Bungie/Activision is kind of the bad guy in all of that.General Tacticus wrote:If you would actually do some research instead riding the "everything new sucks" bandwagon, you would know that most everything you just said there was very inaccurate:3371-Alpha wrote:-destiny-
The original story was abandoned because the creative director (Jason Jones) and other leadership thought it was awful. The words "campy" and "simple" were how they described it. The next year was spent doing catch-up, as they had to rebuild the campaign from near scratch without a complete writing team (the lead left to work on Halo 5). This was revealed by an anonymous employee who did an interview with kotaku a while back.
The Taken king was the first development cycle they had where someone didn't fuck up, and I think it turned out excellently.
O'donnell was fired after a dispute over music rights, and he started harassing his co-workers(the court documents from his dismissal state that pretty clearly)
Joe Staten was in charge of writing the story. His writing always tends to be campy and cliche. Considering this, Bungie should have never let him write the story if they didn't want it to be awful. They fired him when he didn't want to change the story. And yes, he was fired. The official statement was that he "left to pursue other creative projects", but that's just corporate speak for "we're firing you but letting you save face by letting you quit". I personally think Joe got overprotective of his story and thought his status as a "Grizzled Ancient" would give him some pull, but when your company consists of 500+ employees and just got bought by Activision then the fact that you've been around since Marathon 2 doesn't mean jack shit anymore.
As for Marty O'Donnell, Bungie was definitely the one behaving badly. The court even sided with Marty when he sued Bungie/Activision for wrongful termination (Marty got all the rights back to his music, and I believe he has a seat on Bungie's board of directors now). Here's a youtube video where someone talks about that (he's pretty angry at Bungie). Basically, Marty did all this music for Destiny, and then none of it was getting used in the game. And, Bungie was refusing to release it in any way, shape, or form. So they were just burying all his hard work (hours of composition); it's understandable why he'd be upset.
And that's just two big names in Bungie. Imagine how Bungie was treating it's other employees who aren't publicly well known and who aren't fan favorites, but who Bungie considered to be "making trouble".
It definitely feels like there was a lot of internal conflict after the Activision deal, and so the New Bungie was trying to get rid of older, influential employees so they could control the direction of the project better. Except they did a shit job directing and producing the project:
The kotaku article you mention reveals a lot of ineptitude and shitty behavior on the direction and production side of things. The level designers didn't even have proper software to do their work; if you moved a single rock it would take hours to re-render the entire level just to check the change you made.