As former Bungie employees call for studio CEO Pete Parsons to step down after more layoffs, a project that the team will never make has begun to leak.

Writing for Bloomberg, Jason Schreier reports on Payback, inspired by Warframe and Genshin Impact. It was an “incubation project” set in the world of Destiny. It was NOT a full-fledged Destiny 3, but rather a spin-off that would have used a third-person perspective. That alone would have been a big departure from the two Destiny games, which are first-person shooters. According to Schreier, we would have been able to control characters from the franchise to explore a large world while fighting monsters together, and there would have been no shortage of puzzle-solving.

Payback was canceled about two months ago, and most of the team has been reassigned to the Marathon reboot. Schreier’s information confirms what Jeff Grubb said. He recently said that two Bungie veterans, Luke Smith and Mark Noseworthy, left the studio after Payback was canceled. They were let go due to the management change mentioned in Bungie’s blog post, and Payback ended up in the drawer (or trash can, whatever…) because of it. Grubb later clarified that the two were not fired, but left the studio due to the management shakeup.

Bungie recently announced that about 17% of the studio’s staff, or 220 people, would be laid off and another 155 would be “integrated” into Sony Interactive Entertainment, and we wrote earlier this year that the company had already decided to make these cuts. With that in mind, it is no wonder that they are asking Pete Parsons to leave, because it really takes a face to show someone your new cars and then fire them two days later.

Will Bungie be able to turn its reputation around after this? We don’t see much of a chance, and who knows what Sony will do with them from here?

Source: VGC, Bloomberg