Destiny 2is practically here, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stories aboutDestiny 1still worth talking about. This one comes from the early days ofDestiny, when it was still in development at Bungie before anyone outside the company had seen it. According to one of the veteran members of Bungie who helped birth the idea forDestiny, the game originally was going to be very similar toOverwatch.
That is according to the bookBlood, Sweat, and Pixelsby Kotaku news editor Jason Schreier who spoke to Jaime Griesemer. Griesemer was a longtime employee of Bungie who worked on all theHalogames and had a hand in helping to createDestiny. He says that an early iteration ofDestiny(at that time working under the codename Project Tiger) strongly resembled Blizzard’s game that was also in development called Project Titan.Titan was an MMOthat would later be scrapped by Blizzard but then resurrected in the form ofOverwatch.
Griesemer told Schreier that he made the connection between the two games when he visited Blizzard:
“I went to Blizzard for a while, and played Titan, and I was like, ‘Holy s***, you guys are working on the same game, down to character classes.”
Clearly, bothTiger/Destinyand Titan/Overwatchwould become very different games before they finally shipped, but at least early on the two games shared some common ground. Griesemer says that at that time Bungie hadn’t settled on whetherDestinywould be a first- or third-person game yet.
Griesemer went on to say that he was the one who came up with the idea for Bungie to make a shared-world shooter, but admits that there were multiple complete resets of the game. It seems that each reset tookDestinycloser to Bungie’sHaloroots, which Griesemer says he was hoping to avoid, and which ultimately led to Bungie letting him go from the company. Griesemer went on to be a lead designer forinFAMOUS: Second Sonand then co-founded the indie studio Highwire Games, which is currently working on the PSVR title,Golem.
Destinyis available now on PS4 and Xbox One.
