For ‘Destiny 2,’ Bungie Focuses On Improving Storytelling

For Destiny 2, Bungie appears to be focusing on improving the storytelling from the original game, Destiny.

Destiny could have been an epic, a story dramatically unfolding over the years the game has been out. However, a lackluster campaign with short, uninspired writing has flawed an otherwise incredible game. Many players have expressed dissatisfaction with how Bungie handled Destiny and its story, but Bungie seems to be making an effort to improve the tale of the Traveler and Guardians with Destiny 2.

There are several job openings on the Bungie website featuring a number of leadership positions covering the narrative aspect of the game. It looks like Bungie is creating an entire department focused on creating and improving the story and lore of the Destiny universe for when Destiny 2 comes out.

Instead of the current model, where Destiny story updates tend to be a bit far between, the updated model appears to feature both large and small content additions for the story.

The key to that claim is the differentiation between two of the listed jobs, narrative director and live narrative director.

According the official Bungie Career page, the narrative director “will be responsible for directing the storytelling efforts for major Destiny releases.”

The live narrative director job opening “will direct the storytelling efforts for regular, small-scale Destiny releases throughout the calendar year.”

Additionally, the Destiny 2 ND will focus on supporting what Bungie calls “Game Pillars,” while the LND will focus on reinforcing the “Release Pillars.” It can be assumed that Destiny’s “Game Pillars” are more of an overarching theme for the entirety of Bungie’s game while the “Release Pillars” focus on an individual packet or small-scale release that will accompany each of the major Destiny releases.

Bungie’s Destiny 2 narrative department looks like it may have a lot of people working for it as well.

According to a post on NeoGAF, “If we interpret “medium-sized group” as 5-10 people and assume a 1 producer per 10 staff member ratio, we’d get about 50-100 people. It’s possible Bungie considers 3 people to be a medium sized group, and that they have one producer per every 5 employees, but I’m going to assume they’re working under more standard conditions, or at least the conditions suggested by the credits listing for Destiny 1.”

Destiny was hyped for months before release, and many players were extremely excited during the early beta for those who preordered the game. However, reality failed to meet up with expectations, and some players had issues with the expansions.

An Uproxx writer commented that “Activision and Bungie have quietly been cutting off players who can’t or won’t upgrade, and a quick poke around the game’s servers confirm as much.” This in reference to the Destiny expansion The Taken King.

Another issue that Bungie may face is that Destiny 2 is supposed to launch later this year. This is not a whole lot of time to implement any significant narrative changes, especially if it requires map, character, model, or physics work on the programming side for Bungie devs.

Gamingbolt points out, “On one hand, this sounds like good news- it seems that the studio is eager to avoid the egregious mistakes in storytelling with the first game. On the other, this game is apparently nine months away from release- isn’t it too late to be hiring people to patch up the game’s storytelling at this stage? Shouldn’t this have been something they should have been doing before?”

Destiny 2 is expected to be released on Xbox One, PS4, and PC. The PC version alone will get a fair number of new players who missed out because Destiny was never released for PC.

So what are your thoughts on the new storytelling direction Bungie looks like they are taking for Destiny 2? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below!

[Featured Image by Dani-MIB/Flickr/Cropped and Resized/CC BY-SA 2.0]