The development of Destiny 2 has been taking place from home for about three weeks due to the novel coronavirus. A Bungie manager now explains how the studio is coping with the crisis and what impact it will have on the studio.
On March 5, Bungie announced that Destiny 2 is now being developed from home. Now, the operations manager explains how the transition was managed and what effects it will have on Destiny 2.
Who is speaking? The Chief Operating Officer of Bungie, Patrick O’Kelley, speaks with IGN. He is the operations manager in the company and is responsible for the organizational flow of operations.
O’Kelley has been at Bungie since 2008, was the executive producer for Destiny 1, and has since advanced further in management.
This is how Bungie learned about the virus: O’Kelley states that Bungie began to address the virus earlier than elsewhere. They were warned by their Chinese partner NetEase.
Following this, O’Kelley engaged with the virus. In Washington state, where Bungie is located, there were early cases. The operations manager oriented himself by observing what was happening in Italy to learn from it.
By mid-February, all studio employees were informed about the situation so that they would not be caught off guard.
In hindsight, O’Kelley sees this as an important turning point:
The big thing for us was to tell people from the outset: This is serious, folks. You need to stop what you were doing yesterday immediately and focus on resolving this issue.
Patrick O’Kelley
Not everyone needs to be concerned with managing the transition to remote work, but there needs to be a small group of people focused on solving the problems and willing to put in hard work, O’Kelley says.
This was Bungie’s advantage: The studio operates out of Seattle, a cold region of the USA. It is only 160 kilometers to the Canadian border.
Therefore, Bungie has always been prepared to work from home for a while.
We live in an earthquake zone, we have snow days, all these things. So there is a fundamental readiness that we need to be able to work from home.
Patrick O’Kelley
Many employees had already set up VPNs and networks and were prepared to work from home for a short period.
Hundreds of powerful laptops set up and distributed to employees
This is what Bungie did for remote work: O’Kelley states that they provided hundreds of “extremely powerful laptops.” These are “developer-grade” laptops: proper workstations that developers can work from home with.
This was one of the hardest things: literally setting up several hundred of these machines so that people can take them home.
During this phase, the IT department was extremely important, having carried the company on their shoulders during this time.
Google Stadia also proved to be a solution during this time. It is difficult to conduct large playtests with a lot of bandwidth, but Google worked with Bungie, and it seems to be a super solution for the company.
How will the coronavirus affect Destiny? O’Kelley is confident that the coronavirus will not have a major impact on Destiny. The goal is “absolutely” to meet the 2020 objectives. On the operational side, everything is set up so that the team can achieve the goals.
Some things cannot be done, such as motion capture recordings, but Bungie is agile and wants to deliver absolutely.
The goal for Bungie is that players of Destiny 2 do not notice the turmoil on their side. Additionally, Bungie wants to help other studios during the crisis.
What the goals for Destiny 2 are in 2020 and how it will continue, we do not know at the moment. However, there are some data mining findings that suggest interesting twists ahead.
