It could be more than just corporate reshuffling though, with the move rumoured to be due to delays affecting the next major Destiny game.
Parsons, formerly Bungie's chief operating officer and a studio veteran, will now "be tasked with leading the talented Bungie team as they continue to develop great Destiny experiences. As a team, we celebrated many victories and weathered many storms," Parsons said in an official statement.
I believe that Destiny is a one-of-a-kind experience. I also believe you have yet to see our studio's best work. My new role here at the studio will be entirely focused on fulfilling that promise. The change in leadership comes less than a week after reports Destiny 2 was delayed.
The next core instalment was never officially announced nor named, but a September release was considered an open secret. Bungie and Destiny publisher Activision has repeatedly spoken of a "ten year plan" for the sci-fi shooter series, and had released major content in September over the past two years.
The original Destiny launched in September , while its update The Taken King followed the same month last year, adding a much needed narrative upgrade and mixing gameplay up with a greater focus on super-powered melee weapons.
That latter release hasn't been followed by the same kind of defined content that accompanied the original game, either. While 'core' Destiny had a roadmap of expansion packs -- The Dark Below and House of Wolves -- The Taken King has seen only time-sensitive events and a racing league using the in-game hoverbikes. So, you know, when the stories are about human interaction, they never get old.
To say this in a self-serving way, those are the kinds of games for us. Destiny was an evolution of what we had done before. When we look to the future, not only do we look to a bright and long-term future with Destiny, and the Destiny universe, but also new games. That is super important to us. So, that you have the ability to not only play on console or PC but also to ultimately bring it to your phone, for us, is a pretty big deal.
I think long-term, what we want, because it builds on the concept of Destiny as a platform, is to build that larger, unified community of people who just want to go and share experiences together and extend that out to what we do next. Patrick Dane: Would you say cross-play is a longer-term or shorter-term goal? What we have right now is you can seamlessly move between platforms; any platform instantaneously with your character. We also have cross-generational play with the platforms.
We have actually talked about that. We desire to do cross-play. It is a little more complicated for us, but that work is being done. And, most importantly, which is the thing I said before, Destiny is a community game. Destiny is about the stories that we write together. So, the more that we can consolidate that audience into one larger, unified community, the better it just makes it for everybody. Then, in a longer-term sense, in a more business sense, we desire to make games that are not just other Destiny games, but we definitely — a common denominator will always be this sense of social engagement.
This concept of, we can provide that patina of lore and mythology and fiction and heroes and gods, but ultimately, the best stories are going to be your stories. Patrick Dane: Going back to the culture of Bungie, again, I mostly hear passionate things from Bungie designers and how they enjoy working there. That is not true of everywhere. How do you go about creating a positive development environment? Especially with conversations about crunch going around the industry, how do you go about looking after your team?
Pete Parsons: Well, we have been super fortunate. We learned some painful lessons going all the way back, just for a moment, to Well, with both Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2, we learned some painful lesson as related to crunch and just how hard that can be.
So, one of the things that we want to do is we want to make sure that Bungie as a company is a centre of creative and technical excellence. And, so I think, you know, Destiny is an expression of what happens when people can do their best work. So we try to be our best selves. I come to work because I care deeply about making magical, beautiful things. It is not just me, Jason Jones, the original founder of the company and creator of Halo and Destiny, he feels the same way too.
We see our job as, as a legacy, how do we create that centre of creative and technical excellence. It came out in November. And it came out because of the pandemic, and because of the work that we had to do, and we made that decision and it was not an easy decision. Particularly with the console launches and everything else, that we chose the wellness of our people over the date that people would expect us to launch.
I feel like — well, one, it was the right thing to do, and we would have done it anyway — but you know when you look at the reaction of the community, it was also the right thing for us to do. Particularly as you pointed out, the stories of other teams that are just kind of crashing against the rocks of really, fairly devastating crunch.
So, that is a bunch of other things that we have done just on the backside. But, you know, we bugged out in March. I just am so proud of the work that our IT operations group, and then certainly our creatives team, our ability to move out of the studio and our ability to keep working and our ability to create something fairly magical during the pandemic has been pretty inspiring.
I will give you an example. So, one is we have had extra people wellness days as a result of the pandemic. We have given people extra time. Once again, we are very, very fortunate as a studio in that Destiny, the business of Destiny is absolutely thriving. The IT team has stacked up all… like, they ordered it from a catering company and the catering company has built like packages, not kidding, of jambalaya ingredients.
You drive up and you pull up like they have your name and stuff, and then they give you the packet you go home, and then a chef does it online. It sounds way more expensive than it actually is.
Then we are doing a significant amount of work. We are thinking about what the post-pandemic world looks like. That rethinking of the way we work with people, I believe has significantly opened the aperture for the level of talent, global talent, that we can hire. The level of diversity that we can bring on that may not have been able to relocate to Bellevue, Washington of all places. So, you know, I think in many ways, out of darkness, we have seen some pretty exciting light.
Patrick Dane: Yeah, you guys put out a ViDoc of you all working from home. Pete Parsons: Yeah, I went to the studio for the first time in a few months. And I have this special — we have a — it is interesting… at any moment in time, there are about 20 people inside the studio.
They are the IT operations securities team. Their job is obviously ongoing security, maintenance, and managing our online environment. But they are also quite literally rebooting machines as they crash. But what is also true is that their machines are on and they are running as they VPN into them. I walked into the office early last week and I made it like halfway down the hall before I broke into tears.
Patrick Dane: I assume, there is only going to be so much you can say about this, but going independent from Activision, how did that decision come about and where did that come from? Well, I mean, you are looking at definitely one of the people who did that. I was about as intimately involved in this as anybody else in the company. I think the real thing, and we talk about this a lot, is the desire for creative independence. But it is about the creative freedom to build the worlds that we want to build, that connect people globally, across any platform, and from all walks of life.
That is actually a huge deal for us. So, when you are limited in that way — and once again, I am not going to throw shade at anybody — but when you are limited in that way, it really presents a challenge creatively to a team. So, I am going to tell you the secret sauce to every Bungie game. Are you ready? Patrick Dane: I am. Pete Parsons: The first thing is, build a place where you want to be.
Where you want to spend time in, right? And then you fill that space with a bunch of fun stuff to do. There you go. That is the whole secret sauce around a Bungie game, you now know all of our secrets. And so that is what we did. Patrick Dane: One of the things is it seemed Bungie wanted to commit to Destiny 2 for years to come. Was that part of the decision? Pete Parsons: We love Destiny. I mean, we loved Halo too. We really felt like there was — we wanted to take Destiny in the direction that we kind of always wanted to take Destiny which was more of the continuum.
That was the direction that we wanted to go in. We felt like we were not able to pursue that direction at the level that we wanted to and so we needed to make a change. So, I think you are seeing the fruits of that labour. And, you know, we still have a lot to learn. Oh my gosh, we still have a lot to learn.
But, it is about that creative freedom. You have this open, transparent, ongoing dialogue with the community. And sometimes you kind of look right before you hit the send button. What we want to do is what we are doing right now. Patrick Dane: Can you elaborate a little on those?
So we started about three years ago, Jason and Jonny Ebbert and Zach Russell and a few of us started working on new incubations.
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