Yesterday, Bungie announced some big plans over the next few years, including new offices, new games, and a new leadership team seemingly in charge of branching out the the Destiny 2 universe into other media.
“[O]ne of the primary drivers of Bungie’s expansion is to increase the commitment to the long-term development of Destiny 2, tell new stories in the Destiny Universe, and create entirely new worlds in to-be-announced IPs,” the studio wrote over on its website.
In material terms the expansion includes a big new HQ office that sounds effectively like a mini-college campus, an international office in Amsterdam focused on publishing and marketing, and new people brought on board at the executive and board of directors level, including the appointment of former Viacom CBS president of consumer products, Pamela Kaufman. In aspirational terms, Bungie wants to expand the “Destiny Universe into additional media,” and release a brand new game before 2025. Bungie had previously announced it was working on a new non-Destiny game as part of a $100 million publishing deal with Chinese gaming company NetEase.
Previously synonymous with Halo, Bungie has spent the greater part of the last decade becoming the Destiny company. It seems the independent studio is looking to double-down on that trend while also still developing new projects. Last year, Destiny 2 director Luke Smith announced a multi-year plan to continue the game’s annual expansions rather than working on a Destiny 3, a move that came after the studio finally cut ties with publisher Activision.
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All of this seems very much in keeping with the decade-long vision originally laid out for the first Destiny, which at the time then-Bungie COO (and now CEO) Pete Parsons said was part of trying to turn the IP into gaming’s version of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Destiny’s always been a very cinematic game, with voice talents that have ranged from Peter Dinklage and Gina Torres to Nathan Fillion and Lance Reddick. It seems like the perfect time for the world it’s established to be brought into TV or film, especially as Hollywood races to adapt every video game to fill its bottomless appetite for new content.
DISCUSSION
The notion of novels and comics and whatnot in the Destiny universe is... fine, I guess? (To a certain extent, I never got into the Star Wars EU, and so I’m a little wary of that sort of ‘IP expansion’ in general.) What I’d really like, though, are ‘Destiny Universe’ games that feed back into the progression of the main game, and vice versa. I know that idea will be anathema to all the people that already hate how complex the Destiny economy is, but I say, lean into it: give me a Destiny flight sim, a Destiny tactics game, a Destiny RPG... and have all the systems feed into each other. Give me a handful of currencies that are used across the entire franchise; let me earn legendary shards in the main game I can use to buy spaceship parts in the flight sim, then earn exotic engrams in the flight sim I can use to recruit new heroes in the tactics game, etc. Give me a ‘gaming MCU’, full of interconnected plot beats and character motivations. I will absolutely play the hell out of it.