Destiny’s Game Engine Was A Complete Mess, Took Hours Just To Do A Half-Second Change

Destiny was developed on an in-house engine by Bungie, which took quite a lot of time and years of development for them. However, it turns out that this engine might be one of the major reason why there was such a lack of in-game content for Destiny at launch, as detailed in a new article on Kotaku.

Kotaku has the inside story on the development of Destiny and why there was a lack of content and story at launch for the game. It turns out that the game engine that Bungie developed in-house just required a lot of time just to make tiny changes, as revealed by one of the developer that worked on Destiny.

“Let’s say a designer wants to go in and move a resource node two inches. They go into the editor. First they have to load their map overnight. It takes eight hours to input their map overnight. They get [into the office] in the morning. If their importer didn’t fail, they open the map. It takes about 20 minutes to open. They go in and they move that node two feet. And then they’d do a 15-20 minute compile. Just to do a half-second change.”

Kotaku talked to four different sources on this subject matter and all confirmed that destiny’s development tools were one of the main factor hindering the creation of new content for the game.

Destiny originally launched on September 9th for the PS3, PS4, Xbox 360 and Xbox One. It has received two DLC packs and one large expansion so far. The recent revelation about the game lacking a capable engine might explain the lack of content for Vanilla Destiny at launch.