Destiny 2: Activision Wasn’t a Prohibitive Overlord, Says Bungie
Destiny 2 was released back in 2017. At first, it was looking like a very promising sequel to the Destiny franchise. The main story campaign was good, the new Raid – Leviathan was amazing. But after a month or so, it turns out Bungie made Destiny 2 way too casual for the players. They removed some of the core looter-shooter features like random roles on weapons etc. Most of the community blamed Activision for these features in Destiny 2, but it turns out it was mostly Bungie’s decision all along.
Destiny 2 Activision-Bungie Split
In an interview with Eurogamer, Community Manager David Dague (DeeJ) talks about how splitting up with Activision changed the way they work at the Bungie Studios. He said, back when Activision was a part of the franchise, the core decisions about the game was still up to Bungie. Here’s what he said:
“I don’t know. I think we need to dispel the notion Activision was some prohibitive overlord that wasn’t letting us do awesome things. We launched this franchise with Activision, naturally and over the course of time we both decided we had different goals for what we wanted it to be, so we both went our separate ways. It was amicable, and here we are making this game on our own, doing what we think we need to do to make it awesome.”
“Bungie has always prided itself on being flexible and adaptive. The industry has changed a lot and we’ve always been willing to evolve with it. We will do whatever we think is best for the community and welcome new people in. Sometimes these are painful evolutions – when we were blending the Halo nation with the PlayStation nation, there were some of these moments where we had new people joining Bungie.net to join clans and ask questions. But I’m very sensitive to the fact the lifeblood of a community is the ability to bring in new faces to keep it fresh.”
Destiny 2: Shadowkeep will be hitting PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, on October 1, 2019, and later in November on Google Stadia.