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The current era of triple-A games as we know it today was built on the 2010s. Some of these blockbuster titles went away almost as soon as they came, some are still around to this day, others were eventually shelved in favor of spiritual sequels. And then there’s Destiny, Bungie’s sci-fi shooter tangled in a frequent cycle of adventurous promise and annoying disappointment. To know this game is to know what big studios (and the publishers attached to them) have become, for better and for worse.
Before releasing on September 9, 2014 for the PlayStation 3 and 4, Xbox One, and Xbox 360, the original Destiny had a lot of hype. As Bungie’s first game following its 10-year Halo stint and subsequent split from Microsoft, all eyes were on this curious new multiplayer-centric beast. Co-op shooters and MMOs had existed separately before then, but they hadn’t really been blended together in quite this way, let alone on consoles. More substantially, it was a fresh, big property coming into the current generation, and its marketing promised something new and exciting. In that promotional blitz of live-action trailers and frequent hypebuilding, you can see how other triple-A games would follow suit over the years, and that makes it all the more sad that Destiny didn’t fully live up to those dreams.
That’s not to say it’s bad; it was a solid shooter with pretty good combat and decent RPG mechanics under the hood. But it was clear that something had happened, even before players and journalists started digging for information. The story just abruptly ended (and wasn’t terribly engaging in general), the endgame had too much grind, and there could be too much asked of players. But a good foundation goes a long way, and the allure of the future kept players invested enough to see what would come next.
©Bungie Ultimately, that big step came with The Taken King in 2015. The expansion holds a special place in players’ hearts, and laid the greatest groundwork for Destiny as we now know it. Its changes and overhauls were numerous, but its biggest impact was how it rewarded players who stuck around for the long haul. Taken, along with Final Fantasy XIV’s soft reboot A Realm Reborn, are often touted as gold standards of troubled online games that redeemed themselves in the eyes of their respective communities. Without Taken King, Destiny probably doesn’t exist anymore, and with it, the live-service genre ends basically as soon as it begins. Or at the very least, another game takes its place that the industry tries to replicate.
If that sounds hyperbolic, it really isn’t. In the decade since the original Destiny (and especially since its 2017 sequel), there’ve been so many clones or would-be killers: Anthem, First Descendant, Concord, Marvel’s Avengers, Suicide Squad, The Division, Outriders, and more. Some of these were well-received by players, others were not; some I liked and invested a good amount of time in, others I fell off and didn’t really look back. These games mainly focused on replicating Destiny’s “get gun, number go up” loop without understanding that’s only part of the equation. And “misunderstanding” really is what did in many of the games listed here: their developers either had no business making multiplayer games or didn’t want to acknowledge the game whose crown they were clearly coming for, when doing so would’ve been more beneficial to fully understanding what Destiny actually is.
Yes, Bungie made two games with some damn good looting and shooting, and its combat sings when everything clicks together. But you know what else Destiny’s got? A sense of place, and genuine flavor for its setting and characers. It’s got great music and a willingness to embrace its own bullshit. When it’s not having a major supporting character wax poetic about traveling the galaxy with his husband, it’s got a man with tentacles for a face hosting a game show with a cosmic horse he has to double check he’s not hallucinating. Its highs are high in a way that makes it stand out and justify coming back to again and again. By and large, Destiny has done its thing with conviction and gusto. It’s further helped by succeeding in a core area its imitators haven’t: Bungie’s story campaigns feel made with single-player as a priority instead of a begrudging acceptance that a full three or four-person squad isn’t around.
© Bungie/PlayStation Destiny is a game all about power fantasy, and in late 2023, it and its community were hit with a hard dose of reality when Bungie laid off its staff. At the time, it was attributed to waning interest in Destiny 2 and the mixed reaction to its 2023 expansion, Lightfall. Once that crack appeared in the armor, all hopes were laid on this year’s The Final Shape as the saving grace that would let the studio continue making this, its extraction shooter take on Marathon, and remain its own thing from parent company PlayStation. But not long after Shape launched and seemingly hit it off big with the community, another blow came: 220 more developers were cut, Bungie would be more integrated into Sony Interactive’s ecosystem, and Destiny 2 would be getting smaller content going forward. A planned spinoff was scrapped, and long-time staff were now gone as a result of the cuts.
The layoffs and subsequent information we learned felt like a genuine shock since on the surface, it seemed Bungie’s staff had done everything to do right by players with Final Shape. Instead, the expansion shed light on an ugly truth about the studio and the people at the top, to the point that players and ex-Bungie staff were demanding current CEO Pete Parsons step down. The entire games industry has been hit with layoffs since 2023 and reckoning with financial overextending from the early pandemic days, but some of the damage was done well before then, and in response to Destiny’s success. If publishers weren’t actively chasing it with a loot-shooter of their own, they were looking for something that could rake in just as much money trying to challenge fellow big live games Fortnite or GTA Online, or with a hero shooter.
For a series that often yanks players between the spectrum of “it’s over” and “we’re so back,” Destiny may have hit a new peak of the former with recent events. Things will turn themselves around over time, as they always do. But between this and the way live-service games begun to fall more and more out of favor, it feels like the franchise is burning through what remaining revives it has stocked up and taking the studio with it. In a sense, Destiny has ultimately lived up to its original tagline and become a legend for Bungie and the industry as a whole. But how that legend ultimately ends remains as unclear as it did a decade ago when Bungie first shed light on the game.
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