Bungie says it is taking steps “to keep our teams healthier” following a year of Destiny 2 content development that “was starting to wear people down.”
That messaging comes from Bungie Creative Director Luke Smith, who shared the concerns as part of a massive “Director’s Cut” community update this week. In the update, Smith praised the team at Bungie for recently avoiding Destiny‘s history of post-launch “content droughts” and for doing “a great job of providing stuff to do, items to chase, growing fat with strength, et cetera.”
At the same time, though, providing the kind of content promised by Bungie’s Annual Pass system “was harder on the team than we anticipated,” according to Smith:
The scope of what we delivered, the pace that we delivered it, and the overall throughput for Annual Pass takes a toll on the Bungie team. I—and many others—had conversations throughout the year with team members—who had jumped from release to release—about the grind of working on Destiny. Working on the game was starting to wear people down. Here’s an example:
During the annual pass, we invented new, bespoke ways to earn rewards each season. Black Armory had its bounties, Season of the Drifter had the “Reckoning Machine,” Season of Opulence had its Chalice. Each of these mechanics—each with their own lessons—were valuable, but also put the team into an unsustainable development cycle. We needed to develop a more systemic, standardized set of mechanics for progression to keep our teams healthier.
We’re going to take this problem on in [the next year of Destiny 2].
Smith didn’t go into further detail on just how the Destiny team’s workload would be reduced going forward. But it’s not the first sign that Bungie has been scaling back the pace of updates for its workers’ benefit. Back in June, Smith said Bungie was delaying a patch to fix an in-game weapon by a month to help preserve the “work-life balance” of the development team.
Loading comments...
