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Halo studio’s next sci-fi shooter is codenamed Destiny.
Court documents from an Activision court case have outed the next project from Bungie, the studio that originally created Halo. According to an Activision contract made public as part of court proceedings in the upcoming Zampella/West trial, Bungie is currently developing four “sci-fantasy, action shooter games” code-named “Destiny.” Destiny games are set to come out beginning in the fall of 2013, followed by subsequent releases in fall of 2015, 2017 and 2019. In addition, Bungie has agreed to create four downloadable expansions known as “Comet,” which will release in fall of 2014, 2016, 2018 and 2020.
The first Destiny game will be available on Xbox 360 as well as “the next successor console platform released by Microsoft,” which the contract refers to as Xbox 720. While the first Destiny game will hit Xbox in fall of 2013, the contract states that it will hit PlayStation 3 in the fall of 2014 after a “joint technical feasibility analysis” that will determine whether the game “is able to be developed for the PS3 at quality and feature parity to the Xbox 360 version.” Releases of the Comet expansions will “be compatible with the Xbox 360, Xbox 720 and the Sony PlayStation 4.” A PC release is also mentioned.
Other details about Bungie’s contract were also revealed, including the studio’s royalty payments and bonuses. For example, Bungie will receive a $2.5 million bonus if the first Destiny receives an aggregate score of 90 or better on GameRankings.com. In addition, Bungie will be allowed to devote “no more than 5% of its staff” to a new version of Marathon, Bungie’s original shooter that debuted in the early 1990s.
While these are the first details revealed about Bungie’s contract, much of this information has been rumored in the past. After Bungie originally signed with Activision in early 2010, rumors of the Destiny codename began to emerge in February of 2011. Later, reports suggested that the game was code-named Tiger and that it would be a first-person MMO.
Activision and Bungie have not formally announced these games, and for now Destiny is only the project’s code name. Keep in mind that this contract was signed in April of 2010 and some of these details may have changed in the two years since. We’ve reached out to Activision and will update with any comment we receive.
In response to this information, Bungie community manager DeeJ has posted the following statement titled "Well, that just happened…" on the company's official site:
"So, yeah. While we’re not ready to show you what we’ve been working on, we can reconfirm that we are hard at work on our new universe. We can’t wait for you to see it.
See you starside in 2013."
