Only a handful of months after being promoted to story creative lead on Destiny, CJ Cowan announced on social media that yesterday was his final day at Bungie. Cowan has been at Bungie for thirteen years, joining the company as cinematic director on Halo 2. He continued to be focused on cinematics on Halo 3, ODST, and Reach before becoming shifted to Destiny’s story.
After 13 years, I decided to part ways with Bungie yesterday. How am I just now realizing … https://t.co/lLIkKJVDIm pic.twitter.com/IKlhMpJd9H
— CJ Cowan (@stormincow) April 2, 2016
Destiny has a planned update coming soon that should add some more gear, change some of the PvP, and add more co-op and strike missions to take on. Maybe Cowan took his chance, with this update ready, to move on before production fully shifted onto the next Destiny expansion and then Destiny 2.
Bungie has been seeing a slow drain of talent leave, but that does usually happen with any developer as they transition to new projects and away from old ones. Not every developer wants to work on iterative sequels. Cowan clearly enjoys telling stories and considering what happened with Destiny’s original story, it wouldn’t fill me with any confidence about the next one.
