O’Donnell, Bungie court documents reveal Destiny’s story was “substantially”

As the court documents are released, the mysteries shrouding the lawsuit of Marty O’Donnell against the developers of Halo is solved along with the twist and turns of Destiny’s story during launch.

Saying Destiny has a story is a bit of an oxymoron. But Destiny wasn’t always like this. The work, collectively called Music of the Spheres, was recorded in early 2013. The ruling notes how Bungie employees – including CEO Harold Ryan – felt that O’Donnell was having a negative effect on the company thereafter. “They wanted to pare things back to make them more accessible”. Dinklebot was recast due to the actor’s tight scheduling conflicts according to Bungie, but I’m sure it also has to do with the lukewarm response fans had to Tyrion’s uninspired and seemingly phoned-in performance. “Entire areas that would have been in the final game were removed”. It was said that the game’s character level cap is now 34, which means players can target the cap via XP alone.

It was an unexpected move that angered O’Donnell, prompting him to rebel against the company in an attempt to “preserve Bungie’s creative process, artistic integrity, and reputation”. It seems like Activision attempted to pull a Project Icebreaker on Marty O’Donnell, similar to what happened with the former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella. While there were no details as to what the sword can actually do, by the looks of it, it does shows an interesting physical profile that fans may think it does have other goal than that of an ordinary sword.

O’Donnell felt that the Activision deal had ruined Bungie’s “Band of Brothers” ethos. The man was one of the seven founders of Bungie.

Activision didn’t like this. The agreement meant that O’Donnell would keep working on Destiny, which would span until no later than 2014.

Activision and Bungie have more viable opportunities to increase Destiny’s players and sales numbers in the future as well, if certain rumors pan out. Now we learn that a huge overhaul of a nearly complete story was the reason for a year of delays. Probably we won’t ever know what the story was in first place, but looking at how it shaped in the true Destiny game… well, maybe some additional work was still needed.