When a good game is made we should take some time to appreciate it. Bungie is a company that was started in May of 1991 but did not fully launch until June 19th of 1991. Bungie was started by Jason Jones and Alex Seropian, two programmers that met in college. Alex’s father told him to get job experience, and the next day Bungie was born. Over the years, Bungie has made a lot of games such as Halo, Destiny, Marathon, Gnop!, along with many others. However, while the storylines of Bungie games started out great, they have progressively gotten worse.  

Bungie made Halo in 2001, and it had a great detailed storyline. It starts with these people called the precursors, who made something called ‘ark rings’ all over the galaxy to help control the flood by killing everything around them. Each ark ring stores samples of all life that has ever existed, so that when everything dies, there will still be life. Humanity was created to carry on the legacy of the forerunners who have the ability to stop a terrible parasite that kills anything it touches. Many wars happen between a variety of species in the galaxy for the knowledge of how to control the flood. One alien race thinks that  the ark rings are the key to their “great journey,” so they start to try to get to the ark rings and destroy everything, but they see it as a religious journey. Many more wars happen over this. Every other race wants to stop the ark rings from being activated. The rings activate three times over the course of the story. Each time every species must re-evolve. The aliens eventually joined together to make the covenant. They fought together against the humans to once again try to take the knowledge of how to handle the flood. The game follows that story the whole way through.

Then Bungie made Destiny in 2014. Destiny looked like a promising game and it was supposed to have a decent story, but it unfortunately did not. In Destiny, this is what was supposed to happen. It takes place right after a ‘Golden Age’ about seven hundred years in the future. There is peace in the solar system. One day a sphere in the sky started to form. “The traveler,” as the powerful sphere is called, is supposed to help sustain life. Unfortunately, it brought evil to the solar system. When this happened, the traveler cracked and broke into fragments. The traveler is fueled by light, which is equivalent to the life force of people; it even gives some people powers. The player goes through the game as a guardian (the people with powers), and the main goal is to protect and revive the traveler, as well as to defeat all evil. Eventually, the player makes it to this place called the Black Garden, a separate dimension that holds the heart of darkness. Once the Black Garden was destroyed the traveler starts to revive. That sounds like a good storyline, right? Bungie did not follow it though, however. In the game, the story is only slightly referenced throughout the gameplay. Bungie also released a bunch of downloadable content (DLC) for Destiny. Each does the same thing. It is supposed to bring story, but Bungie just does it for the money. People buy it because it is from Bungie.

So Bungie started as a great company that made good, content-filled games with excellent storylines. Then it turned to making games with weak stories and expensive content. Something like this can happen to any company. There are some people who are even at the point of giving up on the game. “I’m done with Destiny for good now. They took away the one thing that made my character useable,” says Patrick McGovern, a Bungie game player. Bungie should go back to its old ways and actually make games with good content to please the players, not just for the most amount of money.