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4/5/2012 12:26:45 AM
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When did destiny development start? Some interesting research...
Some of the longer term members here may remember BentLama (Nathan Walpole) being a Bungie employee. BentLama also worked at 343i recently.
He has previously worked on Halo 2 (Bungie), Halo 3 (Bungie) & Halo 4 (343i/MGS).
Looking at his resume ([url=http://www.bentllama.com/resume_nathanWalpole.pdf]link here[/url]) I see work on "undisclosed projects" reaching back to 2007 with Bungie. It seems interesting to me that a senior animator and conceptual developer for enabling the development team was working on "plural" as in multiple undisclosed projects.
What does this mean? I'm not sure but I wanted to post and get some speculation going. Perhaps he worked on Reach, maybe Destiny commenced all the way back then as well? Personally I think Destiny is in that mix.
I imagine his specialty in proof of concept, pre-vis and character rigging with test animators as well as design viability studies attribute him to working in the very early stages of game development lifecycles.
Any ideas on the projects BentLama worked on during those late years at Bungie? I'm thinking Destiny has been around for longer than we suspect.
Bungie have known for many years now that they were buying themselves back from Microsoft and moving away from Halo. I recall Reach had a small team assigned to retool existing Halo technologies to deliver their best game and ODST was the main focus. However I believe a semi-fast one was pulled on Microsoft and more resources were devoted behind closed doors to Destiny during both those game developments.
This leads me to think Destiny is closer than we think...
Side Note: Another point of interest here is I see 343i had him working on concept animation work for and "undisclosed Halo project" in 2008-2010. This means work for Halo 4 has been going on for over 4 years now.
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Didn't Jason Jones jump out of Halo as soon as Halo 3 was complete? It would be fair to assume that he has been working with a small team in pre-production since then. And concerning that in three years (the time between the releases of Halo 3 and Reach), they would've been able to do quite a lot of pre-production and even huge, public prototypes (ODST and Reach). Even the first hint to Destiny was back in the time before Reach was announced. I remember a quote in a weekly update something along the lines of "[something about ODST]... we have a small team working on a yet unannounced prject (Reach) and a small team working on a prject that is just a distant [b]star[/b] in the horizon". Now, that certainly isn't the exact quote, but it has the main point. I tried searching the BWU, but couldn't find it as I had no idea of the exact time. Anyhow, as SonicJohn pointed out ODST and Reach have basically been two huge prototypes for possible features of their next game. Bungie pretty much got open hands with both games which allowed them to use them as testing platforms for new features and such. So, I believe that the pre-production of Destiny dates all back to the start of 2008 and the full production started at the beginning of 2011. They have basically had three years to make prototypes and build their new engine. And as the game isn't coming out any time soon (2014 would be my bet), they have a lot of time to make the game as they want it to be, possibly hinting on a game that is supposed to last a bit longer than just three years. But that's already a lot of speculation.
