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thefirstknife · 2 years

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Narrative, lore and abuse

I want to talk a little bit more about the constantly repeating ideas about how Destiny used to be better, how the lore is constantly being retconned and how writing was better before. Not only are these sentiments entirely factually incorrect (and I'm currently working on a project to document 8 years worth of reviews, opinions and comments about Destiny to show that no, people really didn't enjoy vanilla D2 or D1 as much as they think they did); the sentiments about lore, supposed retcons and mistakes as well as ideas that it used to be better and that original visions were better are all ignoring a very real and very serious troubled past that came with working at Bungie over the years.

Specifically, I think a lot of people forgot about this article. It's an in-depth review into the hostile work culture and crunch at Bungie, focusing mostly on the troubles that the narrative team went through. The snide comments about how Bungie doesn't know their own lore and how they don't pay attention to details and how they changed certain things over time really ring as petty and hollow when they're put into context of what the employees were going through. I want to remind people.

This article was also not debunked by Bungie and they instead acknowledged it and apologised. In case there are people who think that these devs were exaggerating their reports. They did not.

To start:

There is seemingly no better microcosm for Bungie's historic, company-wide cultural troubles than its narrative team, which has experienced toxic leadership, issues with crunch, and at times unmanageable separation between ideas of ‘Old Bungie’ and ‘New Bungie’ culture, and more — all within the last five or six years.

The narrative team had it worst. This basically plagued the entire development of Destiny.

Several sources spoke of a narrative team lead from that time who appeared to suffer massive burnout during the project, creating an increasingly toxic work environment for others on the team, enough so that team members kept a countdown of days since his last "explosion" on a whiteboard. Many people I spoke to were familiar with a story of him throwing a chair at a window because he felt others were ruining his creative vision of the game.

And:

Some sources who had encounters with him during this later period said that he would frequently issue narrative direction despite no longer being a senior team member, and would become angry when he felt the Destiny 2 writers were deviating from his original vision for Destiny 1. One source told a story of him yelling at her over the phone so aggressively that she was brought to tears, and she subsequently refused to be on phone calls with him without a third party present.

I want people to really read this and commit it to memory. A narrative lead was so toxic that it led to actual physical violence. A narrative lead that was physically explosive over people "ruining" his creative vision of the game. I want us, as a fandom, to truly read this with full understanding that maybe, just maybe, when current employees are changing or "retconing" lore, they are doing it to remove all traces of a person who caused them real trauma and abuse.

What amounts to funny little lore tabs for us to pore through, it's very likely a reminder of abuse to the employees who are writing it. If they want to make minor changes to distance themselves from someone who abused them, I am happy for them if they do it, even if that leads to minor inconsistencies in my lore. The wellbeing of another human is more important than a "retcon" in a fictional story.

I would rather a story change than have "the original" coming from a toxic abusive asshole that is actively making the lives of everyone on the writing team miserable. I frankly don't care about his original vision for Destiny. I don't believe it was anything good.

More under for length. It's a lot.

Writers wouldn’t learn about changes to their work until after voice lines had already been recorded.

Absolutely insane that this is what the writers had to deal with. Yes, of course there are mistakes and issues, especially in the early days of Destiny 1 when the crunch was worse and Activision was forcing them to release new DLCs and forcing them to switch focus to the sequel.

This highlights the issue of people using older lore as proof of retcons. What if these mistakes and inconsistencies that we're seeing are a result of crunch and decisions being made away from the writing team? A lot of old lore could be the actual mistakes that are now being fixed. People tend to prioritise what was written first as some sort of gospel, ignoring all of these well publicised issues that we know Bungie was going through.

The other way around could be true. Old lore, things that were written first, were mistakes due to the disruptive workplace that these devs were struggling with and they didn't have time to double check before their work was shipped off to recording and publishing. Perhaps these people are using this time away to correct some of these mistakes that never should've been released in the state they were released in.

This absolutely makes sense due to the report of an employee that didn't want to stay anonymous. Cookie Hiponia started working at Bungie in 2016 as a contractor and became a full-time employee in 2019. In her words:

Hiponia recalled that when she first stepped in, Bungie hadn't had a lot of editing oversight on the Destiny franchise, and had not previously focused very much on its story, consistency, or continuity. That led to a leadership that appeared to operate without normal professional boundaries. As Hiponia puts it, "They just had a bunch of people who wrote things and kind of had the run of the place."

For years, during entire D1 and early D2, there was apparently no editing oversight, the story wasn't focused on properly and especially they did not care enough about consistency and continuity. Basically, top guys were making things up on the fly and treating the game's story as their personal sandbox. We should be taking 6-7 year old lore with a grain of salt instead of treating is as superior. An actual developer came out publicly to tell people that Bungie did not care about the story, consistency and continuity at the time.

More on hell working conditions:

One leader from earlier in this period was described by one of our anonymous sources as a "sexist nightmare" who yelled in meetings, and would throw papers across tables. Multiple people told us he would frequently rewrite things at the last minute, often on his way to voice recording sessions.

One lead frequently made sexist remarks, but also complained about "reverse sexism" and on at least one occasion made homophobic remarks to a queer colleague. He would openly mock his team members’ ideas in meetings then play his mockery off like a joke, and would frequently take credit for work others had done.

A third narrative lead was called a "callous, hierarchical, authoritarian, incurious, cruel leader" by one anonymous source. ... Others recalled that he frequently insulted people who stood up for themselves, including publicly dressing down the narrative team after they accommodated a last-minute request and asked that such a rush not happen again. On another occasion, he separated and cornered an employee who stood up to him to yell at them. Multiple sources say he also regularly made racist remarks...

Cutting off that racist remark, you can check it out yourself in the article if you want the specifics. I am copying the article directly because I have a feeling not many have read it and not many would if I just posted the link without highlighting these parts.

Those close to the team describe its members working 60, 70, 80, even 100 hour weeks during some expansions, frequently with no breaks in between crunch periods. One team member crunched while so sick they were unable to type, and had to have someone else type for them while they dictated.

People working in these conditions cannot make a coherent story across many years of development and across multiple different teams that were being treated no better than cattle. The fact that there was any kind of a story in Destiny at the beginning is a miracle to be honest so the fact that there are inconsistencies and mistakes is more than expected.

Furthermore, when Bungie decided to stop the crunch, they didn't extend any help to the writing them:

Another source said that the team had been told not to crunch as part of a growing studio push to eliminate the practice — the idea was that the studio would simply cut features if crunch was the only way to get them done. However, many of the writers felt they had been backed into a corner after the painful release of Destiny 2’s first DLC expansion, Curse of Osiris.

This was an incredibly difficult time for the narrative team:

Curse of Osiris' story had been lambasted on Reddit, with a few female narrative team members being singled out by the community for harassment, death threats, and vitriol. Our sources say these women didn't receive support inside the studio or from the community team for what they were going through, and multiple sources were aware of one member of leadership still at the studio who emailed Reddit comments about these women to other company leaders in a seeming bid to tear down the narrative team because players didn't like the story.

The same leader is also said to have been dismissive during a meeting about the controversy, explaining that no one should be worried because they were just going to bring back the Destiny 1 writing team to solve everything.

Ah yes, because the writing in D1 was just splendid and did not have any issues whatsoever /s. This is already showing the rose-tinted glasses of the "good old days" that apparently plagues not just the community, but the actual developers as well. D1 was lambasted on release, especially for lackluster story, and continued to be lambasted for pretty much every DLC. These first two DLCs were an especially huge subject of crunch, as this article details, they still weren't done up to a month before release. Incredibly in-depth article about how much the game sucked during Dark Below. This also discusses how incredibly bad lore delivery was at the time, with everything being relegated to cards that can only be read on the website.

These are just a few articles I collected during my deep dive into 8 years worth of Destiny's existence. It's an incredibly long task to go through up to 400 pages of content on every website that wrote about Destiny. So I'm sure there are more and even harsher criticisms of Destiny at the time, especially if I deep dove into reddit or Youtube. I am putting this excerpt to illustrate how wrong the claims of supposed greatness at release are. Even some of the devs had this perception, skewed by their own egos and ideals of importance that ended up harming and abusing the entire narrative team.

And let's not forget the community's involvement here as well. The criticisms we post online are seen by devs. That doesn't mean that criticism shouldn't be posted, but maybe it should be posted in a more humane way. The narrative team shouldn't be getting death threats over this.

Because of these comments and reviews and the reception that the narrative team got even from inside the company (especially if these writers were women or people of colour or queer), they just continued to crunch:

As a result, the narrative team was afraid of what would happen if it shipped something else that appeared to the community to be incomplete or not up to standard. So they continued to crunch, some of them going so far as to hide the overtime from their leads so they wouldn’t enforce story cuts.

Crunch was exacerbated by the constant need for revisions and last-minute changes, often worsened by constant conflicts over who had control of the story.

Worst of all:

Some of Bungie's old guard were especially precious about the vision of Destiny 1, and reluctant to change anything about the tone, characterizations, or direction of the story as the game moved into Destiny 2 and its subsequent expansions. This was especially frustrating for the team in cases where that vision had never been explicitly defined in the game or elsewhere, but only existed as ideas in the heads of people who no longer worked in narrative.

This is absolutely horiffic. And this sort of a sentiment is the same type of a sentiment that some portions of the fandom also exhibit. The utter mystification and glorification of some imaginary version of D1, treating it as a holy relic that cannot be touched, changed, altered, developed or evolved. This is the death of storytelling. Stories and characters have to change and evolve over time, especially if we're talking about a live service game that is supposed to go on for a decade.

Even worse, a lot of this were things that just existed in someone's head, were never properly communicated to others and were never established as things that are important or that should be taken as important going forward. All in all, what this tells me, is of a narrative team with leaders who are driven entirely by their self-inflated egos, who treated the game as their personal project, who abused, neglected and demeaned a group of people they were in charge of and who were especially nasty to those they thought of as inferior to them; women, people of colour, queer people.

Knowing that, I don't want to know or engage with their "original" ideas for Destiny. And I don't blame the writing team for wanting to scrub their influence away as much as possible. As a matter of fact, I commend them. I hope every aspect of this toxic crap is thoroughly removed even if it results in the entire rewrite of established lore.

This next bit is for people who want more cutscenes and who think that cutscenes are more important than written lore. This is how cutscenes were being made:

Another issue was with the development of cinematics, which were considered a prestige project. Largely written separately from the main writing team in a "star chamber," the cinematics team frequently tried to operate independently from the main narrative team, resulting in disconnects between established lore, planned quest narratives, and major story beats. The cinematic team’s decisions, Hiponia and others recalled, would override decisions made by the narrative team, forcing last-minute rewrites and more crunch.

Personally for me? Until we know that this sort of an ideal is removed entirely, I would rather we never receive another cutscene ever. I would rather get 20 weblore pieces.

Next paragraphs details how much these leads were fighting against inclusivity and diversity and how much the rest of the writing team (that mostly consisted of marginalised groups) had to fight tooth and nail to get inclusive stories told. We owe everything to these people. We owe them all of our great stories about women, inclusion of characters of colour in important positions and the opportunity for them to be big parts of the story, LGBT+ content and incredibly well-handled stories portraying stuff like trauma.

Under all this stress, toxicity and abuse, these passionate people were still fighting, often risking their jobs, to give us these stories and characters. I want people to keep that in mind the next time they even slightly think of calling it queerbaiting. Queer people weren't getting called slurs and being abused every day at Bungie for years for some fans to call their stories queerbaiting.

Despite their best efforts, these toxic leads who had more power still managed to push stories with negative stereotypes. Some low-tier employees can only do so much against big name cishet white dudes who more or less own the company.

In all of these situations, the members of the writing team who fought for change would routinely be told they were difficult to work with, not supportive enough of their leaders, or were aggressive or abrasive and needed to be better at taking criticism.

This bit also details the absolute uproar that Bungie and Activision made when writers decided to give Devrim a husband. I want people to apprecite just how much of a change has happened since, especially if they dare talk about how things were better under Activision. We would not have a fraction of LGBT+ rep under them. This also goes to everyone calling it a "retcon" that Saint-14 and Osiris are lovers because in the "good old lore" they weren't. Except they were. The writers just couldn't say it. The leadership lost their minds of Devrim saying he has a "partner." Not even openly saying "husband." Just "partner." That's how bad it was.

For comparison, today we have entire lore pieces of Devrim and Marc having dinner, and Devrim helping Saint deal with the trauma of almost losing Osiris. Things changed, for the better. So I am not sure why some would rather we go back to before.

Bungie obviously makes mistakes. They made mistakes before and they make them now. Sometimes stories change, direction changes, ideas change, sensibilities change. Sometimes someone makes a decision to take the story into another direction and it requires ignoring or reworking something previously established. These are all normal things that happen when writing anything, including books, TV shows, movies and so on.

But in this case, with how Bungie was handling narrative and how the narrative leads were treating employees? These aren't just normal mistakes and changes. A lot of these mistakes are due to the overworked and abused employees who had to crunch under people who would demean them and abuse them to the point of mental distress and physical injuries. People working under those conditions will make mistakes, especially when the leads are literally circumventing their writing and making changes to the writing on the way to recording sessions.

The fact that there's any coherence at all is a miracle. And then we get fans nitpicking irrelevant details that are easy to mistake even when you're not being abused by your boss while working 100 hours per week, let alone when you are. Think about how those employees feel when we nitpick stuff that they made while they were actively being abused at work every day.

This isn't a defence of Bungie having narrative mistakes. Bungie failed these employees that they were supposed to care for. It has since become evidently better, but the cost is there. Many lost their jobs and their security and health dealing with these working conditions and this needs to be embedded in the mind of every fan who wants to nitpick something written 5 years ago.

And ultimately, yes, perhaps writers that are still there want to actively change the story to remove all traces of leadership that was pushing a certain narrative. Perhaps that's annoying to us, the players and lore enjoyers. Perhaps we hate seeing certain details change in front of our eyes. Perhaps we hold dearly a detail from 2015 that has since been retconned out of the story. Perhaps someone thinks that Destiny's story was the best during D1 and that everything else that's happening now is a retconned crap.

Then re-read this article again and consider that these stories were made under inhumane working conditions. And if you value fictional story details over the wellbeing of real humans, then it's time to reasses your values. To me personally, I am immediately put off from the way those stories went when I know how they were made and what was the cost. I still appreciate then, but I will not scrutinise irrelevant details being changed or mistakes being fixed years after they were first made while the workers could quite literally physically not type from exhaustion.

I first and foremost rely on new lore and always will. It was made with less abuse and with more employees of sound mind, as well as with marginalised groups not being demeaned and shut down. Bungie is currently very obviously and clearly taking the story much more seriously and are aware of how important it is for Destiny's success. Are things now perfect? Probably not! But even those that were previously abused have said that things changed for the better and that there is hope.

Most of the new lore is also repeatedly going back to explain and rework some of the older stuff which can, yes, cause things to change. I don't mind, not with the context of this article looming over our heads. As I said before, people tend to emphasise the importance of stuff written first as proof of changes which ignores the very real possibility of stuff written first to have been written wrong and new rewrites being used to correct that information to what the narrative should've been from the start.

Are there genuine mistakes? Of course. Not every mistake is the consequence of abuse. Sometimes they are just mistakes. They exist in every writing. Don't take them too seriously, especially if they are about some incredibly niche detail that doesn't change the story either way.

However, please keep in mind how much crap the writing team for Destiny went through. Allow them to breathe, allow them to make mistakes, allow them to choose to change things that remind them of their abusers.

And when you're reminiscing about "good old days" of D1 or early D2, remember the conditions under which they were made. It was not a good time for the employees in any department and the fandom glorification of that time can be incredibly painful and defeating to the devs, especially those that belong to marginalised groups.

While you had immense fun at 16 playing D1, hundreds of people were undergoing the worst time of their life trying to maintain the game while being abused 80 hours a week. I'm not asking for people to stop thinking about how much fun they had at the time; just to put things into perspective and to recognise that this is the work of nostalgia. I had fun playing vanilla D2 as well, but I can simultaneously recognise that this was not a good time for Destiny, I would never want to go back to that time and I especially don't want to shittalk developers into going back to that work schedule only to deliver inferior products. I don't want my entertainment to be soaked in blood.

This especially goes for the lore fandom. We almost always talk about the pvp toxicity and sometimes pve toxicity, but rarely touch on the toxicity of the fandom that treats the story as some esoteric construct that doesn't involve a human cost to be made. Are changes annoying? Sure thing. When in doubt, use the most recent information. That's it. Pondering ancient lore can be fun, to a certain extent. At some point, you have to let it go.

There are still many pieces of lore that have been the same for years (my recent post about the Books of Sorrow is one example), but banging your head against the wall about some niche detail from D1 Y1 is usually pointless. In most cases it's a detail that doesn't change anything. In a lot of cases, it simply reflects an in-universe confusion about some information. Unreliable narrators are everywhere in Destiny; characters are biased or they lack knowledge or they interpret things wrong.

The setting is specifically set up in that way. The Collapse wiped away so much knowledge and context so people are sometimes wrong. This is explored in a really over-the-top and funny way in the Festival of the Lost lore where a Cryptarch misinterprets what a "fourth-grade researcher" means.

There is not a single omniscient narrator in Destiny lore. Everyone has their own biases and convictions and limitations of knowledge. Sometimes they will contradict each other by design. Not to mention the amount of complex and secretive characters that are deliberately not telling us everything, such as Rasputin, The Nine, Elsie or Mara Sov. Or the Eliksni who are a displaced and fragmented people that lost much of their own history and often work against each other and have varying perceptions of who they should be as a people. There will be conflicting information regarding these characters and stories.

On top of all that, there will always be a human element present. Writers will make mistakes even on their best days working under the most favourable conditions. So keep in mind what writers went through at Bungie. Not for Bungie's benefit, but for the benefit of largely marginalised people who, despite everything, fought for their voices to be heard and present in the game we love now.

#destiny 2 #bungie #lore #long post #taking the seasonal downtime to address some of the more meta stuff in regards to the lore and fandom #i think this is really important overall. i think too many people forgot about this article or didn't fully understand its gravity #i've been very careful with how i engage with stuff from this time ever since this article #things were bad. especially for the narrative team.#they most likely know about all of the mistakes that we are nitpicking. trust me. they most likely know #i'm also heavily put off from people who celebrate early destiny days ever since this article #100% the same vibes of people who talk about some mystical time before when things were 'better'#for whom?#every woman and person of colour and queer people were suffering. i don't want to celebrate their suffering #the only thing worth celebrating is their strength to keep fighting and that they eventually prevailed #they are allowed to change the story that their abusers were pushing in any way they want imo

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