The Destiny 2 Portal is a disaster, and a 2016 GDC talk shows that Bungie already wrote off a similar idea a decade ago

The Destiny 2 Portal was one of Bungie’s biggest recent gambles, and so far it’s largely been a pretty disappointing one. Introduced as an overhaul to the iconic ‘Director,’ it aimed to wrestle the FPS game’s increasingly cluttered and unwieldy map of destinations into a more streamlined progression system. The pitch was to offer “quick and clean access to a wider offering of activities with updated rewards,” and while it does do that to some extent, it feels like it’s lost a lot of its soul. Now, players are pointing back to an old Bungie GDC presentation that suggests the team had already considered something similar back during the early days of development, only to write it off.

Former Bungie UI design lead David Candland talks about the development of the Director at around the 42-minute mark in the GDC presentation seen below. Candland, who departed Bungie after the launch of Destiny 2 and is now at EA’s Ripple Effect Studios (primarily known for its work on the Battlefield series), explains the core goals for the Director in the original game.

The sequence was highlighted over the weekend by X user ‘NuCaloric,’ who calls it “kind of horrifying in retrospect.” Candland says the Director needed to offer “an always available, always populated list of starting points for adventure; incentivize players to be activity omnivores; and offer direction to inexperienced players.”

That all seems fairly straightforward, and as someone who played a whole lot of Destiny back in 2014-2015 I can say that it did its job very well. However, each expansion brought more features and locations, and despite Bungie’s attempt to trim back some of this constant growth with the content vault, the Director got busier and busier – eventually leading to a need for change, and ultimately to where we are today.

Candland says Bungie’s initial design felt a bit too directionless, with “a little too much digging in and out.” The team went through many possible iterations, among which was one where the team “got rid of the Director as a whole and put in a menu, just right in orbit.” Starting to sound familiar? “We categorized everything: this is the strike for the week, this is the raid, the Crucible, and here is where we landed.” It’s a little different in style, but the functionality is immediately very reminiscent of the modern Portal layout.

“This is at the end of the development cycle,” Candland explains, and we had basically streamlined the process, solved a lot of issues, and made it absolutely easy to do what you wanted to and do it extremely efficiently. But we had totally sucked [out] all the fun and cool stuff that we had in that first prototype, and we realized that we’d somehow gone astray.

“This was an important lesson we learned – when you’re iterating and improving and trying to fix everything, you’ve got to look at all of your previous iterations instead of just the last one, because then it can start driving you in the wrong course.” Game director Jason Jones therefore added some more rules to the initial set of features that the Director needed to achieve.

“He said it has to offer a sense of place, give people a sense of wonder,” Candland continues. It also had to show you your past and your future to create a sense of both accomplishment and aspiration, and it needed to show dependencies between activities (such as making it clear that you had to unlock Venus before Mars). “It was the eleventh hour, we knew we had to get this out ASAP,” he remarks, “we were talking just a few months before we shipped.”

The eventual incarnation of the Director we got did a pretty good job of achieving what Candland describes as “a mixture of sci-fi and fantasy, this ancient cartography look and feel to it.” And now we’re back to rectangular menus that, while quick to parse, very much pull you out of the experience. It’s a trend that’s certainly not exclusive to Destiny 2, but one that certainly contributed to the overwhelmingly negative reception through the Edge of Fate expansion.

Destiny 2’s map was definitely getting too busy – when I came back around the time of The Witch Queen after a long break it was already overwhelming to try and find what I should be doing first. Bungie needed to take some action, but I’m not convinced that the Portal was the right move, and that seems to be a pretty widespread consensus. I wish I had an easy answer; my heart says that it’s Destiny 3, but at this point I don’t know if the team has the capacity to consider that, let alone the desire to.