In Destiny 2, the Director Luke Smith has written a long letter to the players, openly providing insight into the development of Destiny 2. Our author Schuhmann says: He can’t do that because he must keep the most important information secret until summer 2020.
Why I like Luke Smith: I like Luke Smith and the way he talks to players. I feel like he genuinely wants to be someone other than a developer in an ivory tower, far removed from the players, spouting PR nonsense. He’s not someone who thinks everything is awesome; he is someone who says: We really messed up. Someone who also knows how what they do at Bungie comes across and how it is received.
Luke Smith is a gamer who went from being a WoW addict who slept until noon to someone who somehow leads the fate of a huge AAA shooter operated by a cultishly revered studio. You just have to respect that as a gamer.
Even when Luke Smith says things, like “players will throw money at the monitor”, I felt he is authentic and wants to talk to players on equal terms.
Many fans blame Smith for how disastrous Destiny 2 Vanilla was since he was responsible for the title, he did the PR tour in 2017 for Destiny 2. I never saw it that way.
I always felt Smith had to deal with a mess and was a scapegoat for something others had done. But – to his credit – he never tried to offload that blame.
When Smith speaks unfiltered in a live interview, you get the vibe from him that he says what’s on his heart. Although there are topics he strictly blocks and cannot talk about, I feel with Smith: He means everything he says in that moment. Even if he gets into trouble for it later.
Smith wants to speak plainly
That was the new announcement: Luke Smith announced a few days ago that he will write a huge post where he presents himself differently and speaks differently about Destiny 2: an experiment. He wants to be transparent, to show how the development of Destiny 2 is going, how it affects the team, and what lessons Bungie has learned from the past months.
This has raised high expectations.
Yesterday the post was really there, and after Smith emphasized how long it would be, I started to read – but after a few sentences, I felt like “something is off.”
Smith states right at the beginning
- the “Annual Pass” was harder for the team than they thought. The strain was too high and the efforts were not sustainable.
This is my problem with the statement: I completely understand what Smith is saying and how he analyzes it.
But: I miss the context and the circumstances in which these things are said.
The crucial question for me is:
- Is Bungie currently working with the full studio and 800 people on the current “Year Pass” and on Shadowkeep? And then is the annual pass still not “sustainable”?
- Or is Bungie working with a skeleton crew on these things while the core team is already working on Destiny 3 behind the scenes? Then I understand that 3 episodes with different systems per year are not sustainable and must be further optimized.
Are they already working on Destiny 3 or not?
It is completely clear why Bungie cannot answer the question if there will be a Destiny 3 for PS5 and Xbox Scarlett in 2020:
- Bungie wants to continue selling Destiny 2, Shadowkeep, and the next episodes until summer 2020 (until E3 2020).
- The moment Bungie first says “Destiny 3,” Destiny 2 becomes an old game and already in the past, it will sell less.
But for me to understand whether a “development cycle is not sustainable or not,” I need the information on how many percent of the team is actually working on Destiny 2 right now.
Therefore, I feel the thoughts and ideas that Luke Smith shares here are nice and quite informative. But I cannot believe that Bungie is really transparent about what is going on in-house at the moment, even though I like him.
I know that Smith wants to release further parts of his Director’s Cut – but I strongly doubt he will really give us insight into whether
- Destiny 2 is currently the “main project” of the Bungie studio
- or whether the actual focus is already on Destiny 3
and this question would be so important to understand what is really going on at Bungie.
Thus, Smith’s 4000 words remain an interesting analysis; there are some anecdotes, and it’s certainly interesting for fans. But what is really happening at Bungie remains undisclosed.
