A job posting for an Incubation Sandbox Designer may have revealed that Bungie has plans to once again take a shot at the competitive shooter market and see if the company can leverage some space in the esports scene. In a section of the job posting called “Nice to have skills,” the company states they are hoping to hire someone with “familiarity with the competitive gaming landscape/esports”. The news was first reported by the DestinyNews+ Twitter account.
The posting also states that applicants should have experience working on “character-focused action games,” hinting at a potential hero shooter along the lines of Blizzard’s Overwatch or Hi-Rez’s Paladins. Since parting ways with publisher Activision, Bungie has been on a pretty aggressive path of expansion, potentially fueled by aggressive micro-transactions and pricing of new content for their spuriously claimed “free-to-play” tent-pole title Destiny 2.
Destiny 2 players will almost certainly be shocked to learn that the company has plans to develop a competitive multiplayer shooter as that game’s top-tier PvP activity, and indeed PvP in the Destiny universe in general, has been allowed to languish almost to the point of obsolescence at this point.
The head-to-head multiplayer portion of the game, which had already been built on a rickety foundation of peer-to-peer connections, has suffered from extreme balance issues since it launched as Bungie has struggled to marry the PvP and PvE sandboxes together in a coherent fashion. Here is hoping that the assumed smaller scope of a hero shooter solves quite a few of those issues for them, as they would not need try and balance hundreds of different weapons, which is certainly a challenging task.
