'There is no world where it makes sense,' Warframe creative director says of Destiny 2's demise: 'It's unthinkable'

The end of Destiny 2 development came as a surprise to everyone: players, streamers, casual observers, and even the development team at Bungie, most of whom reportedly had no idea it was happening until it happened. It was such an outrageous move that even Rebb Ford, the creative director of Warframe—the other Destiny—called it "unthinkable."

"That news was just cataclysmic," Ford said in a recent episode of the OnlyFrame podcast (via GameSpot). "There is no world where it makes sense, from someone who enjoys videogames, that you can just do that. You can just end one of the biggest things to hit the gaming industry in the past 10 years.

"But it turns out that this is very much what happens when the business side of things, which Cohh [Carnage] and I have emphasized with gusto how much we hate when that becomes the biggest voice in the room—and you've seen the business side of things be the biggest voice in the room for a long time. It's just never hurt this much for a lot of people in our niche genre. It's unthinkable."

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For those not in the loop, this is notable because Warframe is probably Destiny 2's best-known competitor. It generally isn't considered quite as refined as Destiny 2, nor has it hit the same concurrent player highs on Steam, but it's also been around a lot longer and in many ways is a more freewheeling kind of experience—which is a nice way of saying it's viscerally weird. Destiny 2 obsesses over the most minute gun stats; Warframe gets Werner Herzog to talk about being "cursed to walk through this senseless universe in living metal, haunted by dreams."

And while Warframe has certainly had its own share of issues over the years, it's maintained a fairly steady (and sizable) audience throughout. And even though Warframe predates Destiny, it owes a lot to Bungie's wider work: Ford said in May, shortly after Destiny 2's ending was announced, that "there is no Warframe without the legacy of Bungie games."

TennoConFord also reminded podcast viewers that at one point prior to the Bungie purchase, Sony was actually looking to buy out Leyou, the Chinese parent company of Warframe developer Digital Extremes.

"I'll leave it at that," Ford said after reading a headline from a report at the time. "Warframe is made by Digital Extremes and Sony wanted to buy Digital Extremes, according to a 2020 article. So there was a time, is all."

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"Y'all might have dodged a timeline bullet," Carnage says in response, to which Ford replies simply, "Yup."

Leyou, for the record, was acquired by Tencent in December 2020, just a year ahead of Sony's Bungie buyout and at less than half the cost: Sony spent $3.6 billion on Bungie, Tencent dropped $1.5 billion on Leyou.

Warframe's annual TennoCon convention, which has now been going for a decade, returns this July in London, Ontario.