genuinely insane this doesn't end with any accountability on behalf of the studio's leadsership. i'm so mad, dude. two hundred and twenty. 220! 220 people who bought homes, who planned for a future, who have medical bills to pay. i'm seeing red.
there's still a lot of really amazing people at that company, at this point i just hope they all know people care a lot about their work because the morale must be sub-zero levels over there rn
like everyone else i've been stewing in my anger about the continued erosion of bungie as a company and creative organization due to mismanagement. the further gutting this week of the QA, player support, narrative, and music teams, and even more artists and developers from other areas getting axed is both extremely upsetting on a human level and will very definitely have a very direct impact on the game i sometimes-begrudgingly still love and am somewhere north of 7500 hours on
but luke smith in particular being gone feels weird to think about even if he wasn't laid off, but rather left of his own accord as jeff grub has since clarified.
since i started playing the game with the launch of destiny 2, and started getting seriously into the game during the pandemic towards the end of his tenure as the game's director... i have often had this weird separation in my head between "luke smith the human being who is in charge of a lot of aspects of the game's development and appears in that capacity on dev streams and does interviews and things" and a sort of mostly joking idea of Luke Smith as a bogeyman responsible for everything from design decisions that result in particularly tedious grinds to just straight up bad rng. this transferred to joe blackburn when he became game director, and more recently tyson greene, but the joke has never been as funny as when it was 1) newer and 2) involved luke since he was kind of the public face of the game in many ways for so long. "Luke Smith demands sacrifices" was a common response to a friend complaining about a grind being especially boring. the joke when luke smith appeared on stream for the first time in years to tell the playerbase that they were going to do a preview was "luke smith has appeared personally to threaten us with more destiny"
but also more importantly to me personally, he was the lead designer on most of the d1 raids: vault of glass, king's fall, and wrath of the machine. it might not have been specifically his crazy idea to put mmo style raids in destiny, but it was someone's and then he ran with it for quite a while, and along the way helped lay the foundations for one of my absolute favorite things in any video game, and something which no other game has come even close to replicating.
and then a few years ago he disappeared upwards into the bungie upper management structure and answered emails for a living or something and now he's just quietly gone after .... as mentioned appearing briefly to threaten us with more destiny.
whatever successes and failures he had in the more prominent game director years... destiny raids are extremely special. even when there's an occasional dud, they are still extremely special and they wouldn't be what they are without those early ones that he was in charge of. it is just as weird to think about that specific formative influence on the game being completely gone now as it is when i remember that michael salvatori and so many other long time bungie employees are gone too.
while it's been made pretty clear there is still a "raids and dungeons team" and they are still working on Something(s).... destiny raids are played by maybe 8-10% of the playerbase at all despite being massively expensive to make. there is some prestige to having them in the game. they get a lot of attention for the game when one launches. i'm sure the tech built for them gets used elsewhere. but i am so worried that the sony/bungie upper management spreadsheet people are going to look at expenses and realize that maybe pouring buckets of money into huge pieces of content that barely anyone (statistically) touches.... might be a thing they can cut.... and then that thing i love so much will be gone, or at least there will be no more new ones to look forward to even when the rest of game is somewhere between boring (most pve content) and infuriating (pvp except during brief windows when the stars align and it's delightful and easily the most endlessly replayable part of the video game)
change is inevitable, but having it come suddenly and traumatically for most of the people involved no matter how hard they worked or how well that work has done for the company is a lot to deal with every time.
fuck all this entirely imo! pete parsons retire bitch
