Destiny 3 is going to get made because someone at Sony made the choice to avoid talking about it in their earnings report earlier this year. This is a butterfly effect thing, stick with me for like 3 seconds here I'll do my best to catch you up to speed.
Ever since Sony acquired Bungie, the writing was on the wall that they were gonna try to take the axe to the team: either by pulling devs and execs into other studios, or by canning them entirely. This is not a new development, AAA studios (and most major corporations at the center of all our collective suffering) have been repeating this process of hollowing out a company for every penny before pulling the plug and moving to the next pig to gut. We knew Petey Parsnips and his frat bros were gonna get off scott free before the ship got sank, everything so far has been played like a bored chess game.
Except someone at Sony made a bad chess move. They intentionally omitted the name of Bungie's flagship IP in their May 8th Earnings Report detailing a $765 million impairment, devaluing the company (meaning Sony doesn't think Bungie was worth the $3.6 billion they bought them for anymore and adjusted the imaginary value number to represent that).
This report came way before we knew Monument of Triumph was coming, let alone it'd be the last live service update. The community was still waiting for anything about the upcoming quarterly refresh we were promised. Sony had no problem name dropping Marathon in the report, so the lack of mentioning Destiny spoke louder. Even the stupid people could pick up that something about that was "off," and it got people talking, something Sony was obviously trying to avoid.
Shortly after Monument of Triumph dropped, the rumor sprang that Sony leadership went out of their way to make Destiny suffer out of a petty grievance with Bungie's frat boy leadership suite. Granted, the super turbo mega Gamers have been doing the same thing for 15 years, but they can only write death threats on Twitter. Sony actually has, and has used, the power to do something about it. The outrage of this rumor certainly helped compound the overwhelming sentiment that "Destiny can't just die like this."
A petition with over 400,000 signatures has since been circulating the greater gaming community, among other countless displays of love and reverence for the one game the industry loves to hate. The game that could never die, the game that seemed to eat its countless clones for breakfast, taken out to the pasture by its jealous producers.
Destiny has always been a dialogue between the devs and the players, working together to prove one ultimate statement as fact, in spite of the insurmountable forces that seem impossible to challenge:
Time and time again, we broke the rules of this world. Whether those rules were made by the gods of the world, the developers wrote puppet them, or the limits of the engine itself, the Destiny experience was at its best when it felt we could bend this reality to *our* will, not the other way around.
Sony attempting to kill the game about dead people defying life itself will inevitably result in its rebirth. I've gone on too long to take a tangent about how D2's sandbox evolution, but I will say its ironic how there's never been a better player experience, it only took the game dying to get here.
This isn't the send off Destiny deserved, but its honestly the best one it could have gotten. Everything is relevant to play, anything is relevant to use and experiment with, and there's a target farm for every step of the build crafting gameplay loop. Because of this, because of the overwhelming love and support from the community, and because Sony tried to challenge the gaming community to a chess game they weren't prepared for, Destiny 3 will be made.
It might be in a decade or two at most, it might not even be made by Bungie, but it will still be Destiny 3. Fallout New Vegas wasn't made by Interplay, but its regarded as one of the best Fallout games in the series, who's to say D3 won't be made by people that know and love the Destiny ip like Bungie did.
That said, Sony, if you force generative AI into Destiny 3 I'm not playing it, and I'm not alone. D3 is inevitable, the people are loud already and they will not shut up about it, they can't. Don't fuck this up too.
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