Bungie devs talk the end of Destiny's 10 year arc: "The stakes are high with this release"

The Destiny franchise celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2024, and so much has happened since Guardians first stepped out onto the Cosmodrome. Players have fought Gods, raided Dungeons, and acquired all kinds of loot.

There have been good times, and there have certainly been low points, but The Final Shape (Destiny 2's next expansion) will bring with it the closure of the "Light and Darkness saga" that began all the way back in 2014.

As part of a recent roundtable interview with Bungie developers, we heard about how it feels to be approaching the close of a chapter.

Bungie devs on 10 years of Destiny

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"It's been an honor to have walked with these characters," Jonathan To, Narrative Lead on the Seasonal team, explains.

"To me, it'll have been nine years this year, and I started as a fan. I started trying to beat Vault of Glass and Dark Below and didn't join the team until House of Wolves, and I've just been running alongside Oryx and the other Hive gods since then," he jokes.

"I'm, glad that the the universe is still going strong and The Final Shape's story is going to be a climax of sorts, but it won't be won't be an ending to the universe. There are more stories to tell past that."

"This is going to be my fifth year at Bungie," explains Nikko Stevens, who joined the team close to Shadowkeep's launch in 2019 and is a Senior Narrative Designer on the Seasonal team.

"It has been so surreal to be able to come in and influence and help bring to life characters like Saint, Savathun, and Caiatl, and all these characters from the lore than we've been able to realize and bring to the forefront."

"I think back to when I first started playing Destiny, and my son was just born, and holding him and playing Destiny 1 through the campaign, I'll never forget that," Clayton Kisko, Feature Lead and Activities Designer for Seasons, reminisces.

"To get to 10 years feels like an honor, feels like something special."

Amanda Baker, Test Engineer on Raids and Dungeons, feels just as nostalgic.

"I was in school when I was starting to play Destiny, and I was literally writing papers on this game while I was studying so it's wild to actually be here for The Final Shape and see this arc of the story come to its conclusion," she says.

"The stakes are high" for The Final Shape

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Brian Frank, Design Lead on Raid and Dungeons, describes himself as a "grizzled ancient who has been there from the start" and says he's "unemotional" because the Destiny universe will continue.

"For me, it's another avenue, right? We get to keep going and continue to build new content and it means an opportunity for new characters and new stories or whatever."

"The team, I think, has felt the stakes are high with this release [The Final Shape] and I think that's true in a lot of ways, but I also think, um, we're going to get to continue making content."

For more on our Bungie roundtable interview, check out a deep dive into the process behind building Warlord's Ruin, as well as the possibility of the team experimenting with other genres.