So, like, back in October of 2024, this sci-fi writer dude named Matthew Kelsey Martineau was all like, “Hey, Bungie totally stole my ideas for Destiny 2!” He goes by Caspar Cole on his blog, and he’s claiming that Bungie ripped off his story about the Red Legion and their flamethrowers and war hounds. Now, I’m not really sure why this matters, but both stories have stuff like consciousness transfer and failsafes to stop disasters, which, I mean, is pretty generic sci-fi stuff. But yeah, Bungie’s having a hard time proving it’s all just a big coincidence since they’ve hidden away all the Destiny 2 content in the ‘vault’.
You know, one of the issues with live-service games is how they kinda eat themselves, making parts of the game inaccessible when they update or delete stuff. Destiny 2 started doing this with the Beyond Light expansion, tossing the original Red War campaign and its sequels into the ‘Destiny 2 Content Vault’. New players wouldn’t even get to experience those storylines, which is a bummer. They’d have to settle for whatever Bungie replaced them with, I guess.
So, Bungie kept saying that the old Destiny 2 content was just chilling in the vault, but then when the lawsuit happened, turns out they couldn’t even bring it back. The game engine got updated, and restoring the Red War was just not possible. Instead, Bungie was all like, “Hey, check out these videos as proof!” They submitted a 10-hour lore video and a 2-hour and 40-minute cutscene compilation made by fans. But the judge was like, “Uh, nope, not gonna consider those. We need more time for discovery, and these videos could be fake news for all we know.” So yeah, the court case for copyright infringement is still on.
I mean, you’d think this whole mess would be a lesson about axing big chunks of games just to keep the money flowing, but nah, the companies making bank off live-service games don’t really care. They just wanna keep that grind going, you know?
So, Jody, the PC Gamer dude, used to play Pool of Radiance on a Commodore 64, which sounds pretty retro. He’s interviewed some big names in the music scene and co-hosted a radio show about games in Australia. Jody’s been writing for a bunch of places, like Rock Paper Shotgun and Playboy.com (yeah, he had some interesting bank conversations with those bunny logo checks). His first PC Gamer article was about the sounds in Alien Isolation, and from there, he’s talked about why Silent Hill should be on PC, why Recettear is the best shopkeeper game, and how wild Lost Ark can get. Jody even took on the challenge of playing every Warhammer game.
So, yeah, that’s the deal with Bungie, Destiny 2, and the whole lawsuit mess. Let’s see how this all plays out in the end.
