What is Luke Smith actually doing all the time – shouldn’t he be saving Destiny 2?

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Destiny 2’s great hope for ten years has actually been Luke Smith. He has been responsible for the best moments in the loot shooter since 2014: for the first raid, “The Glass Chamber,” and for Destiny’s best DLC, “The Taken King.” In 2019 he was the face of the supposed new beginning. He has been missing for five years. Today we ask ourselves: What does Luke Smith actually do?

Who is Luke Smith?

  • Luke Smith is a former journalist and WoW junkie who came to Bungie as a small PR assistant but rose to senior guru over the course of Destiny. From 2016 he was game director of Destiny 2, and is now the head of the “Destiny” brand.
  • In 2012, Luke Smith scraped together the story from the remains of Destiny 1 that we later saw for the 2014 release. He used his MMORPG experience as a WoW player to design the raid “The Glass Chamber” and the DLC “The Taken King”. Both highlights of Destiny.
  • In the first few years it continued to rise until it seemed to burn out. Because he was also responsible for the gaming low point of the franchise with the release of Vanilla Destiny 2 in 2017.

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    The “throw money at the monitor” guy

    What were his low points? Luke Smith’s “public low point”, where many people got to know him, was an interview with Eurogamer in June 2015. At that time, Smith was on a press tour and presented his DLC “The Taken King”.

    The Brits confronted the American with much more unpleasant questions than Smith was used to, asking him directly how he could justify people spending so much money on a DLC that was as expensive as the base game.

    As a normal player, you don’t want to spend so much money on a few cosmetic items, just for emotes that came with the expensive Collector’s Edition.

    Smith said, somewhat cockily, that if he turned on Destiny right now and showed the journalist the emotes, he would “throw money at the monitor screen.”

    This became a symbol of Bungie’s greed.

    Another low point was reached in 2017: After Destiny 1, Smith also had to save Destiny 2 after the actual head of development left. But this time he couldn’t achieve the miracle rescue.

    He then let himself be insulted for weeks on the press tour for Destiny 2’s miserable endgame and many problems. Two years later, Smith admitted that he had “slipped up twice” on Destiny.

    How was Smith seen? Luke Smith has always had a difficult time in the Destiny community:

  • Smith was highly regarded by experts, colleagues and his superiors and was identified as the “brain” behind the gameplay mechanics that made the loot shooter so appealing
  • At the same time, he was also the scapegoat for the community, responsible for microtransactions and Destiny 2’s major flaws. Like DeeJ before him, he was accused of whitewashing a “bad product” because he was the face and voice of the game during Destiny 2’s hype phases

    • Luke Smith ushers in a new era and gets out

    What was Smith’s last major performance? Luke Smith made his last major appearance on the live stream in 2019, when Bungie separated from Activision: At that time, he announced that Destiny 2 could finally become an MMO.

    In practice, however, this turned out to be code for “We now have to stretch content and rely on grind mechanics because we no longer have as many resources as we did with Forsaken.”

    After this performance, he conveyed, he actually wanted to largely withdraw from everyday business and let young people develop.

    Luke Smith (left) and Mark Noseworthy (right) promised us a “new Destiny” in 2019.

    Luke Smith introduces successor…twice

    How did the succession go? After the big new beginning, Luke Smith doesn’t seem to have much to do with Destiny anymore. He has now introduced his successor twice.

    Only with great fanfare did Joe Blackburn, whom he described as the “new leader”, but who left in January 2024.

    For the new-new successor Joe Tyson, there was only one Twitter thread on January 31, 2024, in which Smith raved about him highly.

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    Luke Smith is the boss of the Destiny universe, which is currently crumbling

    So what is Luke Smith doing at Bungie now? According to Linkedin, Luke Smith remains Destiny 2’s “Game Director” and has been since 2016.

    At a Gamescom event in 2018, an interview with MeinMMO said that he should take care of “Destiny” as a whole – not just the game, but also Destiny as a media brand. It sounded like he was working on TV series, films, comics. But we haven’t heard anything on that front for years and Destiny has become rather weaker as a brand – plus the new owner of Bungie, Sony, has a huge machine here and perhaps has completely different plans of its own. Bungie fired a “TV expert” in April 2023.

    Officially, Luke Smith is currently “Executive Creative Director” for Destiny, according to his Twitter bio.

    However, he now seems to have completely withdrawn from the everyday business of Destiny:

  • Maybe he really is working on “secret projects” around Destiny
  • Or maybe he has been significantly involved in the development of new games like Marathon for years

    • One thing is clear: operationally, he has hardly had anything to do with the game Destiny since 2017/2018. His preferred successor, Blackburn, has already left the company.

    There definitely won’t be a Destiny 3 that many fans want and with which Luke Smith is repeatedly associated.

    The duo of “The Taken King” are working towards a future that no one knows

    His long-term partner Mark Noseworthy is now vice president and continues to work with Smith, but is just as quiet.

    The pair’s last sign of life said they were “thinking about how Destiny can continue beyond Destiny 2.” They are apparently working on a vague, unspecified future for the shooter franchise that has both been with them for so long.

    Well, it’s about time that this future began or at least the outlines of it could be seen:

    Mastermind Luke Smith talks Destiny 2’s future: Need to “get the engines running again”

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