Bungie reviews

Things have changed quite a bit at Bungie since their split from Activision. I had been with the company since shortly after Halo Reach (almost a decade). While some aspects have improved, such as reduced crunch, the studio seems to have lost a lot of appreciation for veteran talent. Out of necessity, Bungie needs to learn and hire a lot of the publication roles Activision provided, and studio leadership has definitely let the fox guard the hen house in this time because of it. As a result, crunch has become a regular occurrence again, and burnout of the Destiny franchise is real. Many veterans are leaving to other studios formed by Bungie alumni or going elsewhere in the Seattle game dev scene. Those roles are not being backfilled, but rather replaced with a "do more with less" attitude, filling roles instead with contractors rather than full time talent we had been clicking on full cylinders with between the Taken King and Forsaken releases. These factors have led to the poorest morale I've seen at the company, which has been declining since late 2018. Leadership says they understand, and will do better, but still keeps leaning into not backfilling jobs and waiting to align on a direction before it's too late to deliver. This has been most obvious on the Narrative and QA teams. Not seeing any improvement in sight, I sadly left the job I thought I would retire at.