Bungie Has an Open Dialogue About Their Dialogue Changes

Destiny has decided to shape its own fate differently than originally seen. The new title has seen a fair share of game altering changes, not limited to in game dialogue and voice acting.

The guys and gals over at Bungie have been hard at work on the new game, Destiny, the Alpha of the game being open to the public for a short time back in June of this year. It is safe to say that many changes and repairs would be made to the game after the initial Alpha and Beta tests were done, which would include some environment work, some software patches, and even some edits to lines of dialogue and the voice acting within the game. Gamers noticed recently after the final version was released, some of those fortunate few who played both Alpha and Beta runs commented on just a particular line being removed.

That is after they poked fun at it a bit in the online community. One of the more famous lines, the one that sent fans into a meme frenzy was “That Wizard Came from The Moon!” , which was the center of a lot of attention, even so much as sparking a T-Shirt on the Bungie Store (claimed to be one of its best sellers. All the proceeds went to charity by the way). Yet even after being a great source of humor and a sold out t-shirt line, the line in particular was removed in the Beta version of the game. Though, that wasn’t the only change.

Destiny’s in game dialogue of the floating companion, Ghost (voiced by Peter Dinklage), was overly stagnant of a delivery by the Game of Thrones actor that Bungie decided to run a robotic sound filter over it. This method gave a better shot at making the character seem life-like, which is rather an odd request for a robot character but the direction called for it. While fans were the first to complain about the lifeless voice acting, Bungie Community Manager, Eric Osborne, says it wasn’t just from the negative responses.

“In the alpha version, there was no processing done to the audio levels. If you go back to that version, you’ll hear a bunch of lines that didn’t get into the final version. But you’ll also hear that the decibel levels are all over the map,….The rest of the game, too, you found a whole bunch of broken embarrassing stuff. So yeah, we’re gonna get some negative impressions. But you have to allow design and engineering to do what’s needed. We’re no strangers to those little hiccups. We’re fallible, we make mistakes..”

Bungie mentioned after the Beta, more changes to the voice-acting were coming but we know games go through design stages just as much as anything else, Destiny is no exception. It isn’t a surprise to hear the removal of dialogue was on the lists of edits. Whether the story was affected, it’s hard to say, but I reached out to Bungie to see if the loss of specific dialogue lines made the flow of the game/story change any, but have yet to receive any word.