Forgive my pessimism.

Even if they turn Marathon into a game with more mainstream appeal, the marketing budget that will be required to get people interested in it again is going to be astronomical.

I want it to succeed. It's just hard to see a path forward from where I'm sitting. Regardless, my condolences go out to the many, many people impacted by today's layoffs.

Welp, right after I made a callback in my last post, lol.

According to Jason Schreier, Truman is out following the layoffs, and word is that Poria Torkan (formerly VP of Operations) is the new lead of what remains.

‘Remains’ is an accurate word to describe Bungie at this point.

I've found the (myriad) post-mortems floating around X/Reddit/here interesting and, as someone who's been mostly checked out since D1, educational.

I have thoughts and speculations but first I'd like to know: how do (and did) people receive Destiny 1? I remember even then that people had the same sort of "this sucks but I'm playing anyway" impulsion that I'd say has characterized the Destiny 2 fan communities. And yet D1 must have been commercially successful in a way D2 wasn't.

Speaking just for myself, I thoroughly enjoyed D1, but I hated that it didn't have a story. And neither did D2 (at least up to the point where I quit playing it). As far as my memory goes, I could have sworn Destiny was supposed to have a story, but they forced out Joseph Staten or something along those lines and scrapped a ton of what the game was supposed to do.

At the same time, even though it wasn't perfect, multiplayer was a lot of fun. I never really tired of Crucible, and I enjoyed doing things with whoever I was playing with. The raids were the best part of the game, especially having done all of them blind to start with others who also went in blind. Oh, and Trials of Osiris was an awesome time. I'm pretty sure D1 was a huge success and was printing money for a while there.

D2 felt soulless and like it was just going through the motions. A lot of the clever Crucible map design and fun seemed to be missing from the sterile maps in D2. The lack of story to the game also didn't help. I ducked out when it became apparent that they weren't going to really improve on the in-game economy, grinding, and total disrespect for players' time. HOWEVER, I was under the impression that D2 also printed money for years and years before eventually running into issues later on. I have no sources for this that I can readily point to for what I just said about D1 and D2, just strictly going off of what I'm remembering from back then.

If the fault for the layoffs the last few years is with "management", what changed? And for the people who believe the "soul" of Bungie escaped long ago and what remains is a corporate husk, was that soul present in D1?

I don't know if changed is the right word, but Pete Parsons was a disaster. Too much for me to want to go into here. But I believe the soul was present in D1, particularly with how Joseph Staten's vision (among many others who had been around for the decade+ prior) helped to shape and craft a lot of it (though a lot of that seemingly being thrown out), and Luke Smith at least managing the raids and that whole process. And story or no story, the lore and Grimoire were absolutely top notch imo.

Which leads me to Marathon (which I'll post about separately). In classic Bungie fashion, the game was in development and apparently had to get scrapped or almost entirely reworked into something else. And although it may have bombed with the public at large and does have its problems, I think the game is great and filled with a lot of soul and character. But after all of these layoffs, including to some of the Marathon team, who knows what even that future holds.

D1 was received pretty poorly. There were groups angry because they wanted Bungie to make a new version of the franchise they were playing before and mad at the new thing for dooming the old thing. It was describes as being far too complex to have any mass appeal. There were media stories about the whole game needing to be scrapped last minute and re-built compromised and not having enough time to make a "full game". There was controversy about not keeping promises about what the game would be from earlier demos. There were pundits talking about how a huge tech company had given Bungie so much money that it would be the rope that hanged them.

You may have noticed I'm drawing some parallels. Nothing is exactly the same, and the difference in both the power of online malcontents and the absolute scale of the companies and finances involved obviously make it different.

As for comparing D1 to D2, I'm not even sure it's useful to try. The time scales are so different and Activision's role, and the number of players and even the fundamental vision of what the destiny franchise is and what it would mean for it to be successful all changes so very much over that decade plus. There are lots of stories about bad management at Bungie, and I'm not an expert (partly because most times I try to learn I end up reading a screed about "stolen" content and a rich guy buying sports cars), so I'll leave that part unanswered here.

D1 was the abusive spouse you stayed with because the sex was absolutely incredible.