Destiny (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Destiny, an online shooter from the studio Bungie, took in more than 325 million US dollars at retail in its first five days. That made it the biggest launch of a new franchise ever. It arrived on the 9th of September 2014 for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. It was also Bungie's first new console franchise since Halo. Players take the role of Guardians, protectors of Earth's last safe city, who wield a power called Light against alien invaders.

  The road to that launch was far rougher than the sales figure suggests. Why did Bungie tear apart its mission structure so late in development? Why did its longtime composer leave before the game shipped? And what kind of world, with broken colonies and a wounded celestial being at its center, could keep players returning for years of updates?

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• 2. The Activision Bargain

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  In 2007, Bungie announced that it was becoming an independent studio and separating from Microsoft Game Studios. It stayed contractually bound to finish Halo: Reach. When that work wrapped up in 2010, the studio started on a new original property under the code name Project Tiger. Bungie knew it needed a major publisher behind it.

  Martin O'Donnell later explained the options. Bungie considered returning to Microsoft and also approached Sony Interactive Entertainment as a publishing partner. Both would have required Bungie to hand over control of the new property. Bungie considered that non-negotiable. Activision Blizzard would let Bungie keep control, with the expectation that the studio would perform financially over the years.

  A ten-year publishing agreement with Activision Blizzard was announced by April 2010. Under it, new property created by Bungie would be owned by Bungie, in a deal similar to the EA Partners Program. Details of the contract surfaced during Activision's lawsuit against Jason West and Vincent Zampella, founders and former employees of Infinity Ward. They showed provisions for four Destiny games across the decade.

  The money drew public argument. Activision Blizzard CEO Robert Kotick suggested that the total investment in Destiny would be around 500 million dollars. Bungie's chief operating officer, Pete Parsons, disagreed. He said: "For marketing you'd have to ask Activision people, but for development costs, not anything close to $500 million." Activision later confirmed the 500 million figure. It said the total covered marketing, up-front infrastructure costs and investment in the game's engine. Those costs could be amortized over the life of the property.

  Bungie also stood to earn an extra 2.5 million dollars if the first game scored 90 or above on Metacritic.

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• 3. Rebuilding the Story

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  By mid-2013, most of the groundwork for Destiny was in place. The lore, the game engine and many environments and missions were finished, and the schedule pointed to a release in September 2013. Then Joseph Staten's writing team presented a supercut of the story and mission structure to Bungie's upper management, led by Jason Jones. It did not test well.

  Jones felt the story was too dense and too linear. He considered it essential that players could choose where to go at any moment. So the entire mission progression was rebuilt between mid-2013 and launch. The old structure rushed players through four major environments: Earth, the Moon, Venus and Mars. The new one was a hub, with each planet visited in sequence and a growing variety of missions on each. Existing missions were spliced and rearranged to fit, along with their dialogue and cinematics.

  Jones also built the director interface that appears in the shipped game, where players pick planets and missions. He set up the "Iron Bar", a series of executive meetings that oversaw the restructuring. The project was rescoped as well. The Hive fortress called the Dreadnaught, an Earth location named the European Dead Zone, and Osiris' temple on Mercury were all cut. Each would return in later installments. The release slipped internally from September 2013 to March 2014, and then again to its real date in September 2014.

  Staten chose to leave the company in the middle of this reboot, though that was not announced until September 2013. The writing team he had built on the Halo series was left leaderless and isolated. Much of the extra time went into perfecting how the shooting felt, while the narrative was polished only to a perfunctory level. One description put it bluntly: "the story was written without writers."

  The technology made all of this harder. Destiny ran on a new game engine called the Tiger Engine, based on the one used for most Halo games. It could combine global illumination with real-time dynamic lighting, and Bungie aimed to render natively at 1080p on both Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Developers criticized it as ill-suited to an online game. Even small changes to maps required an overnight rendering and compiling process, and internal sources called building new maps and missions "grueling".

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• 4. Music of the Spheres

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  By the 17th of February 2013, more than 50 minutes of music for Destiny had been recorded with a 106-piece orchestra at Abbey Road Studios in London. Martin O'Donnell had started long before there was anything to play. Pete Parsons asked him to begin writing when the game was still in its infancy. With no gameplay to score, O'Donnell wrote from the game's ideas, stories and artwork. He handed early pieces to Bungie in the hope that they would inspire the team.

  Halo tracks had run two to three minutes. Destiny's had no such limit, and O'Donnell said they could last "as long as they need to be". For the better part of two years he traded ideas, melody samples and themes with Paul McCartney. The result was Music of the Spheres, an eight-movement symphonic suite completed in 2013, composed with Michael Salvatori and McCartney. Parts of it fed into the official soundtrack, released digitally on iTunes on the 26th of September 2014. That album holds 44 instrumental compositions by Salvatori, C Paul Johnson, O'Donnell and McCartney. It also includes an original McCartney song inspired by the game, titled "Hope for the Future". It was O'Donnell's last work for Bungie.

  Bungie's board dismissed him on the 11th of April 2014. The dispute began with O'Donnell's belief that the Activision deal had started to erode the collegial culture at the studio. Activision was reluctant to release the symphony as a standalone work. It went over O'Donnell's head and replaced the symphony with its own music in a prominent E3 2013 trailer. He clashed with both Activision and Bungie leadership, and his performance review accused him of "unacceptable conduct". Fans worried about the game's music, but Parsons confirmed that it was already complete.

  The legal fight ran for years. In September 2015, O'Donnell won a civil suit over the improper dismissal, recovering unpaid wages, profit sharing and lost stock. The 2015 trial also produced an injunction ordering him to return all his work to Bungie. In 2021, Bungie filed a complaint after he uploaded material from Music of the Spheres and Destiny to YouTube and Bandcamp. He was found in contempt in September 2021 and ordered to remove the material and submit his electronic media for review.

  Meanwhile, Music of the Spheres stayed unreleased until it was leaked online by unknown persons in December 2017. Bungie officially released the album on the 1st of June 2018.

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• 5. Last City Under the Wall

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  About 700 years in the future, humanity has spread across the Solar System and then lost almost everything. Bungie described the setting as a "mythic science-fiction" world. A prosperous era of exploration, peace and technological advancement, known as the Golden Age, ended with an event called the Collapse. It mysteriously dissolved the colonies and left mankind close to extinction.

  The only known survivors lived on Earth, saved by the Traveler, a white, spherical celestial body. Its appearance centuries earlier had made it possible for humans to reach the stars. The Collapse was the work of the Darkness, an ancient enemy of the Traveler. After driving the Darkness off, the Traveler now hovers damaged and comatose above the Last City, which is ringed by a massive Wall. Its presence lets the city's defenders, the Guardians, wield an unknown power called Light.

  Five hostile alien races occupy the planets, and each fights with different tactics. The Fallen, also called the Eliksni, are insectoid nomadic pirates who scavenge ruined settlements on Earth, the Moon and Venus. They split into tribal-like Houses, each led by a Kell. Long before, the Traveler had visited their home world of Riis and sparked a golden age there. The Fallen worshipped it as their "Great Machine". Then the Traveler suddenly left as the Darkness arrived, and Fallen society fell apart. The survivors followed the Traveler to Earth. The Rise of Iron expansion later added the Devil Splicers, Fallen modified by a technological plague called SIVA.

  The Hive began on a planet called Fundament, which had an inescapable gravity well. After a coup killed the Osmium King, his three daughters Aurash, Xi Ro and Sathona feared for their own lives. They discovered that the Traveler had trapped three Worm Gods, disciples of the Darkness, in the core of the planet. The sisters vowed to feed the Worm Gods under the principles of the Sword Logic, in exchange for immortality and power. They became Oryx, the Taken King, Xivu Arath, the God of War, and Savathûn, the Witch Queen.

  The Vex are semi-organic androids made of millions of microscopic artificial organisms, linked by a giant mind network and living in a fluid called radiolaria. They constantly run simulations of the past, present and future, and have mastered some elements of time travel. They have already turned Mercury into a machine and are trying to do the same to Venus and Mars. The Cabal are gigantic amphibians in a military-industrial empire, comparable to the Roman Empire. Their fortifications on Mars are seen as scouting missions for an invasion of Earth.

  The Taken arrived with The Taken King expansion. They are ghostly corrupted versions of ordinary enemies. Oryx created them by drawing foes into the Ascendant Plane, which gave them paracausal powers but drained their individuality and compelled them to serve him.

  Most of this backstory was never told in the game itself. The majority of the lore lived in Grimoire cards that players collected as they played, yet could read only through Bungie's website and the Destiny app.

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• 6. Black Garden and Vault

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  The story starts in the 28th Century, when a Ghost searches the debris of Old Russia and finds a Guardian who was killed in an ancient battle. It resurrects the Guardian, who has no memories of the past. Ghost leads the Guardian to a jump ship and then to the Tower, where the Speaker briefs them about the Darkness. Their first task is to probe the Cosmodrome, where humanity once launched its journeys into space.

  There the Guardian meets Fallen enemies and then the Hive, who were thought to be confined to the Moon. The Guardian also learns that Rasputin, an old Russian Warmind built to defend Earth, is still alive and acting with unknown intent. On the Moon, the Guardian finds the corpse of a lost Guardian and his dead Ghost, and learns that the Hive are raising an army to invade Earth. The Guardian shuts down a ritual that was draining power from the Traveler, destroys a powerful weapon called the Sword of Crota, and cuts the Hive's long-distance communications.

  A mysterious woman called the Exo Stranger then summons the Guardian to Venus to face the Vex. She describes them as an evil so dark that it despises other evil. She tells the Guardian about the Black Garden, a city where the Vex are born, and urges them to rip out its heart. That is the only way the Traveler will begin to heal. Ghost says the Guardian must seek the Awoken in the Reef, the asteroid belt, where Queen Mara Sov and her brother, Prince Uldren Sov, rule. They agree to help only if the Guardian brings them the head of a Vex Gate Lord.

  Back on Venus, the Guardian defeats Draksis, a Fallen Kell of the House of Winter, and claims the Gate Lord's head. The Queen tells the Guardian to carry its eye to the Meridian Bay on Mars. There the Guardian becomes the first to penetrate the Cabal's Exclusion Zone, which nobody had ever entered, and charges the eye at the Garden's Spire. A teleporter then carries the Guardian to a place that appears on no map of known space and time. At the heart of the Black Garden, the Vex summon three Sol Progeny called Eschaton Mind, Imminent Mind and Primeval Mind. When the Guardian defeats them, the heart is destroyed and the Garden returns to Mars. The shroud of Darkness lifts from the Traveler, which begins to heal.

  Back at the Tower, the Speaker gives a celebratory speech. In the hangar, the Exo Stranger warns the Guardian that the fight is far from over. On Venus, the Vault of Glass has reopened.

  The Ishtar Collective described the Vault as the "Vex underworld", a realm where the Vex can control reality and even erase people from existence. Its most infamous victims were the fireteam of Kabr, the Legionless, with the Warlock Praedyth and the hunter Pahanin. Only Pahanin escaped. Praedyth was lost in the dark corners of time, and Kabr drank the radiolaria of the Oracles and became a Vex. In his last moments, Kabr used his Light to close the Vault and left behind an artifact called the Aegis.

  A new fireteam uses the Aegis to defeat the Templar and its Oracles, then crosses the Gorgon labyrinth undetected. At the end waits Atheon, Time's Conflux, who can send Guardians into the distant past or future and summon Vex from other times. The Guardians fight through time, destroy the Oracles and defeat him.

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• 7. Classes and Combat

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  Destiny's designers worked around "seven pillars", seven core principles meant to keep the game accessible to casual novices and experienced shooter and MMO veterans alike. Lead writer Joseph Staten hoped to build a universe that would "take on a life of its own". For the playable classes, Bungie drew on familiar science fiction.

  Hunters are a reconnaissance class meant to recall the classic bounty hunter. Bungie cited Han Solo from Star Wars and the Man with No Name from old Western films with Clint Eastwood. Warlocks are a form of "space wizard" who combine weapons with special powers from the Traveler. Their influences include the Jedi Knights, Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings, and Morpheus from The Matrix. Titans favor heavy weapons and melee attacks and are meant to recall the classic future soldier. They were inspired by Master Chief from Halo, Stormtroopers from Star Wars, and other space marines. Bungie also named Monster Hunter and Dark Souls as influences, for their mechanical depth and brutality.

  Each class has three sub-classes built around powerful supers. The Hunter's Golden Gun is a flaming magnum with a base magazine of three shots. The Warlock's Nova Bomb is a sphere of Void energy, while the Sunsinger's Radiance can revive the player. The Titan's Fist of Havoc slams the ground and destroys every enemy in its radius, and Ward of Dawn raises a shield that also grants bonuses to allies inside it. The Taken King added a third sub-class to each class: Nightstalker with its bow-like Shadowshot, Stormcaller with Stormtrance lightning, and Sunbreaker with the flaming Hammer of Sol.

  Players also choose a species, either Human, Awoken or Exo. The Awoken are bluish-gray-skinned descendants of Humans, and Exos are human consciousness in a machine. The choice is purely cosmetic and does not affect gameplay.

  The four raids are the only player-versus-environment activity that allows a fireteam of more than three. They are the Vault of Glass, Crota's End, King's Fall and Wrath of the Machine, and each ends with the elimination of a major boss tied to the story. Six players take them on together.

  Player-versus-player combat happens in the Crucible, with up to twelve players depending on the mode. Control sends two teams of six after zones. Clash is a classic six-versus-six deathmatch, Rumble is a six-player free-for-all, and Skirmish is a three-versus-three deathmatch in which allies can be revived. Stats are balanced between players, except during the Iron Banner and Trials of Osiris events. Trials of Osiris runs from Friday until the weekly reset on Tuesday. Players who go undefeated earn access to an exclusive social space on Mercury called the Lighthouse.

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• 8. A Game That Kept Changing

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  Destiny's concept art and plot elements first leaked in November 2012. Bungie's official unveiling followed at the PlayStation 4 announcement event on the 20th of February 2013. An alpha test ran from the 12th to the 16th of June 2014, exclusively on PlayStation 4. A public beta for pre-order buyers opened on PlayStation consoles on the 17th of July 2014 and on Xbox consoles six days later. By the time it closed on the 27th of July, it had drawn around 4.6 million players.

  Bungie director of production Jonty Barnes had promised that the game would never be restarted. He said: "We're going to continuously update the game from now until the end of time." The Vault of Glass raid arrived in the 16th of September 2014 update, billed as "Destiny's most difficult mission". The Dark Below followed on the 9th of December 2014, centered on the Hive and Crota, Son of Oryx. House of Wolves came on the 19th of May 2015, with Skolas, Kell of Kells, trying to unite the Fallen under his rule. The Taken King launched on the 15th of September 2015 and began Year Two, as Oryx led the Taken to avenge his son. Rise of Iron arrived on the 20th of September 2016 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One only. In it, Lord Saladin guided players against SIVA. The final update, Age of Triumph, came on the 28th of March 2017 and added a 13-page record book of each player's progress.

  The version 2.0 patch of the 8th of September 2015 changed the core of the game. Experience points now carried players past level 20, and a separate Light level became the average of a character's equipped gear. Level 34 became the experience cap for everyone, and level 40 for owners of The Taken King and Rise of Iron. A weapon with 365 damage in Year One became 170 in Year Two, with no loss of power. The same patch replaced the voice of Ghost. Peter Dinklage had voiced the character in the base game. Nolan North took over for The Taken King and re-recorded every line, because Bungie wanted a consistent storytelling experience from beginning to end. Bungie said the change was due to Dinklage's availability. David Cross was hired to write jokes for Ghost, but none were used.

  On the 13th of October 2015, an update added the Eververse Trading Company, where the vendor Tess Everis sold emotes for a new currency called Silver. One of the first was the Enthusiastic Dance, inspired by the Carlton Dance from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Bungie stressed that the emotes were optional and that the microtransactions were an effort to "bolster the service provided by our live team for another full year".

  Seasonal events kept the world busy. The two-week Queen's Wrath event began on the 23rd of September 2014. Festival of the Lost followed on the 26th of October 2015. The Sparrow Racing League opened on the 8th of December 2015, a "six-player, free-for-all death race through enemy territory" in Bungie's words. Crimson Days began on the 9th of February 2016. Before Rise of Iron, accounts on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were split from those on newer consoles. Those older consoles received their last update on the 26th of July 2016.

  Reviews were generally positive. Critics praised the gameplay, the graphics and the way the game carried on the Halo lineage, especially in competitive play. Criticism centered on the storyline, the post-campaign activities and the emphasis on grinding. GamesRadar named Destiny its 2014 Game of the Year, and it won the BAFTA Award for Best Game at the 2014 British Academy Video Games Awards. It is often cited as a pioneer of the live-service genre.

  A sequel, Destiny 2, was released in September 2017. A mobile prequel set in an alternate timeline, Destiny: Rising, followed in August 2025.

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