Last Week was the final week for Bungie lead sandbox designers, Josh Hamrick and Jon Weisnewski. The separation seems to be on the best of terms, with both of them having left to take a break and pursue other creative challenges. Career changes are pretty normal in the gaming industry, and are generally seen as a good thing for developers.
They get to experience different team dynamics, and exercise different creative muscles. Especially for Jon, who had been at Bungie for 12 years. They will be missed, and we all wish them the best in their future endeavors, but it begs the question; what’s going on? Why did both of them leave at the same time? And why are there murmurs that this has anything to do with the Crucible?
The Path Walked
Josh and Jon were both lead designers on the Destiny Sandbox; the game’s system that’s responsible for everything from weapon damage and perks to enemy behavior. Essentially, the system responsible for how you interact with the world in regards to movement and combat. Anytime you’d see patch notes featuring buffs and nerfs, that’s the sandbox.
A good example is the upcoming Arc Week, where they are implementing some pretty insane sandbox changes to the three arc subclasses. In some instances, they’re increasing damage potential by over 300%. But, it didn’t start out that way.
Josh and Jon were both pretty avid proponents for the launch version of Destiny 2. Back then the game was much slower-paced, with an emphasis on team play. Abilities were far less effective compared to Destiny 1. The most hard-hitting one-and-done supers were converted to roaming supers, exchanging the DPS potential for a more tactical feel. Then of course, there was double primaries, but we’ve talked about that before.
With Josh and Jon leaving, many are drawing the conclusion that Bungie must be stripping the Crucible out of Destiny for its future releases. Now while this was quickly thwarted by Bungie officials, its not hard to see why people were drawing the correlation. The biggest topic of discussion in regards to sandbox always comes back to how balancing the game for the Crucible is holding back the potential of the PvE side of the game.
Feel Free to Be O.P.
In games like The Division, you can stack bonuses to some pretty ridiculous levels. In The Division, the endgame is essentially you trying to maximize things like critical damage and damage against elites by numbers like 100% or more. In Anthem, I’ve seen weapon damage be increased by different pieces of gear by sometimes over 500%.
Anthem has no PvP so it can get as crazy as it wants. Although, you can argue for them to cap certain things so that it doesn’t become laughably easy. The Division combats this with something called Normalizing, where it essentially evens out levels and significantly lowers the effectiveness of mods while in those modes.
Destiny has always had the same sandbox balancing for both worlds. For years, many have called for the balancing to be split up, creating essentially two separate sandboxes for them to maintain, each with very different goals. And while that would solve the issue, I see the value in maintaining a single sandbox. Bungie wants to you to have the same combat experience in PvE and PvP. Gambit comes to mind. A mode like Gambit wouldn’t be anywhere as good without a sandbox that works for all modes of the game.
Having said that, Bungie does have the ability to change certain things for PvP, like buff percentages, base damage numbers; things that will maintain the feel of your weapons and abilities, while keeping them equally viable in PvP. However, lets get back to Josh and Jon.
Lead Sandbox designers, gone. Why could this be? Well sadly, we won’t know for sure, but we can make some safe assumptions.
Literally Unwinnable
The most likely possibility is that they were both becoming fatigued with Destiny’s sandbox. I can’t remember a time where people weren’t complaining about some weapon being overpowered, or being too weak. More often than not, the complaints come from a weapon or ability’s performance in, you guessed it, the Crucible.
So while the game around you is enjoying the success of a launch, you have to endure the onslaught of community feedback about what has gone wrong in the Crucible. They put in tons of work with very little appreciation in return. I’m sure it can become exhausting to deal with day to day, and so I believe they both just wanted change. Which is healthy.
The next possibility is that perhaps Bungie wanted a fresh sandbox team for their next major title. As I mentioned, the next Destiny is rumored to lean more into deeper RPG mechanics, but I think that is simply in relation to things like loot and progression. If it’s one thing Bungie learned from Year 1 of Destiny 2, it’s that Destiny isn’t a slow tactical game. It is ball-to-the-walls action with 10 different effects and explosions going on all the time.
Destiny has had 4 major updates to the sandbox that can be seen as the steps Destiny 2 took to get it to where it is today in regards to the game’s fun factor. Each update was met with high praise by the community because they made your guardians more powerful and more deadly. Bungie would be crazy not to continue down this path, and perhaps that simply wasn’t something Josh and Jon were interested in.
The Fires of The Crucible Will Burn On
Whatever the reason for their departure, a couple things needs to be made abundantly clear: Bungie is working on the next Destiny. They are 100% committed to the Crucible and it’s future. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. This was confirmed several times on Twitter and while on stream, so Crucible fans can rest a little easy. In-fact, community manager DeeJ assured us that the Crucible team was hard at work on “The next evolution of The Crucible”.
While the Crucible has been a pain point of Bungie’s for 5 years now, it is an extremely important part of the Destiny experience. It harkens back to Bungie’s heritage with games like Halo and the multiplayer experience in those games.
However, while the success of Halo truly rests in competitive multiplayer, we’re dealing with a much different landscape today. Deathmatch games are being ditched for Battle Royale games that turns PvP on its head, and somehow succeeds at making looter game mainstream, because lets face it: one of the most addicting parts of Battle Royale is looting your gear.
To B.R. or not to B.R.
One could make the argument that Bungie had inadvertently prepped itself over the past decade to potentially deliver the greatest Battle Royale ever. Just like they dominated PvP 15 years ago by taking what they had developed and plopped it online, you could observe Destiny as them simply getting ahead of the industry yet again. Then turning around and implementing all of that into the ultimate Battle Royale game.
It all sounds great on paper; insane abilities, the most unique spectrum of guns in any game ever, and some of the most incredible level design in the industry. But Battle Royale has some inherent issues that would be hard to tackle in the current setup of the game. Also there seems to be a weird air of negativity towards Battle Royale games.
Although, you can argue that games like Apex Legends are starting to show genuine innovation in the space, and also what Battle Royale can be in the AAA space. I don’t think I would entirely hate a Destiny BR mode, but its also hard to imagine because of how creative Bungie tends to be when they tackle things like this.
Whatever the future of Destiny holds, as long as they lean into the parts of the game that really shine, we may be in for some special stuff in the hopefully not-too-distant future.
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