Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

by Jason Schreier

  Morale at Bungie sunk. During a series of emergency meetings, the studio’s leadership decided to overhaul their plans for the near future. In addition to fixing some of the biggest mechanical problems with free patches, they rebooted both of their planned downloadable content packs, The Dark Below and House of Wolves, remaking the missions and stripping out all the Peter Dinklage lines they’d already recorded.* Destiny, they decided, was done with Dinklage. In the coming months, Bungie’s designers would devour feedback on forums like Reddit, trying to implement as many short- and long-term fixes as they could. In both The Dark Below and House of Wolves they experimented with new types of missions and leveling systems that players enjoyed far more.

  At the end of 2014, a group of Blizzard leads, including Josh Mosqueira, the director of Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, flew up to Bungie’s offices for a pep rally. The parallels between Diablo III and Destiny were uncanny. Not only were both games published by Activision, they’d both launched with similar issues: a frustrating loot system, a punishing endgame, and way too much focus on random numbers. In a presentation to Bungie’s staff, Mosqueira explained how they’d fixed Diablo III’s problems, telling the story of how they transformed their game over two painful years, from Error 37 to Reaper of Souls.

  “It was like present us talking to past us,” said Mosqueira. “They were afraid of all the same things that we were afraid of. . . . It was just amazing to be able to go up there and talk to them, and they got to see, ‘Well, OK, all the things you guys did in Reaper were sort of moving in that direction. You guys are on the other side of the wall now. So there’s life on the other side.’”

  Bungie’s staff said they found Mosqueira’s talk invaluable. Despite Destiny’s many early stumbles—and despite Bungie regularly losing veterans who had been there since the Halo days—there was a belief that they had made something fundamentally solid. Despite everything, millions of people were playing Destiny. Most of them were complaining about Destiny as they played, but the game was addictive enough to keep them entertained nonetheless. The game’s most important elements—the setting, the art direction, the way it felt to shoot guns—were all as stellar as you’d expect from the studio that had made Halo. If Bungie could fix some of the other problems, then maybe, just like Blizzard, they, too, could find redemption.

  It’d have to start with Destiny’s first big expansion, the game code-named Comet that had been laid out in their contract. With this expansion, Bungie had originally planned to introduce a new planet, Europa, and several new zones across Earth and Mars, but production issues again forced them to cut down their scope. When they’d finalized plans for the expansion, which they called The Taken King, they knew it would center on a single location: The Dreadnaught, an infested Hive ship floating near the rings of Saturn. Bungie also overhauled the leveling and loot systems, incorporating a great deal of fans’ feedback to make Destiny feel more player friendly. (It helped that the director of The Taken King, Luke Smith, was an obsessive Destiny player who had racked up hundreds of hours in the game.)

  Bungie also knew that if it was going to win back fans and critics, The Taken King needed a decent story. Under the writer Clay Carmouche, Bungie took a new narrative approach for The Taken King, one that felt far more focused. There was a clear villain—Oryx, the ruler of a phantasmagoric group of aliens called the Taken—and the game would give players ample motivation to track him down and kill him. Irritating characters like the Stranger disappeared for good, while the more charming members of Destiny’s cast, like Nathan Fillion’s snarky Cayde-6, took on more prevalent roles. (Carmouche left the studio not long after shipping The Taken King.)

  Bungie also made the remarkable, unprecedented move of wiping Destiny’s main star from the game. To play Ghost in The Taken King, they hired the energetic voice actor Nolan North, who lent his voice not just to new dialogue but to rerecordings of every single line in the original version of Destiny. Even Marlon Brando couldn’t have done much with a line like “Careful, its power is dark,” but by replacing the monotonous work of Peter Dinklage, Bungie was signaling to the world that it wanted to get things right this time. (Fans were pleased with Nolan North, but years later, there are those who miss the so-called Dinklebot and wish they could hear his dreary voice in Destiny again.)

  When The Taken King launched on September 15, 2015, it was universally lauded. Wrote my good friend and Destiny companion Kirk Hamilton on Kotaku: “After a year of missteps and half-recoveries, Bungie has found their firmest footing since last September. The Taken King’s creators have looked their players in the eye and confidently laid down a convincing vision of what Destiny has and will continue to become.”

  It would have been nice and neat if the story behind Destiny had ended there—if Bungie, like Blizzard, had fixed its mistakes then moved on to the next big thing. Even as they launched The Taken King, however, Bungie’s leadership knew the road ahead would be rocky. Their ambitious ten-year contract with Activision stipulated that they’d have to release a sequel, Destiny 2, in the fall of 2016. That wasn’t going to happen. Expectations were too high, plans were shifting too frequently, and their tools were too slow.

  In January 2016, Bungie delayed Destiny 2 another year, again renegotiating their contract with Activision to buy the team more time. (To replace Destiny 2, they put together a moderate-sized expansion pack called Rise of Iron that they’d release in September 2016.) Days later, Bungie fired its CEO, Harold Ryan, and throughout the year, dissatisfied veterans continued to leave the company, battling with Bungie’s board of directors over office politics and a bizarrely long stock-vesting schedule.*

  To some of those departed Bungie veterans, who had cheered so loudly back in 2007 when the studio announced that it was spinning out from Microsoft, going independent had been the company’s biggest mistake. Ten years later, how many of the people who had signed Bungie’s ostentatious Declaration of Independence were even left at the studio? “When we were working with Microsoft, Bungie was like this little punk rock band who always shook their tiny little skinny fist at mom and dad,” said one former employee. “And when we spun out, we didn’t have anyone to shake our tiny fists at. We actually had to self-govern and run ourselves.”

  As I write this chapter, in early 2017, the story of Destiny is still ongoing. There are lingering questions, both within and outside Bungie, about the future of the franchise. How will people react to Destiny 2? What will happen to the series after that? Will Bungie remain independent, or will Activision find a way to buy it? By the time this book is published, some of those questions will be answered. Others might take a little longer.

  “I think the real story of Destiny’s development is that just making any game is incredibly hard,” said Jaime Griesemer. “Trying to make an ambitious game under a lot of pressure is staggeringly hard. . . . When you have just quantic explosions and craterings and huge assimilation and communication problems on a team, you end up wasting so many resources and so much time that you see it in the final game.”

  All things considered, it’s remarkable that Bungie found a way to ship anything, let alone build something as popular as Destiny (a video game in which players travel through space, complaining about Destiny). Maybe the studio didn’t quite make Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, and maybe they lost some of their soul—and a lot of talented employees—along the way. But Destiny’s challenges were many of the same challenges that nearly every video game production has faced over the years. The stakes were just higher. And the story of Destiny—more specifically, the story around Destiny—turned out to be fascinating for reasons Bungie could never have planned.

  9

  The Witcher 3

  Marcin Iwiński grew up under the specter of Stalinism, which made it tough to play a lot of computer games. With light blue eyes and a face that seemed to be in a constant state of stubble, Iwiński was one of many teenagers in Warsaw, Poland, who wished he could just play the same games as everyone else in
the world.

  Until 1989, Poland was a Communist country, and even in the early 1990s, as the newly democratic Third Polish Republic began embracing the free market, there was nowhere in Warsaw to buy games legally. There were, however, “computer markets,” open-air bazaars where the city’s geeks would unite to buy, sell, and trade pirated software. Polish copyright laws were essentially nonexistent, so there was nothing illegal about ripping a foreign computer game to a floppy disk, then selling it for cheap at the market. Marcin Iwiński and his high school friend Michał Kiciński would spend all their spare time at the markets, bringing home whatever they could find to play on their old ZX Spectrum computers.

  In 1994, when he was twenty, Iwiński started envisioning a business that would import and distribute computer games throughout the country. He and Kiciński teamed up to start a company called CD Projekt, named after the industry-changing CD-ROMs that had just popped up in Warsaw. At first they imported and traded games at the computer market, then they started signing deals with outside companies like LucasArts and Blizzard to distribute those companies’ games in Poland. CD Projekt’s big break arrived when they convinced the publisher Interplay to give them the Polish rights to Baldur’s Gate, one of the most popular role-playing games in the world.*

  Knowing it’d be difficult to persuade their Polish brethren to buy proper copies of the game rather than pirating it online or at the market, Iwiński and Kiciński went all out. In addition to localizing Baldur’s Gate in Polish (complete with authentic Polish voice acting), they stuffed the game’s box with a map, a Dungeons & Dragons guide, and a CD soundtrack, gambling that Polish players would see the package’s value as a justification to buy Baldur’s Gate instead of pirating it. If you got a ripped version of the game, you wouldn’t get all those goodies.

  The tactic worked. On day one CD Projekt sold eighteen thousand copies, a massive number for a country where, just a few years earlier, buying games legally hadn’t even been an option. It opened the door for Iwiński and his company to publish all the other big RPGs that were popping up, like Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and Fallout.

  This success in the distribution market allowed Iwiński to start pursuing his real dream, to make his own video games, and by 2002 he’d launched CD Projekt Red, a development branch of CD Projekt. The question was, what kind of game was this new studio going to make? Someone at the company suggested that they start up a conversation with Andrzej Sapkowski, the renowned fantasy writer who was generally considered to be the Polish version of J. R. R. Tolkien. Sapkowski had written a series of popular books called The Witcher, a favorite of both adults and children throughout Poland. Starring a white-haired monster hunter named Geralt of Rivia, The Witcher mixed gritty fantasy with eastern European fairy tales, like a cross between Game of Thrones and the Brothers Grimm.

  Turned out Sapkowski had no interest in video games, and he was happy to sell the rights to CD Projekt Red for a reasonable price. Iwiński and crew knew very little about developing games, but with The Witcher, they had an established property, which would be far easier than starting from scratch. It was also an appealing property, one that they thought might draw broad interest not just in Poland but across the world.

  In 2007, after a tough five-year development cycle and multiple reboots, CD Projekt Red released The Witcher for personal computers. The game sold well enough to justify a sequel, and in 2011, CD Projekt put out The Witcher 2. Both games shared several traits: They were both dark, gritty action-RPGs. They both tried to make the player feel like he or she was making consequential decisions that had an impact on how the story would unfold. And they were both challenging, esoteric PC games. Although CD Projekt Red would later port The Witcher 2 to the Xbox 360, both games were generally seen as PC-centric, which meant their audience was limited. Competing games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (November 2011) sold millions and millions in part because they were simultaneously released on both PC and consoles.

  Also, Skyrim was North American. By the mid-2000s, as the gaming industry became more globalized, role-playing games had formed their own sort of geographical divide. In the United States and Canada you’d find companies like Bethesda and BioWare, with big, critically acclaimed hits like The Elder Scrolls and Mass Effect, both of which sold gangbusters. Out of Japan came Square Enix’s Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, which weren’t quite as trendy as they had been during the Japan-dominated 1990s, but still held their own among millions of fans. And then there were the European RPG publishers, which never drew as much respect as their American or Japanese counterparts. European RPGs like Two Worlds and Venetica were generic, janky, and critically panned.

  With The Witcher 2, Iwiński and his studio had built a sizable audience outside Europe and even become a cultural icon in Poland, to the point where in 2011, when US president Barack Obama visited the country, prime minister Donald Tusk gifted him a copy of The Witcher 2. (Obama later admitted that he had not played it.) But the developers at CD Projekt Red were dreaming bigger. They wanted to prove that, even though they were Polish, they could compete with the Bethesdas and Square Enixes of the world. Iwiński wanted CD Projekt Red to be as much of a household name as BioWare, and he wanted that to happen with The Witcher 3.

  To lead this third Witcher game, Iwiński and the other executives tapped Konrad Tomaszkiewicz, who had been a tester on the first Witcher before leaping up to become head of CD Projekt Red’s “quest department,” which they’d created during early development of The Witcher 2. Traditionally, an RPG studio would have separate writing and design departments, which collaborated to build all of a game’s quests (Kill ten dragons! Defeat the dark lord and save the princess!). At CD Projekt Red, however, the quest department was its own entity, with a team of people who were each responsible for designing, implementing, and improving their own chunks of the game. As head of this department, Tomaszkiewicz had spent a lot of time collaborating with the other teams, which made him a good fit to be the director of The Witcher 3.

  When he was told he’d be in charge of their next big game, an anxious Tomaszkiewicz started talking to CD Projekt Red’s other executives about how they’d make the game appealing to as many people as possible. One of their immediate solutions was simple: make it huge. “We spoke with [studio head] Adam Badowski and the board and we asked [them] what was missing in our games to make them more perfect RPGs,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “And we knew we missed the freedom of exploration and we needed a bigger world.”

  Konrad Tomaszkiewicz fantasized about a Witcher 3 that wouldn’t restrict you to one specific area per chapter, the way previous games had. Instead, this new Witcher game would let you explore a big open world, hunting monsters and undertaking quests at your discretion. (“Freedom” was the word Iwiński used most often as a pillar for what the game would offer.) They wanted it to be the best-looking game you could buy. And, this time, they would do a simultaneous release on both consoles and PCs. With The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red wanted to show the world that Poland could make games just as critically and commercially successful as its competitors.

  Right away Tomaszkiewicz and his team established some basic ideas. They knew they wanted to tell a story about the hero Geralt hunting for his adopted daughter, Ciri, a popular character from the Witcher books who could wield powerful magic. They knew that the primary villain would be a group called the Wild Hunt, a phalanx of spectral horsemen based on the European folk myth of the same name. They knew they wanted The Witcher 3 to take place in three massive regions: Skellige, a group of Nordic-inspired islands; Novigrad, the largest and richest city in Witcher lore; and Velen, also known as No Man’s Land, a poor, war-ravaged swampland. “We were terrified of the scope,” said Konrad Tomaszkiewicz. “But at this company, [we] all want to create the best experience of games out there. And we are driven by challenges, [even] a huge challenge which is almost impossible to do.”

  As they entered preproduction, the design team started discussing and plott
ing out structural ideas, which were already getting complicated. “There were a lot of actually challenging bits in terms of paper design,” said the lead quest designer, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz (Konrad’s younger brother). “For example, the original idea was that once you leave the prologue, you were supposed to be able to go to one of the three regions. Any of them.” The goal of this decision was to allow for more freedom—Iwiński’s watchword—but it left the designers in a tough spot.

  CD Projekt Red had already decided that The Witcher 3’s enemies would have predetermined levels rather than scaling up with the player. Level scaling, most famously used in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, had been detested by RPG players, who’d complain that when enemies leveled up with you, it eliminated the feeling that your character was making real progress. (Few video game experiences were less pleasant than watching your high-level superhero get slaughtered by a gang of pitiful goblins.)

  Without level scaling, however, there was no way to balance the difficulty in an open-world RPG. If the player could choose to go to Skellige, Novigrad, or Velen at the start of the game, all three of those regions would have to be populated with low-level enemies, or else they’d be too tough. But if all three regions had low-level enemies, you’d be able to breeze through them all once you’d gained some experience.

  To solve this problem, CD Projekt Red went with a more linear structure. After the prologue, you’d go to Velen (low level), then Novigrad (midlevel), then Skellige (high level). You’d still have the freedom to move between regions, but progression would be a little more restricted. Besides, if the game was going to be as big as they hoped, they would need to funnel players a little bit. “We wanted you to feel like you’re not lost, and basically you know more or less where to go, and what the structure is,” said Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz. “When you are free to go anywhere, we felt that after the prologue, it was too much at once—that you would be overwhelmed.”