Following a lawsuit brought against Bungie and Activision by a former employee who was fired prior to the release of the game, new information has come to light about the heavily criticized story and the outcome of the lawsuit.
According to Forbes, a lawsuit brought up against Bungie and Activision, the two powerhouse companies behind the successful but polarizing game Destiny, is settled, and court documents released help to answer questions plaguing the mind of gamers about the story in the game as well.
The lawsuit, brought on by the firing of Marty O’Donnell, a composer who worked on the score for the game, was brought to media attention after he was fired following what he described as a “toxic” relationship with Bungie and Activision. Marty scored many of the games post Halo launch for Bungie and, following his scoring of Destiny, Activision’s marketing team wanted to instead create the score for the trailers. This led to the companies describing Marty’s work attitude as having a lack of engagement and his eventual firing.
In the court documents for the game the questions about the story, which many found to be very lacking coming from the company who created the massively successful Halo franchise, were answered in part. According to the documents, Bungie underwent a massive story overhaul following the firing of Marty. From many testers who were part of the initial testing of the game, it was said that the game on launch was very different from their first encounter to the game.
Initially the game was to be released in September, 2013, but the substantial revision took place in August of the same year, leading to the game being pushed back.
From VentureBeat, “While Destiny was planned for a September 2013 release, the story was substantially revised in August 2013. That pushed the release date back to March 2014. O’Donnell returned to work after a vacation, but the audio team and his supervisor did not consider him to be fully engaged in his work. The release date of the game, meanwhile, pushed back to September 2014. Bungie set in motion a process to terminate O’Donnell.”
With this now in the public light, the question remains about the steps Bungie will take in the future regarding the story and Marty’s new company, Highwire Games.
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