Bungie Moves Away From Crunch Culture With Destiny 2

After Bungie releases the highly-anticipated Destiny 2, the company will finally move away from the stressful "crunch" culture of hammering out game after game with vigorous schedules.

Bungie revealed their plans to transition away from the crunch culture that has existed in their company during the Casual Connect conference earlier this week. Speaking on behalf of Bungie, Luke Timmins, the head of engineering, spoke about their pivot away from crunching games, a trend that he says began with Halo 2. Knocking out the second Halo title in just 18 months, the pressure to get the game out quickly had a huge impact on the company.

"The Halo 2 crunch almost killed Bungie as a company," Timmins said at the conference. "It is the most I've ever seen humans work in a year and a half. It was brutal.

After Halo 2 was completed, Timmins said that the company vowed to never again repeat that same process with future games. He said that developing a crunch culture within a company can occur much quicker than people would expect it to, but he also added that there's more than one type of crunch. The first is one where everyone is enthusiastically working on a title that they want to contribute to, and the second is more driven by a need to finish it rather than a want. While the former would clearly be the better option, Timmins warns that both run the risk of causing workers to burn out quickly.

"The one you want to do can be awesome, because you have passionate people who are excited and have cool stuff to work on," he added. "That can be really good, but you've got to be careful. People can be super excited and before you know it they're working a ton and getting burned out."

As far as the Destiny games are concerned, Timmins said that the Destiny was the last time a whole department operated under such crunch culture.

"Destiny 2 will actually be our fifth release - we've done all these DLCs - with no full, enforced crunch," he added. "We've very proud of that. It took us a long time to get there from the Halo 2 days."

Destiny 2 will be releasing on Sept. 6 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with a PC release coming on Oct. 24. Don't forget that Amazon Prime members can save 20% when they pre-order.

[via Games Industry]