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Destiny: Design Director Abruptly Leaves Bungie
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Bungie's long time employee and Destiny Design Director Joseph Staten has abruptly left the company. Staten had been employed by Bungie for over 15 years and his farewell note on the official site gives no real hint at his reasons other than wanting to "explore new creative challenges".
We'll keep you posted as this story develops.
Head to Gamasutra for more.
Comments
"When Gamasutra reached out to Destiny publisher Activision for comment on the departure, a representative for the company said it had no comment beyond what was written in the blog post."
This tells me that there was a pretty serious dispute, wonder how long it had been going on for. You don't just suddenly leave your job of 15 years. Wonder what went down?
But we also know that Destiny has been in development for 4 years. Not sure if that was already known, its new to me.
Really?! People aren't catching onto the obvious overly dramatic headlines being used here, to generate some traffic and clicks?
1) Abrupt? Of course not. I'm sure anyone who actually "needed" to know, has known this was coming for months. You know like co-workers, friends and family, as opposed to random internet peeps, and internet "journalists." I doubt it ever occurred to anyone involved that this decision needed to be cleared ahead of time with the "interwebz."
2) Gamasutra chose to take things a step further, claiming that he's left in the "middle" of their latest games development. If thier just in the middle now..... Clearly more verbiage designed to drum up drama and get some clicks.
Actually, that's the normal response you, as press or other outsider, should get from anyone in a company when someone leaves.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Doubtful if this would have much of an impact on Destiny.
Staten was Design Director, and the design phase must be a distant memory by now. The game will probably launch in 6 months' time, it's far too late to make serious design changes at this point.
Some people do take time off from careers for various reasons. If he feels that Destiny will be a success, then he can probably take a few months break, after which he could pick-and-choose his next position.
If anything from learning that the publisher was Activision from this article to me it would be a shock if it didn't have to do with how they wanted to monetize the game, and or pullback on development costs on things like a totally seamless world. Doing this like Borderlands where you can join an open game or create your own game loby, not an actual real persistent world.
Most likely.
Other than that its also known to happen when board of investors want to change gameplay to be more "casual - bulshit" forcing designer to butcher his project ,
he can no longer stand behing the project without compromising himself , so he leaves.
You can "line-up" stock options quite easily, if you have them.
Engineers and high level designers make enough money that they often leave companies with no intention of working for a couple of months so nothing unusual about that, in fact it is more often then not the norm. There is also no reason to believe he got nudged it is a lot of stressful work to bring a game this big to market and if management was directing the final stages of the game in a direction he disagreed with then he may have been un willing or unable to emotionally invest in what it would take to get the final part out the door.
EXACTLY what I think.
Considering Star Citizen just hit 20 million, maybe they were finally able to offer him the contract he was asking for.