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Warframe creative director Rebb Ford and design director Pablo Alonso joined Destiny 2 fans mourning the game following the end of development announced last week by Bungie.
Though Warframe actually predates Destiny, the two games have long been compared as giants of the loosely defined, live-service, looter-shooter space, and they have shared many players. Ford and Alonso, like many others at developer Digital Extremes, were clearly big fans of Destiny and are sad to see it go.
Rebb relates her history with Bungie's work, going back to playing Halo 3 at 16. "There is no Warframe without the legacy of Bungie games," she says.
"Destiny was and is a force of nature, loved and held in the hands of so many people who, for a moment, were part of the biggest thing in gaming," she adds. "Then comes the words, summarized crudely: 'The End.'"
Destiny 2 will remain playable going forward, and Bungie and studio owner Sony have not openly killed off the IP, but the game will not get any additional updates and the franchise has no known new entries in the works. Bungie's only other release is Marathon, which is quite shy of a smash-hit, so the studio's waters are choppy.
Ford adds: "What a tempest! I am 16 again - I am 35. I am making Warframe, I am saying goodbye to the only lasting pillar I had to look up to. I am responsible for my own destiny. This is misery for so many people - and people are the only reason for the good and the bad of this."
Alonso likewise focuses on how losing a game like this can feel as a player. In an indirect tip of his hat, he says, "When Heroes of the Storm ended development I was very sad, I loved that game. People kept saying 'play league or dota' most were trying to be helpful but they were just annoying. I was sad the game I liked was ending and didn’t need people telling me how their moba was better."
This is the quandary Destiny 2 players will face in the months and years ahead: there is no other game like Destiny. Many tried to make one and none succeeded, and many more were told not to even try because it would be impossible. There are games with guns and loot and space drama, but none of them look or feel or sound quite like this.
For me, the greatest losses lie in Destiny's unresolved narrative threads, and in knowing that we'll never get any more of those raids or dungeons. Destiny 2's pinnacle PvE encounters were peerless – an ingenious distillation of everything the sandbox could produce spliced with think-on-your-feet puzzles that pushed the entire FPS genre forward and turned fireteams into orchestras conducted by whoever actually learned the mechanics (usually with a Datto video playing in another window).
As someone who was all-in on Destiny from day one, I'm gutted to see where we are now.
