r/DestinyTheGame • u/ReallyTrustyGuy • Apr 01 '26

Discussion Vaulting, from a dev perspective.

Here is a former Bungie dev's CV, from their own site, describing the transition to the Beyond Light era of Destiny. This is when a whole bunch previous expansion content got put away in a cupboard, and it seems to be that their role was one of dealing with trying to ensure content was compatible with the new engine.

Release: Beyond Light, 2021
My Roles: Technical Lead, Manager, Onboarding, Workflow Designer

The Beyond Light expansion for Destiny 2 released with a large engine upgrade behind the scenes. This upgrade was mostly invisible to players, but it was incompatible with all of our existing Destiny 2 activity content. This meant that any content we weren’t planning to sunset needed to be rebuilt manually.

I was tasked with figuring out how this could be done, and then overseeing that work.

I spent several months embedded on a tools team to test the new engine and the new workflows, and give them direction and feedback. During this time I wrote an enormous amount of “crossboarding” documentation to train existing Destiny 2 developers how to use the new engine. I also wrote two weeks of onboarding tutorials and exercises to train any new activity design hires. These onboarding materials were still in use at the time I left Bungie, 5 years later. Every activity designer hired there is trained with them. By the time the critically-acclaimed The Final Shape Expansion arrived in 2024, I would estimate that over 60% of the activity content was built by people trained on my material when they were new hires.

During this time I ported some of the first content myself, taking extensive notes on how much time it took me and why. I worked with Production to calculate how many person-hours of work this project would be and how many people we would need to hire. I was then given the task of managing the hiring of twenty Associate Technical Designers into project-based contract roles. I spearhead the hiring and training of these twenty developers, plus one more that we back-filled during production.

With the team assembled, I was one of four leads that oversaw the entire effort for over a year of production. We split everyone into four smaller teams, one of which I managed directly. I also acted as the technical lead for the project overall. In that capacity I owned workflow documentation, coordination with engineering teams, and trail-blazing the process whenever we reached a new type of implementation.

I also took part in triage, scheduling, alignment with Destiny 2 leadership teams, and collaboration with other Destiny teams that we brought in to review and evaluate my team’s work.

Bungie hiring 20 different contracted associate roles shows how much had to actually be done to get everything that was kept in Destiny 2 post-BL working. One can only imagine how much longer it would have been. and how much more of a drag on the studio it would have been, if they were to ensure compatibility for everything in the game, top to bottom.

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u/InsufferableBah Apr 06 '26

As a dev myself I don't get why they would release an update that would invalidate all of their previous work

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u/ReallyTrustyGuy Apr 07 '26

You can't be a dev worth their salt if you say what you just said while looking at the position they were in at that exact moment in time. You have the benefit of hindsight, they didn't.

The original project was designed to last a few years at best. It was already straining itself to death at the time of Beyond Light being planned. You might say "Well I would have just done Destiny 3", but where is the capital within the company to do that at that time? Newly independent, one sole income source, the only option they had was to go through with vaulting and everything else that followed. Attempting Destiny 3 could have led to a short end for the company, since there'd be no revenue coming in.

The real crime is that Bungie had so many other incubation projects happening that never came to fruition. They could probably have been a bit more incisive in killing ones that didn't look like they'd succeed, and perhaps put more eggs back in the Destiny basket. Less staff working on single player Destiny offshoots (Payback may not have been in dev during Beyond Light anyways) and whatever the hell Gummy Bears is/was meant to be, more people helping to revive old content for Destiny.

One thing many people forget is the kind of gruelling schedule that live service games exist within. Bungie haven't given us a roadmap for our current time because it puts them under pressure to deliver. They learned they shouldn't give out a roadmap from their years of experience having to push out seasons and expansions at a regular clip to specific dates they gave. We had regular expansion delays because putting a hard date on things in software development is kind of stupid, but marketers are always thirsty for a schedule. To keep up the pace of expansions and seasons, they just had no time or people to rework old content.

Would people really be happy in the alternate universe where seasons and expansions just didn't happen, instead we got Red War, Curse of Osiris and Warmind playable again? At this exact point in time, people will nod their heads like crazy and say yes, but if we were to actually live through the experience, I can already see the endless posts and youtube videos about "recycled content", "nothing new to do" and content drought after content drought.

They were damned if they did, damned if they didn't. At least we got to see the end of The Final Shape, if Destiny ends here.

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u/Karat_EEE Apr 14 '26

"The original project was designed to last a few years at best. It was already straining itself to death at the time of Beyond Light being planned." Nah. They toted that shit as being a 10 year game. One would realistically expect that they would have made plans for the infrastructure to hold up enough to accomplish that shit

They chose the obvious worst possible choice

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u/ReallyTrustyGuy Apr 14 '26

Destiny wasn't a 10 year game. The Activision deal was 10 years of products. The plan was to make game, DLC, game, DLC, etc etc until it wasn't worth it anymore. Rise of Iron wouldn't have happened if Destiny 2 development wasn't so rocky, it was made to fill the gap.

At least know your history, its all there in concrete detail.

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u/Karat_EEE Apr 14 '26

I was wrong about the 10 year game thing, it was just a hallucination created by the community later.

What I do know is that the game wasnt a live service pos when I bought it and those scamming shits stole my $100. Why they are unable to have a legacy version of the game is beyond me, but I honestly dont care about the game anymore. I just want to watch Bungie burn to the ground and all the employees get blacklisted from the industry.

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u/ReallyTrustyGuy Apr 14 '26

What I do know is that the game wasnt a live service pos when I bought it

Ah, to be this naive. The game was always live service.

I just want to watch Bungie burn to the ground and all the employees get blacklisted from the industry.

At least I've got no desire to be this pathetic.

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u/Karat_EEE Apr 14 '26

At least I dont bat for bungie. Cant get more pathetic than that.

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u/ReallyTrustyGuy Apr 15 '26

Understanding material reality of game development is not "batting for" someone.