I'm going to preface this by mentioning that I'm a pretty big Bungie fan. I don't go all the way back to Marathon, I don't even go as far back as Oni, but I had some incredible times with every Bungie-made Halo game, even have modded Halo 1 and Halo Demo on Mac. I went to the Destiny midnight release at Best Buy with my girlfriend, we both got copies of the limited edition. I followed as much information on the development of Destiny as I could from the beginning when we first heard of the game. (Actually, that's technically not true, I didn't hear about the ODST Destiny teaser posters until later, and I did not participate in Alpha Lupi) Suffice it to say that I was looking more forward to Destiny than DeeJ is probably looking forward to the eventual creation of a Dark Tower miniseries or something. To the point, as I do tend to ramble: Destiny is not what it could have been. Even we defenders of it, as I am one, would have a hard time arguing that Destiny is anywhere near its highest potential. This is the topic I see being brought up everywhere, that content was cut, that integral pieces of the story were cut, that Joe Staten left and everything fell apart from there. As a writer myself, reading about the pieces of story people have uncovered that existed during what I will refer to as pre-collapse Destiny, reading about these pieces of lost lore was eye-opening. There was so much, so much more than what we have now. I feel the pain of that loss. Of what might have been. I knew of such things before with other games, but because of my more direct part as a fan in watching as everything collapsed, I feel a more tangible loss. I see what happens when good writing is stripped away, when the storyteller behind the story stops mid-sentence never to begin again. When I think about what happened to Destiny, I am not thinking merely from my own perspective, because that is close-minded. I think of the developers. We saw the early vidocs, we have been touched by the excitement of the people behind the game. This was something I always liked about Bungie, they were never afraid to show the face of a programmer or a graphic designer as that person excitedly spoke of what their creation meant to them. That is why I noticed when the vidocs stopped, and there was silence. Many people were quick to point out this silence, that details were sparse. But this loss of communication was a more recent thing, I believe. Within 2013-2014, the time when Joe Staten left and it is said everything began to collapse, we ceased seeing those smiling developer's faces. DeeJ held things together for Bungie, wrote the weekly updates and filled our minds with images of guns, swords, and space magic. Some might blame him for this. He kept our hopes up. Kept us expecting something incredible. Why? Because he has to. It's his job. As someone who has just finished working a 3-year long job as a dishwasher, I actually feel I have some perspective on this. The restaurant I worked at is, in my opinion, a very good place. I love the food there and I love the people I worked with. But my job there was to wash dishes. Each day that I worked I ruined my hands, each day that I worked I ensured our customers would have clean dishes to eat off of. My feet ached from standing for 8 hours or more straight, I came home smelling like food eaten by over 200, sometimes 300 people. But I did it, because it was my job to. I loved it and I hated it, perhaps in equal measure. What does this have to do with Destiny? Destiny was made by real people with real families that they have to provide for. I don't care when someone says "Bungie made cut content into DLC to make easy money," because I don't believe that Bungie did that. And I'm not saying that to blame Activision either. At the restaurant where I worked only yesterday, the people who I care about the most were the people I worked with directly. Management was not terrible, but they made mistakes. I didn't care. I cared about my fellow employees, the other dishwashers, the cooks, the wait staff. A select few at Bungie and at Activision, those at the top, made the decisions that turned Destiny into what it is today. But they are not Bungie. To me Bungie is made up of those smiling faces in the vidocs, those people creating a new world and excited to see us take our first steps in it, DeeJ trying to look to a bright future even as he is forced to cover up for the changes being made during development. What we have to understand is that Destiny was made by people, working jobs, just like us. I wish I could hear from one of them and get their point of view, what they think of all the crap that's been said about the game they put long hours into. I've read a one-star review of the restaurant I worked at. The person who wrote the review had not even eaten there, and there was a 5-star review from someone who had right above it. That one-star review infuriated me so much that the 5-star review meant almost nothing to me in that moment. I've rambled quite a bit. Perhaps no one will read this. Perhaps no one will care. But to any who do read this, remember: we're all just people and these are all just our opinions. Destiny's lost content is extremely unfortunate. But if that potential existed once, it can exist again. The talent that could have made Destiny great is still out there, and there is much, much more out there than that. There will be another time. There are other worlds than these. Until then, I'm going to enjoy as much of what Destiny is as I can, for the sake of those people that created it.