Destiny. Despite being billed as the end of the beginning, The Final Shape really is beginning to feel like the nail in the game’s coffin. There appears to be no certainty that Destiny will even be around in a few years, or that it’s a priority to the studio outside of being a cash cow riddled with microtransactions. So long as it can maintain a number of players who are actively playing (and more crucially, spending), Bungie seems to have placed any plans for Destiny’s continued growth on an indefinite hiatus.
Throwing further fuel on the fire, one person who wasn’t impacted by this week’s layoffs was Pete Parsons, Bungie’s CEO and the man who multiple former Destiny developers claim is largely to blame for the hard times the team’s fallen on. As developers were laid off earlier this week, repeated calls for Parsons’ job popped up from a number of senior developers who’d previously departed the studio, with one calling Parsons a “joke,” while another accused the CEO of turning Destiny into “a money pit with no return.” Accordingly, it was discovered that Parsons, who players and employees now have to trust to steward the franchise and studio, has spent more than $2.3 million buying cars since Bungie was acquired by Sony.
I trust that the talented developers left behind are going to continue to try their hardest to take care of Destiny, a franchise I care for more than I like to admit. But it pains me to say that I don’t know if I trust Bungie’s leadership to ever enable it to be the best that it can be. And so as regrettable as it may be, it might be time to let Destiny go. At least until it’s in capable and caring hands again.
