Bungie has reportedly canceled its project that was called “Payback”, which many believed would be Destiny 3. The project is alleged to be one of those affected by this week’s restructuring of the developer which led to more than 200 layoffs across every level of the company.
Is Destiny 3 canceled?
Destiny 3 has never officially been announced, although Destiny 2’s creative director Luke Smith has previously implied that another game was in development. When coupled with previous rumors that Destiny 3 was in development under the codename Payback, most players thought a future announcement was a certainty.
Then came this week’s layoffs. During today’s Game Mess Mornings podcast, industry insider Jeff Grubb claimed that Payback has now been canceled as a result of the company’s restructure process: “What is going on the shelf is Payback. This is what was also leaked and reported to be maybe Destiny 3 – technically not Destiny 3.”
He continued: “Internally, they would refer to it as ‘the next Destiny’. I don’t know if the distinction is there, but they think there’s a distinction there. But that is going on the shelf indefinitely, according to the people I’ve talked to. Either way, let’s be clear, a ‘Destiny 3’ or ‘next Destiny’ is just not the thing that they are going to be coming out of this looking toward let alone working on in any real way.”
This doesn’t seem to mean the end for the Destiny franchise right now, though. Bungie CEO Pete Parsons said in a statement that the developer would be focusing development “entirely on Destiny and Marathon” with 850 team members currently working on the two franchises. Only time will tell whether this will eventually lead to a new Destiny game.
Another project that also managed to survive the layoffs is an incubation project that is an action game set in a brand-new science-fantasy universe. This has been passed on to a new PlayStation studio. All other incubation projects, which stretched the studio “too thin, too quickly,” have also been canceled.