Last week was rough for developers since there are so many layoffs happening in the games industry. Bungie laid off employees too — which was due to Destiny 2 underperformance, IGN reported. Also, news broke out that Bungie delayed The Final Shape expansion by four months. With The Final Shape expansion being delayed, a massive gap in between the next season and the upcoming expansion, and layoffs, it begs the question, will current Destiny 2 developers have to crunch for The Final Shape?
Crunch is essentially a compulsory overtime period where developers have an elevated workload that is dictated by a sense of pressure and urgency. So, after speaking to an anonymous source, Forbes reported that the 30th Anniversary Pack took eight months to develop and since the developers don’t have eight months to put out something between Season 23 and The Final Shape, that strategy may not work for Season 23, but allegedly, there will be “something in the season 23 gap.” If the developers for Destiny 2 cannot put out a significant content drop like the 30th Anniversary Pack in Season 23, the next season could either be extended or have something else in store for players. Regardless of how much content we will get, it could lead developers to crunch and ship something that was meant to have more production time.
Moreover, this doesn’t include work that will need to be done for The Final Shape. Bungie intends to make The Final Shape an “unforgettable Destiny experience”. It wants the expansion to be regarded as one of the best things Bungie has put out while citing Forsaken, The Witch Queen, and The Taken King as the standard they aim to live up to. The Forbes article also mentions: “The Final Shape campaign and features are reportedly quite solid even in its current state, ahead of planned future work. But they want to go even further, and there is some concern about crunch to make that happen, even with a delay.” If this is known to Destiny 2 developers, then it may be possible that teams are already prepared to crunch until Bungie meets that milestone.
Reportedly, the in-game looking-for-group (LFG) feature, which according to the article “has been tremendously difficult from a tech perspective” was announced to the community before it was to Bungie’s developers. Destiny 2 players will see the LFG feature, but it’s been delayed a few times already as it was originally meant to launch with Lightfall, but it was delayed once again to Season 23.
Bloomberg reported that Bungie laid off about 100 employees, which it estimates is around 8% of Bungie’s total workforce of around 1200 employees. Bungie issued a statement about the matter, and said that 650 people are working on Destiny 2 and that they’re working hard on The Final Shape and its subsequent Episodes. Still, it’s safe to assume that there are fewer people on that development team than before. With all of the information that has surfaced in the past few days, there is a valid concern about developers crunching for The Final Shape.
